CHAPTER XXI
‘WELL,’ said Gumbril, ‘here I am again.’
‘Already?’ Mrs
Viveash had been reduced, by the violence of her headache, to coming home after
her luncheon with Piers Cotton for a rest.
She had fed her hungry pain on Pyramidon and now she was lying down on
the Dufy-upholstered sofa at the foot of her full-length portrait by
Jacques-Emile Blanche. Her head was not
much better, but she was bored. When the
maid had announced Gumbril, she had given word that he was to be let in. ‘I’m very ill,’ she went on expiringly. ‘Look at me,’ she pointed to herself, ‘and me
again.’ She waved her hand towards the
sizzling brilliance of the portrait. ‘Before and after.
Like the advertisement, you know.
Every picture tells a story.’ She
laughed faintly, then made a little grimace and,
sucking in the breath between her lips, she put her hand to her forehead.
‘My poor
Mrs
Viveash gave an all but imperceptible shrug.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Not
influenza, I hope?’
‘No,
I don’t think so.’
‘Not
love, by any chance?’
Mrs
Viveash did not venture another laugh; she contented herself with smiling
agonizingly.
‘That
would have been a just retribution,’ Gumbril went on, ‘after what you’ve done
to me.’
‘What
have I done to you?’ Mrs Viveash asked, opening wide her pale-blue eyes.
‘Merely wrecked my existence.’
‘But
you’re being childish, Theodore. Say
what you mean without these grand, silly phrases.’ The dying voice spoke with impatience.
‘Well,
what I mean,’ said Gumbril, ‘is merely this. You prevented me from going to see the only
person I ever really wanted to see in my life.
And yesterday, when I tried to see her, she was gone. Vanished. And here am I left in the vacuum.’
Mrs
Viveash shut her eyes. ‘We’re all in the
vacuum,’ she said. ‘You’ll still have
plenty of company, you know.’ She was
silent for a moment. ‘Still, I’m sorry,’
she added. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? And why didn’t you just pay no attention to
me and go all the same?’
‘I
didn’t tell you,’ Gumbril answered, ‘because, then, I didn’t know. And I didn’t go because I didn’t want to
quarrel with you.’
‘Thank
you,’ said Mrs Viveash, and patted his hand.
‘But what are you going to do about it now? Not quarrelling with me is only a rather
negative satisfaction, I’m afraid.’
‘I
propose to leave the country tomorrow morning,’ said Gumbril.
‘Ah,
the classical remedy … But not to shoot big game, I hope?’ She thought of Viveash among the Tikki-tikkis
and the tsetses. He was a charming
creature; charming, but … but what?
‘Good
heavens!’ exclaimed Gumbril. ‘What do
you take me for? Big
game!’ He leaned back in his
chair and began to laugh, heartily, for the first time since he had returned
from Robertsbridge, yesterday evening.
He had felt then as though he would never laugh again. ‘Do you see me in a pith helmet, with an
elephant gun?’
Mrs
Viveash put her hand to her forehead. ‘I
see you,’ Theodore,’ she said, ‘but I try to think you would look quite normal;
because of my head.’
‘I
go to
This
time, in spite of her head, Mrs Viveash laughed.
‘I
thought of giving myself a farewell banquet,’ Gumbril went on. ‘We’ll go round before dinner, if you’re
feeling well enough, that is, and collect a few friends. Then, in profoundest gloom, we’ll eat and
drink. And in the morning, unshaved, exhausted
and filled with disgust, I shall take the train from
‘We’ll
do it,’ said Mrs Viveash faintly and indomitably from the sofa that was almost
genuinely a deathbed. ‘And, meanwhile,
we’ll have a second brew of tea and you shall talk to me.’
The
tannin was brought in. Gumbril settled
down to talk and Mrs Viveash to listen – to listen and from time to time to dab
her brows with eau-de-Cologne, to take a sniff of hartshorn.
