CHAPTER II
GUMBRIL SENIOR
occupied a tall, narrow-shouldered and rachitic house in a little obscure
square not far from Paddington. There
were five floors, and a basement with beetles, and nearly a hundred stairs,
which shook when any one ran too rudely down them. It was a prematurely old and decaying house
in a decaying quarter. The square in
which it stood was steadily coming down in the world. The houses, which a few years ago had all
been occupied by respectable families, were now split up into squalid little
maisonettes, and from the neighbouring slums, which along with most other
unpleasant things the old bourgeois families had been able to ignore, invading
bands of children came to sport on the once-sacred pavements.
Mr
Gumbril was almost the last survivor of the old inhabitants. He liked his house, and he liked his
square. Social decadence had not
affected the fourteen plane-trees which adorned its little garden, and the
gambols of the dirty children did not disturb the starlings who
came, evening by evening in summertime, to roost in their branches.
On
fine evenings he used to sit out on his balcony waiting for the coming of the
birds. And just at sunset, when the sky
was most golden there would be a twittering overhead, and the black,
innumerable flocks of starlings would come sweeping across on the way from
their daily haunts to their roosting-places, chosen so capriciously among the
tree-planted squares and gardens of the city and so tenaciously retained, year
after year, to the exclusion of every other place. Why his fourteen plane-trees should have been
chosen, Mr Gumbril could never imagine.
There were plenty of bigger and more umbrageous gardens all round; but
they remained birdless, while every evening, from the larger flocks, a faithful
legion detached itself to settle clamorously among the trees. They sat and chattered till the sun went down
and twilight was past with intervals every now and then of silence that fell
suddenly and inexplicably on the all the birds at once, lasted through a few
seconds of thrilling suspense, to end as suddenly and senselessly in an
outburst of the same loud and simultaneous conversation.
The
starlings were Mr Gumbril’s most affectionately cherished friends; sitting out
on his balcony to watch and listen to them, he had caught at the shut of
treacherous evenings many colds and chills on the liver, he had laid up for
himself many painful hours of rheumatism.
These little accidents did nothing, however, to damp his affection for
the birds; and still on every evening that could possibly be called fine, he
was always to be seen in the twilight, sitting on the balcony, gazing up,
round-spectacled and rapt, at the fourteen plane-trees. The breezes stirred in his grey hair, tossing
it up in long, light wisps that fell across his forehead and over his
spectacles; and then he would shake his head impatiently, and the bony hand
would be freed for a moment from its unceasing combing and clutching of the
sparse grey beard to push back the strayed tendrils, to smooth and reduce to
order the whole ruffled head. The birds
chattered on, the hand went back to its clutching and combing; once more the
wind blew, darkness came down, and the gas-lamps round the square lit up the
outer leaves of the plane-trees, touched the privet bushes inside the railings
with an emerald light; behind them was impenetrable night; instead of shorn
grass and bedded geraniums there was mystery, there were endless depths. And the birds at last were silent.
Mr
Gumbril would get up from his iron chair, stretch his arms and his stiff cold
legs and go in through the french window to work. The birds were his diversion; when they were
silent, it was time to think of serious matters.
Tonight,
however, he was not working; for always on Sunday evenings his old friend
Porteous came to dine and talk. Breaking
in unexpectedly at
‘My
dear fellow, what on earth are you doing here?’ Gumbril Senior jumped up
excitedly at his son’s entrance. The
light silky hair floated up with the movement, turned for a moment into a
silver aureole, then subsided again. Mr
Porteous stayed where he was, calm, solid and undishevelled as a seated
pillar-box. He wore a monocle on a black
ribbon, a black stock tie that revealed above its double folds a quarter of an
inch of stiff white collar, a double-breasted black coat, a pair of pale
checked trousers and patent leather boots with cloth tops. Mr Porteous was very particular about his
appearance. Meeting him casually for the
first time, one would not have guessed that Mr Porteous was an expert on Late
Latin poetry; and he did not mean that you should guess. Thin-limbed, bent and agile in his loose,
crumpled clothes, Gumbril Senior had the air, beside Mr Porteous, of a
strangely animated scarecrow.
