CHAPTER IX

 

FAN-SHAPED, blond, mounted on gauze and guaranteed undetectable, it arrived from the wig-maker, preciously packed in a stout cardboard box six times too large for it and accompanied by a quarter of a pint of the choicest spirit gum.  In the privacy of his bedroom Gumbril uncoffined it, held it out for his own admiration, caressed its silkiness, and finally tried it on, holding it provisionally to his chin, in front of the looking-glass.  The effect, he decided immediately, was stunning, was grandiose.  From melancholy and all too mild he saw himself transformed on the instant into a sort of jovial Henry the Eighth, into a massive Rabelaisian man, broad and powerful and exuberant with vitality and hair.

       The proportions of his face were startlingly altered.  The podium, below the mouth, had been insufficiently massive to carry the stately order of the nose; and the ratiocinative attic of the forehead, noble enough, no doubt, in itself, had been disproportionately high.  The beard now supplied the deficiencies in the stylobate, and planted now on a firm basement of will, the order of the senses, the aerial attic of ideas, reared themselves with a more classical harmoniousness of proportion.  It only remained for him to order from Mr Bojanus an American coat, padded out at the shoulders as squarely and heroically as a doublet of the Cinquecentro, and he would look the complete Rabelaisian man.  Great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover; clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs.  Fitted out with coat and beard, he could qualify for the next vacancy among the cenobites of Thelema.

       He removed his beard – ‘put his beaver up,’ as they used to say in the fine old days of chivalry; he would have to remember that little joke for Coleman’s benefit.  He put his beaver up – ha, ha! – and stared ruefully at the far from Rabelaisian figure who now confronted him.  The moustache – that was genuine enough – which had looked, in conjunction with the splendid work of art below, so fierce and manly, served by itself, he now perceived, only droopily to emphasize his native mildness and melancholy.

       It was a dismal affair, which might have belonged to Maurice Barrès in youth; a slanting, flagging, sagging thing, such as could only grow on the lip of an assiduous Cultivator of the Me, and would become, as one grew older, ludicrously out of place on the visage of a roaring Nationalist.  If it weren’t that it fitted in so splendidly with the beard, if it weren’t that it became so marvellously different in the new context he had now discovered for it, he would have shaved it off then and there.

       Mournful appendage.  But now he would transform it, he would add to it its better half.  Zadig’s quatrain to his mistress, when the tablet on which it was written was broken in two, became a treasonable libel on the king.  So this moustache, thought Gumbril, as gingerly he applied the spirit gum to his cheeks and chin, this moustache which by itself serves only to betray me, becomes, as soon as it is joined to its missing context, an amorous arm for the conquest of the fair sex.

       A little far-fetched, he decided; a little too ponderous.  And besides, as so few people had read Zadig, not much use in conversation.  Cautiously and with neat, meticulous fingertips he adjusted the transformation to his gummed face, pressed it firmly, held it while it stuck fast.  The portals of Thelema opened before him; he was free of those rich orchards, those halls and courts, those broad staircases winding in noble spirals within the flanks of each of the fair round towers.  And it was Coleman who had pointed out the way; he felt duly grateful.  One last look at the Complete Man, one final and definitive constatation that the Mild and Melancholy one was, for the time at least, no more; and he was ready in all confidence to set out.  He selected a loose, light greatcoat – not that he needed a coat at all, for the day was bright and warm; but until Mr Bojanus had done his labour of padding he would have to broaden himself out in this way, even if it did mean that he might be uncomfortably hot.  To fall short of Complete Manhood for fear of a little inconvenience would be absurd.  He slipped, therefore, into his light coat – a toga, Mr Bojanus called it, a very neat toga in real West Country whipcord.  He put on his broadest and blackest felt hat, for breadth above everything was what he needed to give him completeness – breadth of stature, breadth of mind, breadth of human sympathy, breadth of smile, breadth of humour, breadth of everything.  The final touch was a massive and antique Malacca cane belonging to his father.  If he had possessed a bulldog, he would have taken it out on a leash.  But he did not.  He issued into the sunshine, unaccompanied.

       But unaccompanied did not mean to remain for long.  These warm, bright May days were wonderful days for being in love on.  And to be alone on such days was like a malady.  It was a malady from which the Mild and Melancholy Man suffered all too frequently.  And yet there were millions of superfluous women in the country; millions of them.  Every day, in the streets, one saw thousands of them passing; and some were exquisite, were ravishing, the only possible soul-mates.  Thousands of unique soul-mates every day.  The Mild and Melancholy one allowed them to pass – for ever.  But today – today he was the complete and Rabelaisian man; he was bearded to the teeth; the imbecile game was at its height; there would be opportunities, and the Complete Man could know how to take them.  No, he would not be unaccompanied for long.