Gumbril
talked. He talked of the marriage
ceremonies of octopuses, of the rites intricately consummated in the submarine
green grottos of the
On
the backside of the moon, his friend Umbilikoff, the mystic, used to assure
him, the souls of the dead in the form of little bladders – like so much
swelled sago – are piled up and piled up till they squash and squeeze one
another with an excruciating and ever-growing pressure. In the exoteric world this squeezing of the
moon’s backside is know, erroneously, as hell.
And as for the constellation, Scorpio – he was the first of all
constellations to have a proper sort of backbone. For by an effort of the will he ingurgitated
his external armour, he compressed and rebuilt it within his body and so became
the first vertebrate. This, you may well
believe, was a notable day in cosmic history.
The
rents of these new buildings in
Who
lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who
lives on roast beef, water and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in
eternity. All the years of the
beef-eater are lived only in time. ‘I
can tell you all about heroin,’ said Mrs Viveash.
Lady
Capricorn, he understood, was still keeping open bed. How Rubens would have admired those silk
cushions, those gigantic cabbage roses, those round pink pearls of hers, vaster
than those that Captain Nemo discovered in the immemorial oyster! And the warm dry rustle of flesh over flesh
as she walks, moving first one leg, then advancing the other.
Talking
of octopuses, the swim-bladders of deep-sea fishes are filled with almost
absolutely pure oxygen. C’est la vie – Gumbril shrugged his
shoulders.
In
Alpine pastures the grasshoppers start their flight, whizzing like clockwork
grasshoppers. And these brown invisible
ones reveal themselves suddenly as they skim above the flowers – a streak of
blue lightning, a trailing curve of scarlet.
Then the overwing shuts down over the coloured wing below and they are
once more invisible fiddlers rubbing their thighs, like Lady Capricorn, at the
foot of the towering flowers.
Forgers
give patina to their mediæval ivories by lending them to stout young Jewesses
to wear for a few months hanging, like an amulet, between their breasts.
In
Italian cemeteries the family vaults are made of glass and iron, like
greenhouses.
Sir
Henry Griddle has finally married the hog-faced gentlewoman.
Piero
della Francesca’s fresco of the Resurrection at San
Sepolcro is the most beautiful picture in the world, and the hotel there is far
from bad. Scriabine = le Tschaikovsky de nos jours. The dullest
landscape painter is Marchand. The best
poet …
‘You
bore me,’ said Mrs Viveash.
‘Must
I talk of love, then?’ asked Gumbril.
‘It
looks like it,’ Mrs Viveash answered, and closed her eyes.
Gumbril
told the anecdote about Jo Peters, Connie Astiot and Jim Baum. The anecdote of Lola Knopf
and the Baroness Gnomon. Of Margherita Radicofani, himself, and the Pastor Meyer. Of Lord Cavey and little
Toby Nobes. When he had finished
these, he saw that Mrs Viveash had gone to sleep.
He
was not flattered. But a little sleep
would do her headache, he reflected, a world of good. And knowing that if he ceased to speak, she
would probably be woken by the sudden blankness of the silence, he went on
quietly talking to himself.
‘When
I’m abroad this time,’ he soliloquized, ‘I shall really begin writing my
autobiography. There’s nothing like a
hotel bedroom to work in.’
He scratched his head thoughtfully and even picked his nose,
which was one of his bad habits, when he was alone. ‘People who know me,’ he went on, ‘will think
that what I write about the governess cart and my mother and the flowers and so
on is written merely because I know in here,’ he scratched his head a little
harder to show himself that he referred to his brain, ‘that that’s the sort of
thing one ought to write about. They’ll
think I’m a sort of dingy Romain Rolland, hopelessly trying to pretend that I
feel the emotions and have the great spiritual experiences, which the really
important people do feel and have. And
perhaps they’ll be right. Perhaps the
Life of Gumbril will be as manifestly an ersatz
as the Life of Beethoven. On the other
hand, they may be astonished to find that it’s the genuine article. We shall see.’ Gumbril nodded his head slowly, while he
transferred two pennies from his right-hand trouser pocket to his left-hand
trouser pocket. He was somewhat
distressed to find that these coppers had been trespassing among the
silver. Silver was for the right-hand,
copper for the left. It was one of the
laws which it was extremely unlucky to infringe. ‘I have a premonition,’ he went on, ‘that one
of these days I may become a saint. An unsuccessful flickering sort of saint, like a candle beginning
to go out. As
for love – m’yes, m’yes. And as
for the people I have met – I shall point out that I have known most of the
eminent men in Europe, and that I have said of all of them what I said after my
first love affair: Is that all?’