‘What
on earth?’ the old gentleman repeated his question.
Gumbril
Junior shrugged his shoulders. ‘I was
bored, decided to cease being a schoolmaster.’
He spoke with a fine airy assumption of carelessness. ‘How are you, Mr Porteous?’
‘Thank
you, invariably well.’
‘Well,
well,’ said Gumbril Senior, sitting down again, ‘I must say I’m not
surprised. I’m only surprised that you
stood it, not being a born pedagogue, for as long as you did. What ever induced you to think of turning
usher, I can’t imagine.’ He looked at
his son first through his spectacles, then over the top of them; the motives of
the boy’s conduct revealed themselves to neither vision.
‘What
else was there for me to do?’ asked Gumbril Junior, pulling up a chair towards
the fire. ‘You gave me a pedagogue’s
education and washed your hands of me.
No opportunities, no openings. I
had no alternative. And now you reproach
me.’
Mr
Gumbril made an impatient gesture.
‘You’re talking nonsense,’ he said.
‘The only point of the kind of education you had is this,
it gives a young man leisure to find out what he’s interested in. You apparently weren’t sufficiently
interested in anything …’
‘I
am interested in everything,’ interrupted Gumbril Junior.
‘Which
comes to the same thing,’ said his father parenthetically, ‘as being interested
in nothing.’ And he went on from the
point at which he had been interrupted.
‘You weren’t sufficiently interested in anything to want to devote
yourself to it. That was why you sought
the last refuge of feeble minds with classical educations, you became a
schoolmaster.’
‘Come,
come,’ said Mr Porteous. ‘I do a little
teaching myself; I must stand up for the profession.’
Gumbril
Senior let go his beard and brushed back the hair that the wind of his own
vehemence had brought tumbling into his eyes.
‘I don’t denigrate the profession,’ he said. ‘Not at all. It would be an excellent profession if
everyone who went into it were as much interested in teaching as you are in
your job, Porteous, or I in mine. It’s
these undecided creatures like Theodore, who ruin it by drifting in. Until all teachers are geniuses and
enthusiasts, nobody will learn anything, except what they teach themselves.’
‘Still,’
said Mr Porteous, ‘I wish I hadn’t had to learn so much by myself. I wasted a lot of time finding out how to set
to work and where to discover what I wanted.’
Gumbril
Junior was lighting his pipe. ‘I have
come to the conclusion,’ he said, speaking in little jerks between each suck of
the flame into the bowl, ‘that most people … ought never … to be taught
anything at all.’ He threw away the
match. ‘Lord have mercy upon us, they’re
dogs. What’s the use of teaching them
anything except to behave well, to work and obey? Facts, theories, the truth
about the universe – what good are those to them? Teach them to understand – why, it only
confuses them; makes them lose hold of the simple real appearance. Not more than one in a hundred can get any
good out of a scientific or literary education.’
‘And
you’re one of the ones?’ asked his father.
‘That
goes without saying,’ Gumbril Junior replied.
‘I
think you mayn’t be so far wrong,’ said Mr Porteous. ‘When I think of my own children, for example
…’ he sighed, ‘I thought they’d be interested in the things that interested me;
they don’t seem to be interested in anything but behaving like little apes –
not very anthropoid ones either, for that matter. At my eldest boy’s age I used to sit up most
of the night reading Latin texts. He
sits up – or rather stands, reels, trots up – dancing and drinking. Do you remember St Bernard? “Vigilet tota nocte luxuriosus non solum
parienter” (the ascetic and the scholar only watch patiently); “sed et
libenter, ut suam expleat voluptatem.”
What the wise man does out of a sense of duty, the fool does for
fun. And I’ve tried very hard to make
him like Latin.’
‘Well,
in any case,’ said Gumbril Junior, ‘you didn’t try to feed him on history. That’s the real unforgivable sin. And that’s what I’ve been doing, up till this
evening – encouraging boys of fifteen and sixteen to specialize in history,
hours and hours a week, making them read bad writers’ generalizations about
subjects on which only our ignorance allows us to generalize; teaching them to
reproduce these generalizations in horrid little “Essays” of their own; rotting
their minds, in fact, with a diet of soft vagueness; scandalous it was. If these creatures are to be taught anything,
it should be something hard and definite.