       Outside in the square the fourteen plane-trees glowed in their young, unsullied green.  At the end of every street the golden muslin of the haze hung in an unwrinkled curtain that thinned against the intenser blue.  The dim, conch-like murmur that in a city in silence seemed hazily to identify itself with the golden mistiness of summer, and against this dim, wide background the yells of the playing children detached themselves, distinct and piercing.  Beaver,’ they shouted, ‘beaver!’ and, ‘Is it cold up there?’ Full of playful menace, the Complete Man shook at them his borrowed Malacca.  He accepted their prompt hail as the most favourable of omens.

       At the first tobacconist’s Gumbril bought the longest cigar he could find, and trailing behind him expiring blue wreaths of Cuban smoke, he made his way slowly and with an ample swagger towards the park.  It was there, under the elms, on the shores of the ornamental waters, that he expected to find his opportunity, that he intended – how confidently behind his Gargantuan mask! – to take it.

       The opportunity offered itself sooner than he expected.

       He had just turned into the Queen’s Road and was sauntering past Whiteley’s with the air of one who knows that he has a right to a good place, to two or three good places even, in the sun, when he noticed just in front of him, peering intently at the New Season’s Models, a young woman whom in his mild and melancholy days he would have only hopelessly admired, but who now, to the Complete Man, seemed a destined and accessible prey.  She was fairly tall, but seemed taller than she actually was, by reason of her remarkable slenderness.  Not that she looked disagreeably thin, far from it.  It was a rounded slenderness.  The Complete Man decided to consider her as tubular – flexible and tubular, like a section of boa constrictor, should one say?  She was dressed in clothes that emphasized this serpentine slimness: in a close-fitting grey jacket that buttoned up to the neck and a long, narrow grey skirt that came down to her ankles.  On her head was a small, sleek black hat, that looked almost as though it were made of metal.  It was trimmed on one side with a bunch of dull golden foliage.

       Those golden leaves were the only touch of ornament in all the severe smoothness and unbroken tubularity of her person.  As for her face, that was neither strictly beautiful nor strictly ugly, but combined elements of both beauty and ugliness into a whole that was unexpected, that was oddly and somehow unnaturally attractive.

       Pretending, he too, to take an interest in the New Season’s Models, Gumbril made, squinting sideways over the burning tip of his cigar, an inventory of her features.  The forehead, that was mostly hidden by her hat; it might be pensively and serenely high, it might be of that degree of lowness which in men is villainous, but in women is only another – a rather rustic one perhaps – rather canaille even, but definitely another – attraction.  There was no telling.  As for her eyes, they were green, and limpid; set wide apart in her head, they looked out from under heavy lids and through openings that slanted up towards the outer corners.  Her nose was slightly aquiline.  Her mouth was full-lipped, but straight and unexpectedly wide.  Her chin was small, round and firm.  She had a pale skin, a little flushed over the cheekbones, which were prominent.

       On the left cheek, close under the corner of the slanting eye, she had a brown mole.  Such hair as Gumbril could see beneath her hat was pale and inconspicuously blonde.  When she had finished looking at the New Season’s Models she moved slowly on, halting for a moment before the travelling-trunks and the fitted picnic-baskets; dwelling for a full minute over the corsets, passing the hats, for some reason, rather contemptuously, but pausing, which seemed strange, for a long pensive look at the cigars and wine.  As for the tennis rackets and cricket bats, the school outfits and the gentleman’s hosiery – she hadn’t so much as a look for one of them.  But how lovingly she lingered before the boots and shoes!  Her own feet, the Complete Man noticed with satisfaction, had an elegance of florid curves.  And while other folk walked on neat leather she was content to be shod with nothing coarser than mottled serpent’s skin.

       Slowly they drifted up Queen’s Road, lingering before every jeweller’s, every antiquarian’s, every milliner’s on the way.  The stranger gave him no opportunity, and indeed, Gumbril reflected, how should she?  For the imbecile game on which he was relying is a travelling piquet for two players, not a game of patience.  No sane human being could play it in solitude.  He would have to make the opportunity himself.

       All that was mild in him, all that was melancholy, shrank with a sickened reluctance from the task of breaking – with what consequences delicious and perilous in the future or, in the case of the deserved snub, immediately humiliating? – a silence which, by the tenth or twelfth shop window, had become quite unbearably significant.  The Mild and Melancholy one would have drifted to the top of the road, sharing, with that community of tastes which is the basis of every happy union, her enthusiasm for brass candlesticks and toasting-forks, imitation Chippendale furniture, gold watch-bracelets and low-waisted summer frocks; would have drifted to the top of the road and watched her, dumbly, disappearing for ever into the Green Park or along the blank pavements of the Bayswater Road; would have watched her for ever disappear and then, if the pubs had happened to be open, would have gone and ordered a glass of port, and sitting at the bar would have savoured, still dumbly, among the other drinkers, the muddy grapes of the Douro, and his own unique loneliness.