‘Did
you really say that about your first love affair?’ asked Mrs Viveash, who had
woken up again.
‘Didn’t
you?’
‘No. I said: That is all – everything, the universe.
In love, it’s either all or nothing at all.’ She shut her eyes and almost immediately went
to sleep again.
Gumbril
continued his lullaby-soliloquy.
‘”This
charming little book.” … The
Scotsman. “This farrago of
obscenity; slander and false psychology.” …
At
‘I
really believe I’m all right,’ she said.
She jumped up. ‘Come on,’ she
cried. ‘I feel ready for anything.’
‘And
I feel like so much food for worms,’ said Gumbril. ‘Still, Versiam’ a tazza piena il generoso umor.’ He hummed the Drinking Song out of Robert the Devil, and to that
ingenuously jolly melody they left the house.
Their
taxi that evening cost them several pounds.
They made the man drive back and forth, like a shuttle, from one end of
‘How
I adore them!’ she said the first time they passed them. ‘Those wheels that whiz round till the sparks
fly out from under them: that rushing motor, and that lovely bottle of port
filling the glass and then disappearing and reappearing and filling it
again. Too lovely.’
‘Too
revolting,’ Gumbril corrected her.
‘These things are the epileptic symbol of all that’s most bestial and
idiotic in contemporary life. Look at
those beastly things and then look at that.’
He pointed to the County Fire Office on the northern side of the
Circus. ‘There stands decency, dignity,
beauty, repose. And there flickers,
there gibbers and twitches – what?
Restlessness, distraction, refusal to think, anything for an unquiet
life …’
‘What
a delicious pedant you are!’ She turned
away from the window, put her hands on his shoulders and looked at him. Too exquisitely ridiculous!’ And she kissed him.
‘You
won’t force me to change my opinion.’
Gumbril smiled at her. ‘Eppur’ di muove - I
stick to my guns like Galileo. They move
and they’re horrible.’
‘They’re
me,’ said Mrs Viveash emphatically.
‘Those things are me.’
They
drove first to Lypiatt’s mews. Under the Piranesian arch.
The clotheslines looped from window to window across the street might
have been those ropes which form so essential and so mysterious a part of the
furniture of the Prisons. The place smelt,
the children were shouting; the hyena-like laughter of the flappers
reverberated between the close-set walls.
All Gumbril’s sense of social responsibility was aroused in a moment.
Shut
up in his room all day, Lypiatt had been writing – writing his whole life, all
his ideas and ideals, all for
He
still had his Service revolver. Taking
it out of the drawer in which it was kept, he loaded it, he laid it on the
packing-case which served him as a table at his bed’s head, and stretched himself out on the bed.
He lay quite still, his muscles all relaxed,
hardly breathing. He imagined himself
dead. Derision! there
was still the plunge into the wall.
He
picked up the pistol, looked down the barrel.
Black and deep as the well. The muzzle against his forehead was a cold
mouth.
There
was nothing new to be thought about death.
There was not even the possibility of a new thought. Only the old thoughts, the horrible old
questions returned.
The cold mouth to his forehead, his finger pressing on the trigger. Already he would be falling, falling. And the annihilating crash would be the same
as the faraway sound of death at the bottom of the well. And after that, in the
silence? The old question was
still the same.
After
that, he would be bleeding. The flies
would drink his blood as though it were red honey. In the end the people would come and fetch
him away, and the coroner’s jury would look at him in the mortuary and
pronounce him temporarily insane. Then
he would be buried in a black hole, would be buried and decay.
And
meanwhile, would there be anything else?
There was nothing new to be thought or asked. And there was still no answer.
In
the room it began to grow dark; colours vanished, forms ran together. The easel and
Down
below, at his door, he heard a sharp knocking.