Latin – that’s excellent. Mathematics, physical science. Let them read history for amusement,
certainly. But for heaven’s sake don’t
make it the staple of education!’
Gumbril Junior spoke with the greatest earnestness, as though he were an
inspector of schools, making a report.
It was a subject on which, at the moment, he
felt very profoundly; he felt profoundly on all subjects while he was talking
about them. ‘I wrote a long letter to
the Headmaster about the teaching of history this evening,’ he added. ‘It’s most important.’ He shook his head thoughtfully, ‘Most
important.’
‘Hora
novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus,’ said Mr Porteous, in the words of
St Peter Damianus.
‘Very
true,’ Gumbril Senior applauded. ‘And
talking about bad times, Theodore, what do you propose to do now, make I ask?’
‘I
mean to begin by making some money.’
Gumbril
Senior put his hands on his knees, bend forward and laughed, ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ He had a profound bell-like laugh that was
like the croaking of a very large and melodious frog. ‘You won’t,’ he said, and shook his head till
the hair fell into his eyes. ‘You
won’t,’ and he laughed again.
‘To
make money,’ said Mr Porteous, ‘one must be really interested in money.’
‘And
he’s not,’ said Gumbril Senior. ‘None of
us are.’
‘When
I was still uncommonly hard up,’ Mr Porteous continued, ‘us used to lodge in
the same house with a Russian Jew, who was a furrier. That man was interested in money, if you
like. It was a passion, an enthusiasm,
an ideal. He could have led a
comfortable, easy life, and still have made enough to put by something for his
old age. But for his high abstract ideal
of money he suffered more than Michelangelo ever suffered for his art. He used to work nineteen hours a day, and the
other five he slept, lying under his bench, in the dirt, breathing into his
lungs the stink and the broken hairs. He
is now very rich indeed and does nothing with his money, doesn’t want to do
anything, doesn’t know what one does with it.
He desires neither power nor pleasure.
His desire for lucre is purely disinterested. He reminds me of Browning’s
“Grammarian”. I have a great admiration
for him.’
Mr
Porteous’s own passion had been for the poems of Notker Balbulus and St
Bernard. It had taken him nearly twenty
years to get himself and his family out of the house where the Russian furrier
used to lodge. But Notker was worth it,
he used to say; Notker was worth even the weariness and the pallor of a wife
who worked beyond her strength, even the shabbiness of ill-dressed and none too
well-fed children. He had readjusted his
monocle and gone on. But there had been
occasions when it needed more than the monocle and the careful, distinguished
clothes to keep up his morale. Still,
those times were over now; Notker had brought him at last a kind of fame –
even, indirectly, a certain small prosperity.
Gumbril
Senior turned once more towards his son.
‘And how do you propose,’ he asked, ‘to make this money?’
Gumbril
Junior explained. He had thought it all
out in the cab on the way from the station.
‘It came to me this morning,’ he said, ‘in chapel, during service.’
‘Monstrous,’
put in Gumbril Senior, with a genuine indignation, ‘monstrous these medieval
survivals in schools! Chapel,
indeed!’
‘It
came,’ Gumbril Junior went on, ‘like an apocalypse, suddenly, like a divine
inspiration. A grand and luminous idea
came to me – the idea of Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.’
‘And
what are Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes?’
‘A
boon to those whose occupation is sedentary’; Gumbril Junior had already
composed his prospectus and his first advertisements: ‘a comfort to all
travellers, civilization’s substitute for steatopygism, indispensable to
first-nighters, the concert-goers friend, the …’
‘Lectulus
Dei floridus,’ intoned Mr Porteous.
‘Gazophylacium Ecclesiæ,
Cithara benesonans Dei,
Cymbalum jubilationis Christi,
Promptuarium mysteriorum
fidei, ora pro nobis.