       That was what the Mild and Melancholy one would have done.  But the sight, as he gazed earnestly into an antiquary’s window, of his own powerful bearded face reflected in a sham Heppelwhite mirror, reminded him that the Mild and Melancholy one was temporarily extinct, and that it was the Complete Man who now dawdled, smoking his long cigar, up the Queen’s Road towards the Abbey of Thelema.

       He squared his shoulders; in that loose toga of Mr Bojanus’s he looked as copious as François Premier.  The time, he decided, had come.

       It was at this moment that the reflection of the stranger’s face joined itself in the little mirror, as she made a little movement away from the Old Welsh dresser in the corner, to that of his own.  She looked at the spurious Heppelwhite.  Their eyes met in the hospitable glass.  Gumbril smiled.  The corners of the stranger’s wide mouth seemed faintly to move; like petals of the magnolia, her eyelids came slowly down over her slanting eyes.  Gumbril turned from the reflection to the reality.

       ‘If you want to say Beaver,’ he said, ‘you may.’

       The Complete Man had made his first speech.

       ‘I want to say nothing,’ said the stranger.  She spoke with a charming precision and distinctness, lingering with a pretty emphasis on the n of nothing.  ‘N – n – nothing’ – it sounded rather final.  She turned away, she moved on.

       But the Complete Man was not to be put off by a mere ultimatum.  ‘There,’ he said, falling into step with her, ‘now I’ve had it – the deserved snub.  Honour is saved, prestige duly upheld.  Now we can get on with our conversation.’

       The Mild and Melancholy one stood by, gasping with astonished admiration.

       ‘You are v – very impertinent,’ said the stranger, smiling and looking up from under the magnolia petals.

       ‘It is in my character,’ said the Complete Man.  ‘You mustn’t blame me.  One cannot escape from one’s heredity; that’s one’s share of original sin.’

       ‘There is always grace,’ said the stranger.

       Gumbril caressed his beard.  ‘True,’ he replied.

       ‘I advise you to pr-ray for it.’

       His prayer, the Mild and Melancholy one reflected, had already been answered.  The original sin in him had been self-corrected.

       ‘Here is another antique shop,’ said Gumbril.  ‘Shall we stop and have a look at it?’

       The stranger glanced at him doubtfully.  But he looked quite serious.  They stopped.

       ‘How revolting this sham cottage furniture is,’ Gumbril remarked.  The shop, he noticed, was called ‘Ye Olde Farme House’.

       The stranger, who had been on the point of saying how much she liked those lovely Old Welsh dressers, gave him her heartiest agreement.  ‘So v-vulgar.’

       ‘So horribly refined.  So refined and artistic.’

       She laughed on a descending chromatic scale.  This was excitingly new.  Poor Aunt Aggie with her Arts and Crafts, and her old English furniture.  And to think she had taken them so seriously!  She saw in a flash the fastidious lady that she now was – with Louis whatever-it-was furniture at home, and jewels, and young poets to tea, and real artists.  In the past, when she had imagined herself entertaining real artists, it had always been among really artistic furniture.  Aunt Aggie’s furniture.  But now – no, oh no.  This man was probably an artist.  His beard; and that big black hat.  But not poor; very well dressed.

       ‘Yes, it’s funny to think that there are people who call that sort of thing artistic.  One’s quite s-sorry for them,’ she added, with a little hiss.

       You have a very kind heart,’ said Gumbril.  ‘I’m glad to see that.’

       ‘Not v-very kind, I’m af-fraid.’  She looked at him sideways, and significantly as the fastidious lady who would have looked at one of the poets.

       ‘Well, kind enough, I hope,’ said the Complete Man.  He was delighted with his new acquaintance.

       Together they disembogued into the Bayswater Road.  It was here, Gumbril reflected, that the Mild and Melancholy one would dumbly have slunk away to his glass of port and his loneliness among the alien topers at the bar.  But the Complete Man took his new friend by the elbow, and steered her into the traffic.  Together they crossed the road, together entered the park.

       ‘I still think you are v-very impertinent,’ said the lady.  ‘What induced you to follow me?’

       With a single comprehensive gesture, Gumbril indicated the sun, the sky, the green trees airily glittering, the grass, the emerald lights and violet shadows of the rustic distance.  ‘On a day like this,’ he said, ‘how could I help it?’

       ‘Original sin?’

       ‘Oh,’ the Complete Man modestly shook his head, ‘I lay no claim to originality in this.’

       The stranger laughed.  This was nearly as good as a young poet at the tea-table.  She was very glad that she’d decided, after all, to put on her best suit this afternoon, even if it was a little stuffy for the warmth of the day.  He, too, she noticed, was wearing a greatcoat; which seemed rather odd.

       ‘Is it original,’ he went on, ‘to go and tumble stupidly like an elephant into a pitfall, head over ears, at first sight…?’