He lifted his head and listened, caught the sound of two voices, a man’s
and a woman’s.
‘Hideous
to think that people actually live in places like this,’ Gumbril was
saying. ‘Look at those children. It ought to be punishable by law to produce
children in this street.’
‘They
always take me for the Pied Piper,’ said Mrs Viveash. Lypiatt got up and crept to the window. He could hear all they said.
‘I
wonder if Lypiatt’s in. I don’t see any
sign of a light.’
‘But
he has heavy curtains,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘and I know for a fact that he always
composes his poetry in the dark. He may
be composing poetry.’
Gumbril
laughed.
‘Knock
again,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘Poets are
always absorbed, you know. And Casimir’s
always the poet.’
‘Il Poeta – capital P. Like d’Annunzio in the Italian papers,’ said
Gumbril. ‘Did you know that d’Annunzio has books printed on mackintosh for his
bath?’ He rapped again at the door. ‘I saw it in the Corriere della Sera the other day at the
club. He reads the Little Flowers of St Francis by preference in his bath. And he has a fountain-pen with waterproof ink
in the soapdish, so that he can add a few Fioretti of his own whenever he feels
like it. We might suggest that to
Casimir.’
Lypiatt
stood with folded arms by the window, listening. How lightly they threw his life, his heart,
from hand to hand, as though it were a ball and they
were playing a game! He thought suddenly
of other people. His own person had
always seemed, on those occasions, sacred.
One knew in theory very well that others spoke of one contemptuously –
as one spoke of them. In practice – it
was hard to believe.
‘Poor
Casimir!’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘I’m afraid
his show was a failure.’
‘I
know it was,’ said Gumbril. ‘Complete and absolute.
I told my tame capitalist that he ought to employ Lypiatt for our
advertisements. He’d be excellent for
those. And it would mean some genuine
money in his pocket.’
‘But
the worst of it is,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘that he’ll only feel insulted by the
suggestion.’ She looked up at the
window.
‘I
don’t know why,’ she went on, ‘this house looks most
horribly dead. I hope nothing’s happened
to poor Casimir. I have a most
disagreeable feeling that it may have.’
‘Ah,
this famous feminine intuition,’ laughed Gumbril. He knocked again.
‘I
can’t help feeling that he may be lying there dead, or delirious, or
something.’
‘And
I can’t help feeling that he must have gone out to dinner. We shall have to give him up, I’m
afraid. It’s a pity. He’s so good with Mercaptan. Like bear and mastiff. Or rather, like bear and poodle, bear and
King Charles’s spaniel – or whatever those little dogs are that you see ladies
in eighteenth-century French engravings taking to bed with them. Let’s go.’
‘Just
knock once again,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘He
might really be preoccupied, or asleep, or ill.’ Gumbril knocked. ‘Now listen.
Hush.’
They
were silent; the children still went on hallooing in the distance. There was a great clop-clopping of horse’s
feet as a van was backed into a stable door near by. Lypiatt stood motionless, his arms still
crossed, his chin on his breast. The
seconds passed.
‘Not
a sound,’ said Gumbril. ‘He must have
gone out.’
‘I
suppose so,’ said Mrs Viveash.
‘Come
on, then. We’ll go and look for
Mercaptan.’
He
heard their steps in the street below, heard the slamming of the taxi door. The engine was started up. Loud on the first gear, less loud on the
second, whisperingly on the third, it moved away, gathering speed. The noise of it was merged with the general
noise of the town. They were gone.
Lypiatt
walked slowly back to his bed. He wished
suddenly that he had gone down to answer the last knock. These voices – at the well’s edge he had
turned to listen to them; at the well’s extreme verge. He lay quite still in the darkness; and it
seemed to him at last that he had floated away from the earth, that he was
alone, no longer in a narrow dark room, but in an illimitable darkness outside
and beyond. His mind grew calmer; he
began to think of himself, of all that he had known, remotely, as though from a
great way off.
‘Adorable
lights!’ said Mrs Viveash, as they drove once more through
Gumbril
said nothing. He had said all that he
had to say last time.