Your Small-Clothes sound to me very like
one of my old litanies, Theodore.’
‘We
want scientific descriptions, not litanies,’ said Gumbril Senior. ‘What are
Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes?’
‘Scientifically,
then,’ said Gumbril Junior, ‘my Patent Small-Clothes may be described as
trousers with a pneumatic seat, inflatable by means of a tube fitted with a
valve; the whole constructed of stout seamless red rubber, enclosed between two
layers of cloth.’
‘I
must say,’ said Gumbril Senior in a tone of somewhat grudging approbation, ‘I
have heard of worse inventions. You are
too stout, Porteous, to be able to appreciate the idea. We Gumbrils are all a bony lot.’
‘When
I have taken out a patent for my invention,’ his son went on, very
business-like and cool, ‘I shall either sell it to some capitalist, or I shall
exploit it commercially myself. In
either case, I shall make money, which is more, I may say, than you or any
other Gumbril have ever done.’
‘Quite
right,’ said Gumbril Senior, ‘quite right’; and he laughed very
cheerfully. ‘And nor will you. You can be grateful to your intolerable Aunt
Flo for having left you that three hundred a year. You’ll need it. But if you really want a capitalist,’ he went
on, ‘I have exactly the man for you.
He’s a man who has a mania for buying Tudor houses and making them more
Tudor than they are. I’ve pulled half a
dozen of the wretched things to pieces and put them together again differently
for him.’
‘He
doesn’t sound much good to me,’ said his son.
‘Ah,
but that’s only his vice. Only his amusement.
His business,’ Gumbril Senior hesitated.
‘Well,
what is his business?’
‘Well,
it seems to be everything. Patent
medicine, trade newspapers, bankrupt tobacconist’s
stock – he’s talked to me about those and heaps more. He seems to flit like a butterfly in search
of honey, or rather money.’
‘And
he makes it?’
‘Well,
he pays my fees and he buys more Tudor houses, and he gives me luncheons at the
Ritz. That’s all I know.’
‘Well,
there’s no harm in trying.’
‘I’ll
write to him,’ said Gumbril Senior. ‘His
name is Boldero. He’ll either laugh at
your idea or take it and give you nothing for it. Still,’ he looked at his son over the top of
his spectacles, ‘if by any conceivable chance you ever should become rich; if,
if, if …’ And he emphasized the remoteness of the conditional by raising his
eyebrows a little higher, by throwing out his hands in a dubious gesture a
little farther at every repetition of the word, ‘if – why, then I’ve got
exactly the thing for you. Look at this
really delightful little idea I had this afternoon.’ He put his hand in his coat pocket and after
some sorting and sifting produced a sheet of squared paper on which was roughly
drawn the elevation of a house. ‘For
anyone with eight or ten thousand to spend, this would be – this would be …’
Gumbril Senior smoothed his hair and hesitated, searching for something strong
enough to say of his little idea. ‘Well,
this would be much too good for most of the greasy devils who do have eight or
ten thousand to spend.’
He
passed the sheet to Gumbril Junior, who held it out so that both Mr Porteous
and himself could look at it. Gumbril Senior got up from his chair and,
standing behind them, leant over to elucidate and explain.
‘You
see the idea,’ he said, anxious lest they should fail to understand. ‘A central block of three
stories, with low wings of only one, ending in pavilions with a second floor. And the flat roofs of the wings are used as
gardens – you see? – protected from the north by a wall. In the east wing there is the kitchen and the
garage, with the maids’ rooms in the pavilion at the end. The west is a library, and it has an arcaded
loggia along the front. And instead of a
solid superstructure corresponding to the maids’ rooms, there’s a pergola with
brick piers. You see? And in the main block there’s a Spanish sort
of balcony along the whole length at first-floor level; that gives a good
horizontal line. And you get the
perpendiculars with coigns and raised panels.
And the roof’s hidden by a balustrade, and there are balustrades along
the open sides of the roof garden on the wings.
All in brick it is. This is the
garden front; the entrance front will be admirable too. Do you like it?’
Gumbril
Junior nodded. ‘Very much,’ he said.