       She looked at him sideways, then closed down the magnolia petals, and smiled.  This was going to be the real thing – one of those long, those interminable, or, at any rate, indefinitely renewable conversations about love; witty, subtle, penetrating and bold, like the conversations in books, like the conversations across the tea-table between brilliant young poets and ladies of quality, grown fastidious through an excessive experience, fastidious and a little weary, but still, in their subtle way, insatiably curious.

       ‘Suppose we sit down,’ suggested Gumbril, and he pointed to a couple of green iron chairs, standing isolated in the middle of the grass close together and with their fronts slanting inwards a little towards one another in a position that suggested a confidential intimacy.  At the prospect of the conversation that, inevitably, was about to unroll itself, he felt decidedly less elated than did his new friend.  If there was anything he disliked it was conversations about love.  It bored him, oh, it bored him most horribly, this minute analysis of the passion that young women always seemed to expect one, at some point or other in one’s relation with them, to make.  How love alters the character for both good and bad; how physical passion need not be incompatible with the spiritual; how a hateful and tyrannous possessiveness can be allied in love with the most unselfish solicitude for the other party – oh, he knew all this and much more, so well, so well.  And whether one can be in love with more than one person at a time, whether love can exist without jealousy, whether pity, affection, desire can in any way replace the full and genuine passion – how often he had had to thrash out these dreary questions!

       And all the philosophical speculations were equally familiar, all the physiological and anthropological and psychological facts.  In the theory of the subject he had ceased to take any interest.  Unhappily, a discussion of the theory always seemed to be an essential preliminary to the practice of it.  He sighed a little wearily as he took his seat on the green iron chair.  But then, recollecting that he was now the Complete Man, and that the Complete Man must do everything with a flourish and a high hand, he leaned forward and, smiling with a charming insolence through his beard, began:

       ‘Tiresias, you may remember, was granted the singular privilege of living both as a man and a woman.’

       Ah, this was the genuine young poet.  Supporting an elbow on the back of her chair and leaning her cheek against her hand, she disposed herself to listen and, where necessary, brilliantly to interpellate; it was through half-closed eyes that she looked at him, and she smiled faintly in a manner which she knew, from experience, to be enigmatic, and though a shade haughty, though a tiny bit mocking and ironical, exceedingly attractive.

       An hour and a half later they were driving towards an address in Bloxam Gardens, Maida Vale.  The name seemed vaguely familiar to Gumbril.  Bloxam Gardens – perhaps one of his aunts had lived there once?

       ‘It’s a dr-dreadful little maisonette,’ she explained.  ‘Full of awful things.  We have to take it furnished.  It’s so impossible to find anything now.’

       Gumbril leaned back in his corner, wondering, as he studied that averted profile, who or what this young woman could be.  She seemed to be in the obvious movement, to like the sort of things one would expect people to like; she seemed to be as highly civilized, in Mr Mercaptan’s rather technical sense of the term, as free of all prejudices as the great exponent of civilization himself.

       She seemed, from her coolly dropped hints, to possess all the dangerous experience, all the assurance and easy ruthlessness of a great lady whose whole life is occupied in the interminable affairs of the heart, the senses and the head.  But, by a strange contradiction, she seemed to find her life narrow and uninteresting.  She had complained in so many words that her husband misunderstood and neglected her, had complained, by implication, that she knew very few interesting people.

       The maisonette in Bloxam Gardens was certainly not very splendid – six rooms on the second and third floors of a peeling stucco house.  And the furniture – decidedly High Purchase.  And the curtains and cretonnes – brightly ‘modern’, positively ‘futurist’.

       ‘What one has to put up with in furnished flats!’  The lady made a grimace as she ushered him into the sitting-room.  And while she spoke the words, she really managed to persuade herself that the furniture wasn’t theirs, that they had found all this sordid stuff cluttering up the rooms, not chosen it, oh and with pains! Themselves, not doggedly paid for it, month by month.

       ‘Our own things,’ she murmured vaguely, ‘are stored.  In the Riviera.’  It was there, under the palms, among the gaudy melon flowers and the croupiers that the fastidious lady had last held her salon of young poets.  In the Riviera – that would explain, now she came to think of it, a lot of things, if explanation ever became necessary.

       The Complete Man nodded sympathetically.  ‘Other people’s tastes,’ he held up his hands, they both laughed.  ‘But why do we think of other people?’ he added.  And coming forward with a conquering impulsiveness, he took both her long, fine hands in his and raised them to his bearded mouth.  

       She looked at him for a second, then dropped her eyelids, took back her hands.  ‘I must go and make the tea,’ she said.  ‘The servants’ – the plural was a pardonable exaggeration – ‘are out.’

       Gallantly, the Complete Man offered to come and help her.  These scenes of intimate life had a charm all their own.  But she would not allow it.  ‘No, no,’ she was very firm, ‘I simply forbid you.  You must stay here.  I won’t be a moment,’ and she was gone, closing the door carefully behind her.

       Left to himself, Gumbril sat down and filed his nails.