‘And
there’s another,’ exclaimed Mrs Viveash, as they passed, near Burlington House,
a fountain of Sandeman’s port. ‘If only
they had an automatic jazz band attached to the same mechanism!’ she said
regretfully.
The
Mr
Mercaptan, it seemed, had left
Secure,
meanwhile, behind a whole troop of butlers and footmen, Mr Mercaptan was dining
comfortably at Oxhanger with the most faithful of his friends and admirers, Mrs
Speegle. It was to Mrs Speegle that he
had dedicated his coruscating little ‘Loves of the Pachyderms’; for Mrs Speegle
it was who had suggested, casually one day at luncheon, that the human race
ought to be classified in two main species – the pachyderms, and those whose
skin, like her own, like Mr Mercaptan’s and a few others, was fine and
‘responsive,’ as Mr Mercaptan himself put it, ‘to all caresses, including those
of pure reason.’ Mr Mercaptan had taken
the casual hint and had developed it, richly.
The barbarous pachyderms he divided up into a number of subspecies:
steatocephali, acephali, theolaters, industrious Judæorhynci – busy, compact
and hard as dung-beetles – Peabodies, Russians, and so on. It was all very witty and delicately
savage. Mr Mercaptan had a standing
invitation at Oxhanger. With dangerous
pachyderms like Lypiatt ranging loose about the town, he thought it best to
avail himself of it. Mrs Speegle, he
knew, would be delighted to see him. And
indeed she was. He arrived just at
lunchtime. Mrs Speegle and Maisie
Furlonger were already at the fish.
‘Mercaptan!’ Mrs
Speegle’s soul seemed to be in the name.
‘Sit down,’ she went on, cooing as she talked, like a ringdove. There seemed to be singing in every word she
spoke. She pointed to a chair next to
hers. ‘N’you’re
n’just in time to tell us all about n’your
Lesbian experiences.’
And
Mercaptan, giving vent to his fully orchestrated laugh – squeal and roar
together – had sat down and, speaking in French partly, he nodded towards the
butler and the footman, ‘à cause des
valets,’ and partly because the language lent itself more deliciously to
this kind of confidences, he began there and then, interrupted and spurred on
by the cooing of Mrs Speegle and the happy shrieks of Maisie Furlonger, to
recount at length and with all the wit in the world his experiences among the
Isles of Greece. How delicious it was,
he said to himself, to be with really civilized people! In this happy house it seemed scarcely
possible to believe that such a thing as a pachyderm existed.
But
Lypiatt still lay, face upwards, on his bed, floating, it seemed to himself,
far out into the dark emptinesses between the stars. From those distant abstract spaces he seemed
to be looking impersonally down upon his own body stretched out by the brink of
the hideous well; to be looking back over his own history. Everything, even his own unhappinesses,
seemed very small and beautiful; every frightful convulsion had become no more
than a ripple, and only the fine musical ghost of sound came up to him from all
the shouting.
‘We
have no luck,’ said Gumbril, as they climbed once more into the cab.
‘I’m
not sure,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘that we haven’t really had a great deal. Did you genuinely want very much to see
Mercaptan?’
‘Not
in the least,’ said Gumbril. ‘But do you
genuinely want to see me?’
Mrs
Viveash drew the corners of her mouth down into a painful smile and did not
answer. ‘Aren’t we going to pass through
‘No,
no,’ said Gumbril, ‘we are going straight to
‘We
couldn’t tell the driver to …?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Ah,
well,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘Perhaps one’s
better without stimulants. I remember
when I was very young, when I first began to go about at all, how proud I was
of having discovered champagne. It
seemed to me wonderful to get rather tipsy.
Something to be exceedingly proud of. And, at the same time, how much I really
disliked wine! Loathed
the taste of it. Sometimes, when
Calliope and I used to dine quietly together, tête-à-tête, with no awful men about, and no appearances to keep
up, we used to treat ourselves to the luxury of a large lemonsquash, or even
raspberry syrup and soda. Ah, I wish I
could recapture the deliciousness of raspberry syrup.’
Coleman
was at home. After a brief delay he
appeared himself at the door. He was
wearing pyjamas, and his face was covered with red-brown smears, the tips of
his beard were clotted with the same dried pigment.