His
father sighed and taking the sketch put it back in his pocket. ‘You must hurry up with your ten thousand,’
he said. ‘And you, Porteous, and
you. I’ve been waiting so long to build
your splendid house.’
Laughing,
Mr Porteous got up from his chair. ‘And
long, dear Gumbril,’ he said, ‘may you continue to wait. For my splendid house won’t
be built this side of New Jerusalem, and you must go on living a long time yet. A long, long time,’ Mr Porteous repeated; and
carefully he buttoned up his double-breasted coat, carefully, as though he were adjusting an instrument of precision, he took out and
replaced his monocle. Then, very erect
and neat, very soldierly and pillar-boxical, he marched towards the door. ‘You’ve kept me very late tonight,’ he
said. ‘Unconscionably
late.’
The
front door closed heavily behind Mr Porteous’s departure. Gumbril Senior came upstairs again into the
big room on the first floor smoothing down his hair, which the impetuosity of
his ascent had once more disarranged.
‘That’s
a good fellow,’ he said of his departed guest, ‘a splendid fellow.’
‘I
always admire the monocle,’ said Gumbril Junior irrelevantly. But his father turned the irrelevance into
relevance.
‘He
couldn’t have come through without it, I believe. It was a symbol, a proud flag. Poverty’s squalid, not fine at all. The monocle made a kind of difference, you understand. I’m always so enormously thankful I had a
little money. I couldn’t have stuck it
without. It needs strength, more
strength than I’ve got.’ He clutched his
beard close under the chin and remained for a moment pensively silent. ‘The advantage of Porteous’s line of
business,’ he went on at last, reflectively, ‘is that it can be carried on by
oneself, without collaboration. There’s
no need to appeal to anyone outside oneself, or to have any dealings with other
people at all, if one doesn’t want to.
That’s so deplorable about architecture.
There’s no privacy, so to speak; always this horrible jostling with
clients and builders and contractors and people, before one can get anything
done. It’s really revolting. I’m not good at people. Most of them I don’t like at all, not at
all,’ Mr Gumbril repeated with vehemence.
‘I don’t deal with them very well; it isn’t my business. My business is architecture. But I don’t often get a chance of practising
it. Not properly.’
Gumbril
Senior smiled rather sadly. ‘Still,’ he
said, ‘I can do something. I have my
talent, I have my imagination. They
can’t take those from me. Come and see
what I’ve been doing lately.’
He
led the way out of the room and mounted, two steps at
a time, towards a higher floor. He
opened the door of what should have been, in a well-ordered house, the Best
Bedroom, and slipped into the darkness.
‘Don’t
rush in,’ he called back to his son, ‘for God’s sake don’t rush in. You’ll smash something. Wait till I’ve turned on the light. It’s so like these asinine electricians to
have hidden the switch behind the door like this.’ Gumbril Junior heard him fumbling in the
darkness; there was suddenly light. He
stepped in.
The
only furniture in the room consisted of a couple of long trestle tables. On these, on the mantelpiece and all over the
floor, were scattered confusedly, like the elements of a jumbled city, a vast
collection of architectural models. There
were cathedrals, there were town halls, universities, public libraries, there
were three or four elegant little skyscrapers, there were blocks of offices,
huge warehouses, factories, and finally dozens of magnificent country mansions,
complete with their terraced gardens, their noble flights of steps, their
fountains and ornamental waters and grandly bridged canals, their little rococo
pavilions and garden houses.
‘Aren’t
they beautiful?’ Gumbril Senior turned enthusiastically towards his son. His long grey hair floated wispily about his
head, his spectacles flashed, and behind them his eyes shone with emotion.
‘Beautiful,’
Gumbril Junior agreed.
‘When
you’re really rich,’ said his father, ‘I’ll build you one of these.’ And he pointed to a little
‘And
then,’ he had suddenly stooped down, he was peering and pointing once more into
the details of his palace, ‘then there’s the doorway – all florid and rich with
carving. How magnificently and surprisingly
it flowers out of the bare walls! Like
the colossal writing of Darius, like the figures graven in the bald face of the
precipice over Behistun – unexpected and beautiful and human, human in the
surrounding emptiness.’