       As for the young lady, she hurried along to her dingy little kitchen, lit the gas, put the kettle on, set out the teapot and the cups on a tray, and from the biscuit-box, where it was stored, took out the remains of a chocolate cake, which had already seen service at the day-before-yesterday’s tea-party.  When all was ready here, she tiptoed across to her bedroom and sitting down at her dressing-table, began with hands that trembled a little with excitement to powder her nose and heighten the colour of her cheeks.  Even after the last touch had been given, she still sat there, looking at her image in the glass.

       The lady and the poet, she was thinking, the grande dame and the brilliant young man of genius.  She liked young men with beards.  But he was not an artist, in spite of the beard, in spite of the hat.  He was a writer of sorts.  So she gathered; but he was reticent, he was delightfully mysterious.  She too, for that matter.  The great lady slips out, masked, into the street; touches the young man’s sleeve: Come with me.  She chooses, does not let herself passively be chosen.  The young poet falls at her feet; she lifts him up.  One is accustomed to this sort of thing.

       She opened her jewel-box, took out all her rings – there were not many of them, alas! – and put them on.  Two or three of them, on second thoughts, she took off again; they were a little, she suspected with a sudden qualm, in other people’s taste.

       He was very clever, very artistic – only that seemed to be the wrong word to use; he seemed to know all the new things, all the interesting people.  Perhaps he would introduce her to some of them.  And he was so much at ease behind his knowledge, so well assured.  But for her part, she felt pretty certain, she had made no stupid mistakes.  She too had been, had looked at any rate – which was the important thing – very much at ease.

       She liked young men with beards.  They looked so Russian.  Catherine of Russia had been one of the great ladies with caprices.  Masked in the streets.  Young poet, come with me.  Or even, Young butcher’s boy.  But that, no, that was going too far, too low.  Still, life, life – it was there to be lived – life – to be enjoyed.  And now, and now?  She was still wondering what would happen next, when the kettle, which was one of those funny ones which whistle when they come to the boil, began, fitfully at first, then, under full steam, unflaggingly, to sound its mournful, otherworldly note.  She sighed and bestirred herself to attend to it.

       ‘Let me help you.’  Gumbril jumped up as she came into the room.  ‘What can I do?’  He hovered rather ineptly round her.

       The lady put down her tray on the little table.  ‘N-nothing,’ she said.

       ‘N-nothing?’ he imitated her with a playful mockery.  ‘Am I good for n-nothing at all?’  He took one of her hands and kissed it.

       ‘Nothing that’s of the l-least importance.’  She sat down and began to pour out the tea.

       The Complete Man also sat down.  ‘So to adore at first sight,’ he asked, ‘is not of the l-least importance?’

       She shook her head, smiled, raised and lowered her eyelids.  One was so well accustomed to this sort of thing; it had no importance.  ‘Sugar?’ she asked.  The young poet was safely there, sparkling across the tea-table.  He offered love and she, with the easy heartlessness of one who is so well accustomed to this sort of thing, offered him sugar.

       He nodded.  ‘Please.  But if it’s of no importance to you,’ he went on, ‘then I’ll go away at once.’

       The lady laughed her section of a descending chromatic scale.  ‘Oh, no, you won’t,’ she said.  ‘You can’t.’  And she felt that the grande dame had made a very fine stroke.

       ‘Quite right,’ the Complete Man replied; ‘I couldn’t.’  He stirred of tea.  ‘But who are you,’ he looked up at her suddenly, ‘you devilish female?’  He was genuinely anxious to know; and besides, he was paying her a very pretty compliment.  ‘What do you do with your dangerous existence?’

       ‘I enjoy life,’ she said.  ‘I think one ought to enjoy life.  Don’t you?  I think it’s one’s first duty.’  She became quite grave.  ‘One ought to enjoy every moment of it,’ she said.  ‘Oh, passionately, adventurously, newly, excitingly, uniquely.’

       The Complete Man laughed.  ‘A conscientious hedonist.  I see.’

       She felt uncomfortably that the fastidious lady had not quite lived up to her character.  She had spoken more like a young woman who finds life too dull and daily, and would like to get on to the cinema.  ‘I am very conscientious,’ she said, making significant play with the magnolia petals and smiling her riddling smile.  She must retrieve the Great Catherine’s reputation.

       ‘I could see that from the first,’ mocked the Complete Man with a triumphant insolence.  ‘Conscience doth make cowards of us all.’

       The fastidious lady only contemptuously smiled.  ‘Have a little chocolate cake,’ she suggested.  Her heart was beating.  She wondered, she wondered.’

       There was a long silence.  Gumbril finished his chocolate cake, gloomily drank his tea and did not speak.  He found, all at once, that he had nothing to say.  His jovial confidence seemed, for the moment, to have deserted him.  He was only the Mild and Melancholy one foolishly disguised as a Complete Man; a sheep in beaver’s clothing.  He entrenched himself behind his formidable silence and waited; waited, at first, sitting in his chair, then, when this total inactivity became unbearable, striding about the room.

       She looked at him, for all her air of serene composure, with a certain disquiet.  What on earth was he up to now?  What could he be thinking about?  Frowning like that, he looked like a young Jupiter, bearded and burly (though not, she noticed, quite so burly as he had appeared in his overcoat), making ready to throw a thunderbolt.  Perhaps he was thinking of her – suspecting her, seeing through the fastidious lady and feeling angry at her attempted deception.  Or perhaps he was bored with her, perhaps he was wanting to go away.  Well, let him go; she didn’t mind.  Or perhaps he was just made like that – a moody young poet; that seemed, on the whole, the most likely explanation; it was also the most pleasing and romantic.  She waited.  They both waited.

       Gumbril looked at her and was put to shame by the spectacle of her quiet serenity.  He must do something, he told himself; he must recover the Complete Man’s lost morale.  Desperately he came to a halt in front of the one decent picture hanging on the walls.  It was an eighteenth-century engraving of Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration’ – better, he always thought, in black and white than in its bleakly-coloured original.

       ‘That’s a nice engraving,’ he said.  ‘Very nice.’  The mere fact of having uttered it at all was a great comfort to him, a real relief.

       ‘Yes,’ she said.  ‘That belongs to me.  I found it in a second-hand shop, not far from here.’

       ‘Photography,’ he pronounced, with that temporary earnestness which made him seem an enthusiast about everything, ‘is a mixed blessing.  It has made it possible to reproduce pictures so easily and cheaply, that all the bad artists who were well occupied in the past, making engravings of good men’s paintings, are now free to do bad original work of their own.’  All this was terribly impersonal, he told himself, terribly off the point.  He was losing ground.  He must do something drastic to win it back.  But what?

       She came to his rescue.  ‘I bought another at the same time,’ she said.  ‘“The Last Communion of St Jerome”?’  The Complete Man was afloat again.  ‘Poussin’s favourite picture.  Mine too, very nearly.  I’d like to see that.’

       ‘It’s in my room, I’m afraid.  But if you don’t mind.’

       He bowed.  ‘If you don’t.’

       She smiled graciously to him and got up.  ‘This way,’ she said, and opened the door.

       ‘It’s a lovely picture,’ Gumbril went on, loquaciously now, behind her, as they walked down the dark corridor.  ‘And besides, I have a sentimental attachment to it.  There used to be a copy of an engraving of it at home, when I was a child.  And I remember wondering and wondering – oh, it went on for years – every time I saw the picture; wondering why on earth that old bishop (for I did know it was a bishop) should be handing the naked old man a five-shilling piece.’

       She opened a door; they were in her very pink room.  Grave in its solemn and subtly harmonious beauty, they picture hung over the mantelpiece, hung there, among the photographs of the little friends of her own age, like some strange object from another world.  From within that chipped gilt frame all the beauty, all the grandeur of religion looked darkly upon the pink room.  The little friends of her own age, all deliciously nubile, sweetly smiled, turned up their eyes, clasped Persian cats or stood jauntily, feet apart, hand in the breeches pocket of the land-girl’s uniform; the pink roses on the wallpaper, the pink and white curtains, the pink bed, the strawberry-coloured carpet, filled all the air with the rosy reflections of nakedness and life.

       And utterly remote, absorbed in their grave, solemn ecstasy, the robed and mitred priest held out, the dying saint yearningly received, the body of the Son of God.  The ministrants looked gravely on, the little angels looped in the air above a gravely triumphant festoon, the lion slept at the saint’s feet, and through the arch beyond, the eye travelled out over a quiet country of dark trees and hills.

       ‘There it is,’ she waved towards the mantelpiece.

       But Gumbril had taken it all in long ago.  ‘You see what I mean by the five-shilling piece.’  And stepping up to the picture, he pointed to the round bright wafer which the priest holds in his hand and whose averted disk is like the essential sun at the centre of the picture’s harmonious universe.  ‘Those were the days of five-shilling pieces,’ he went on.  ‘You’re probably too young to remember those large, lovely things.  They came my way occasionally, and consecrated wafers didn’t.  She you can understand how much the picture puzzled me.  A bishop giving a naked old man five shillings in a church, with angels fluttering overhead, and a lion sleeping in the foreground.  It was obscure, it was horribly obscure.’  He turned away from the picture and confronted his hostess, who was standing a little way behind him smiling enigmatically and invitingly.

       ‘Obscure,’ he repeated.  ‘But so is everything.  So is life in general.  And you,’ he stepped towards her, ‘you in particular.’

       ‘Am I?’ she lifted her limpid eyes at him.  Oh, how her heart was beating, how hard it was to be the fastidious lady, calmly satisfying her caprice.  How difficult it was to be accustomed to this sort of thing.  What was going to happen next?