Gumbril
Senior brushed back his hair and turned, smiling, to look at his son over the
top of his spectacles.
‘Very
fine,’ Gumbril Junior nodded to him.
‘But isn’t the wall a little too blank?
You seem to allow very few windows in this vast palazzo.’
‘True,’
his father replied, ‘very true.’ He
sighed. ‘I’m afraid this design would
hardly do for
‘There’s
nothing I should like better,’ said Gumbril Junior.
‘Another
great advantage of sunny countries,’ Gumbril Senior pursued, ‘is that one can
really live like an aristocrat, in privacy, by oneself. No need to look out on the dirty world or to
let the dirty world look in on you.
Here’s the great house, for example, looking out on the world through a
few dark portholes and a single cavernous doorway. But look inside.’ He held his lamp above the courtyard that was
at the heart of the palace. Gumbril
Junior leaned and looked, like his father.
‘All the life looks inwards – into a lovely courtyard, a more than
Spanish patio. Look there at the treble tiers of arcades,
the vaulted cloisters for your cool peripatetic meditations, the central Triton
spouting white water into a marble pool, the mosaic work on the floor and
flowering up the walls, brilliant against the white stucco. And there’s the archway that leads out into
the gardens. And now you must come and
have a look at the garden front.’
He
walked round with his lamp to the other side of the table. There was suddenly a crash; the wire had
twitched a cathedral from off the table.
It lay on the floor in disastrous ruin as though shattered by some
appalling catacylism.
‘Hell
and death!’ said Gumbril Senior in an outburst of Elizabethan fury. He put down the lamp and ran to see how
irreparable the disaster had been.
‘They’re so horribly expensive, these models,’ he explained, as he bent
over the ruins. Tenderly he picked up
the pieces and replaced them on the table.
‘It might have been worse,’ he said at last, brushing the dust off his
hands. ‘Though I’m afraid that dome will
never be quite the same again.’ Picking
up the lamp once more, he held it high above his head and stood looking out,
with a melancholy satisfaction, over his creations. ‘And to think,’ he said after a pause, ‘that I’ve been spending these last days designing model
cottages for workmen at Bletchley!’ I’m
in luck to have got this job, of course, but really, that a civilized man
should have to do jobs like that! It’s too much. In the old days these creatures built their
own hovels, and very nice and suitable they were too. The architects busied themselves with
architecture – which is the expression of human dignity and greatness, which is
man’s protest, not his miserable acquiescence.
You can’t do much protesting in a model cottage at seven hundred pounds
a time. A little, no doubt, you can
protest a little; you can give your cottage decent proportions and avoid
sordidness and vulgarity. But that’s
all; it’s really a negative process. You
can only begin to protest positively and actively when you abandon the petty
human scale and build for giants – when you build for the spirit and the
imagination of man, not for his little body.
Model cottages, indeed!’
Mr
Gumbril snorted with indignation. ‘When I think of Alberti!’
And he thought of Alberti – Alberti, the noblest Roman of them all, the
true and only Roman. For the Romans themselves had lived their own actual lives, sordidly and
extravagantly in the middle of a vulgar empire.
Alberti and his followers in the Renaissance lived the ideal Roman
life. They put Plutarch into their
architecture. They took the detestable
real Cato, the Brutus of history, and made of them Roman heroes to walk as
guides and models before them. Before
Alberti there were no true Romans, and with Piranesi’s death the race began to
wither towards extinction.
‘And when I think of Brunelleschi!’ Gumbril Senior went on to remember with
passion the architect who had suspended on eight thin flying ribs of marble the
lightest of all domes and the loveliest.
‘And when of Michelangelo!
The grim, enormous apse … And of Wren and of Pilladio, when I think of
all these …’ Gumbril Senior waved his arms and was silent. He could not put into words what he felt when
he thought of them.
Gumbril
Junior looked at his watch. ‘Half-past
two,’ he said.
‘Time to go to bed.’