       What happened next was that the Complete Man came still closer, put his arms round her, as though he were inviting her to the fox-trot, and began kissing her with a startling violence.  His beard tickled her neck; shivering a little, she brought down the magnolia petals across her eyes.  The Complete Man lifted her up, walked across the room carrying the fastidious lady in his arms and deposited her on the rosy catafalque of the bed.  Lying there with her eyes shut, she did her best to pretend she was dead.

       Gumbril had looked at his wristwatch and found that it was six o’clock.  Already?  He prepared himself to take his departure. Wrapped in a pink kimono, she came out into the hall to wish him farewell.

       ‘When shall I see you again, Rosie?’  He had learnt that her name was Rosie.

       She had recovered her great lady’s equanimity and detachment, and was able to shrug her shoulders and smile.  ‘How should I know?’ she asked, implying that she could not foresee what her caprice might be an hour hence.

       ‘May I write, then, and ask one of these days if you do know?’

       She put her head on one side and raised her eyebrows, doubtfully.  At last nodded.  ‘Yes, you can write,’ she permitted.

       ‘Good,’ said the Complete Man, and picked up his wide hat.  She held out her hand to him with stateliness, and with a formal gallantry he kissed it.  He was just closing the front door behind him, when he remembered something.  He turned round.  ‘I say,’ he called after the retreating pink kimono.  ‘It’s rather absurd.  But how can I write?  I don’t know your name.  I can’t just address it “Rosie”.’

       The great lady laughed delightedly.  This had the real capriccio flavour.  ‘Wait,’ she said, and she ran into the sitting-room.  She was back again in a moment with an oblong of pasteboard.  ‘There,’ she said, and dropped it into his greatcoat pocket.  Then blowing a kiss she was gone.

       The Complete Man closed the door and descended the stairs.  Well, well, he said to himself; well, well.  He put his hand in his coat pocket and took out the card.  In the dim light of the staircase he read the name on it with some difficulty.  Mrs James – but no, but no.  He read again, straining his eyes; there was no question of it.  Mrs James Shearwater.

       Mrs James Shearwater.

       That was why he had vaguely known the name of Bloxam Gardens.

       Mrs James Shear-.  Step after step he descended, ponderously.  ‘Good Lord,’ he said out loud.  ‘Good Lord.’

       But why had he never seen her?  Why did Shearwater never produce her?  Now he came to think of it, he hardly ever spoke of her.

       Why had she said the flat wasn’t theirs?  It was; he had heard Shearwater talk about it.

       Did she make a habit of this sort of thing?

       Could Shearwater be wholly unaware of what she was really like?  But, for that matter, what was she really like?

       He was half-way down the last flight, when with a rattle and a squeak of hinges the door of the house, which was only separated by a short lobby from the foot of the stairs, opened, revealing, on the doorstep, Shearwater and a friend, eagerly talking.

       ‘… I take my rabbit,’ the friend was saying – he was a young man with dark, protruding eyes, and staring, doggy nostrils; very eager, lively and loud.  ‘I take my rabbit and I inject into it the solution of eyes, pulped eyes of another dead rabbit.  You see?’

       Gumbril’s first instinct was to rush up the stairs and hide in the first likely-looking corner.  But he pulled himself together at once.  He was a Complete Man, and Complete Men do not hide; moreover, he was sufficiently disguised to be quite unrecognizable.  He stood where he was, and listened to the conversation.

       ‘The rabbit,’ continued the young man, and with his bright eyes and staring, sniffing nose, he looked like a poacher’s terrier ready to go barking after the first white tail that passed his way; ‘the rabbit naturally develops the appropriate resistance, develops a specific anti-eye to protect itself.  I then take some of its anti-eye serum and inject it into my female rabbit; I then immediately breed from her.’  He paused.

       ‘Well?’ asked Shearwater, in his slow, ponderous way.  He lifted his great round head inquiringly and looked at the doggy young man from under his bushy eyebrows.

       The doggy young man smiled triumphantly.  ‘The young ones,’ he said, emphasizing his words by striking his right fist against the extended palm of his left hand, ‘the young ones are born with defective sight.’

       Thoughtfully Shearwater pulled at his formidable moustache.  ‘H’m,’ he said slowly.  ‘Very remarkable.’

       ‘You realize the full significance of it?’ asked the young man.  ‘We seem to be affecting the germ-plasm directly.  We have found a way of making acquired characteristics …’

       ‘Pardon me,’ said Gumbril.  He had decided that it was time to be gone.  He ran down the stairs and across the tiled hall, he pushed his way firmly but politely between the talkers.

       ‘… heritable,’ continued the young man, imperturbably eager, speaking through and over and round the obstacle.

       ‘Damn!’ said Shearwater.  The Complete Man had trodden on his toe.  ‘Sorry,’ he added, absent-mindedly apologizing for the injury he had received.

       Gumbril hurried off along the street.  ‘If we really have found out a technique for influencing the germ-plasm directly …’ he heard the doggy young man saying; but he was already too far away to catch the rest of the sentence.  There are many ways, he reflected, of spending an afternoon.

       The doggy young man refused to come in, he had to get in his game of tennis before dinner.  Shearwater climbed the stairs alone.  He was taking off his hat in the little hall of his own apartment, when Rosie came out of the sitting-room with a trayful of tea-things.

       ‘Well?’ he asked, kissing her affectionately on the forehead.  ‘Well?   People to tea?’

       ‘Only one,’ Rosie replied.  ‘I’ll go and make you a fresh cup.’

       She glided off, rustling in her pink kimono towards the kitchen.

       Shearwater sat down in the sitting-room.  He had brought home with him from the library the fifteenth volume of the Journal of Biochemistry.  There was something in it he wanted to look up.  He turned over the pages.  Ah, here it was.  He began reading.  Rosie came back again.

       ‘Here’s your tea,’ she said.

       He thanked her without looking up.  The tea grew cold on the little table at his side.

       Lying on the sofa, Rosie pondered and remembered.  Had the events of the afternoon, she asked herself, really happened?  They seemed very improbable and remote, now, in this studious silence.  She couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed.  Was it only this?  So simple and obvious?  She tried to work herself up into a more exalted mood.  She even tried to feel guilty; but there she failed completely.  She tried to feel rapturous; but without much more success.  Still, he certainly had been a most extraordinary man.  Such impudence, and at the same time such delicacy and tact.

       It was a pity she couldn’t afford to change the furniture.  She saw now that it wouldn’t do at all.  She would go and tell Aunt Aggie about the dreadful middle-classness of her Art and Craftiness.

       She ought to have an Empire chaise longue.  Like Madame Récamier.  She could see herself lying there, dispensing tea.  ‘Like a delicious pink snake.’  He had called her that.

       ‘Well, really, now she came to think of it all again, it had been too queer, too queer.

       ‘What’s a hedonist?’ she suddenly asked.

       Shearwater looked up from the Journal of Biochemistry.  ‘What?’ he said.

       ‘A hedonist.’

       ‘A man who holds that the end of life is pleasure.’

       A ‘conscientious hedonist’ – ah, that was good.

       ‘This tea is cold,’ Shearwater remarked.

       ‘You should have drunk it before,’ she said.  The silence renewed and prolonged itself.

       Rosie was getting much better, Shearwater reflected, as he washed his hands before supper, about not interrupting him when he was busy.  This evening she had really not disturbed him at all, or at most only once, and that not seriously.  There had been times in the past when the child had really made life almost impossible.  There were those months at the beginning of their married life, when she had thought she would like to study physiology herself and be a help to him.  He remembered the hours he had spent trying to teach her elementary facts about the chromosomes.  It had been a great relief when she abandoned the attempt.  He had suggested that she should go in for stencilling patterns on Government linen.  Such pretty curtains and things one could make like that.  But she hadn’t taken very kindly to the idea.  There had followed a long period when she seemed to have nothing to do but prevent him from doing anything.  Ringing him up at the laboratory, invading his study, or pulling his hair, or asking ridiculous questions when he was trying to work.

       Shearwater flattered himself that he had been extremely patient.  He had never got cross.  He had just gone on as though she weren’t there.  As though she weren’t there.

       ‘Hurry up,’ he heard her calling.  ‘The soup’s getting cold.’

       ‘Coming,’ he shouted back, and began to dry his large, blunt hands.

       She seemed to have been improving lately.  And tonight, tonight she had been a model of non-existence.

       He came striding heavily into the dining-room.  Rosie was sitting at the head of the table, ladling out the soup.  With her left hand she held back the flowing pink sleeve of her kimono so that it should not trail in the plates or the tureen.  Her bare arm showed white and pearly through the steam of lentils.

       How pretty she was!  He could not resist the temptation, but coming up behind her bent down and kissed her, rather clumsily, on the back of her neck.

       Rosie drew away from him.  ‘Really, Jim,’ she said, disapprovingly.  ‘At meal-times!’  The fastidious lady had to draw the line at these ill-timed, tumbling familiarities.

       ‘And what about work-times?’ Shearwater asked laughing.  ‘Still, you were wonderful this evening, Rosie, quite wonderful.’  He sat down and began eating his soup.  ‘Not a sound all the time I was reading; or, at any rate, only one sound, so far as I remember.’

       The great lady said nothing, but only smiled – a little contemptuously and with a touch of pity.  She pushed away the plate of soup unfinished and planted her elbows on the table.  Slipping her hands under the sleeves of her kimono, she began, lightly, delicately, with the tips of her fingers, to caress her own arms.

       How smooth they were, how soft and warm and how secret under the sleeves.  And all her body was as smooth and warm, was as soft and secret, still more secret beneath the pink folds.  Like a warm serpent hidden away, secretly, secretly.