‘What
have you been doing to yourself?’ asked Mrs Viveash.
‘Merely
washing in the blood of the Lamb,’ Coleman answered, smiling, and his eyes
sparkling blue fire, like an electric machine.
The
door on the opposite side of the little vestibule was open. Looking over Coleman’s shoulder, Gumbril
could see through the opening a brightly lighted room and, in the middle of it,
like a large rectangular island, a wide divan.
Reclining on the divan an odalisque by Ingres – but slimmer, more
serpentine, more like a lithe pink length of boa – presented her back. The big, brown mole on the right shoulder was
surely familiar. But when, startled by
the loudness of the voices behind her, the odalisque turned round – to see in a
horribly embarrassing instant that the Cossack had left the door open and that
people could look in, were looking in, indeed – the slanting eyes beneath their
heavy white lids, the fine aquiline nose, the wide, full-lipped mouth, though
they presented themselves for only the fraction of a second, were still more
recognizable and familiar. For only the
fraction of a second did the odalisque reveal herself definitely as Rosie. Then a hand
pulled feverishly at the counterpane, the section of buff-coloured boa wriggled
and rolled; and, in a moment, where an odalisque had been, lay
only a long packet under a white sheet, like a jockey with a fractured skull
when they carry him from the course.
Well,
really … Gumbril felt positively indignant, not jealous, but astonished and
righteously indignant.
‘Well,
when you’ve finished bathing,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘I hope you’ll come and have
dinner with us. Coleman was standing
between her and the farther door; Mrs Viveash had seen nothing in the room
beyond the vestibule.
‘I’m
busy,’ said Coleman.
‘So
I see.’ Gumbril spoke as sarcastically
as he could.
‘Do
you see?’ asked Coleman, and looked round.
‘So you do!’ He stepped back and
closed the door.
‘It’s
Theodore’s last dinner,’ pleaded Mrs Viveash.
‘Not
even if it were his last supper,’ said Coleman, enchanted to have been given
the opportunity to blaspheme a little.
‘Is he going to be crucified? Or what?’
‘Merely
going abroad,’ said Gumbril.
‘He
has a broken heart,’ Mrs Viveash explained.
‘Ah, the genuine platonic towsers?’ Coleman uttered his artificial demon’s laugh.
‘That’s
just about it,’ said Gumbril, grimly.
Relieved
by the shutting of the door from her immediate embarrassment, Rosie threw back
a corner of the counterpane and extruded her head, one arm and the shoulder
with the mole on it. She looked about
her, opening her slanting eyes as wide as she could. She listened with parted lips to the voices
that came, muffled now, through the door.
It seemed to her as though she were waking up; as though now, for the
first time, she were hearing that shattering laugh, were looking now for the
first time on those blank, white walls and the one lovely and horrifying
picture. Where was she? What did it all mean? Rosie put her hand to her forehead, tried to
think. Her thinking was always a series
of pictures; one after another the pictures swam up before her eyes, melted
again in an instant.
Her
mother taking off her pince-nez to wipe them – and at once her eyes were
tremulous and vague and helpless. ‘You
should always let the gentleman get over the stile first,’ she said, and put on
her glasses again. Behind the glasses
her eyes immediately became clear, piercing, steady and efficient. Rather formidable eyes. They had seen Rosie getting over the stile in
front of Willie Hoskyns, and there was too much leg.
James
reading at his desk; his heavy, round leg propped on his hand. She came up behind him and threw her arms
round his neck. Very gently, and without
turning his eyes from the page, he undid her embrace and, with a little push
that was no more than a hint, an implication, signified that he didn’t want
her. She had gone to her pink room, and
cried.
Another
time James shook his head and smiled patiently under his moustache. ‘You’ll never learn,’ he said. She had gone to her room and cried that time
too.
Another
time they were lying in bed together, in the pink bed; only you couldn’t see it
was pink because there was no light.
They were lying very quietly.
Warm and happy and remote she felt.
Sometimes as it were the physical memory of pleasure plucked at her
nerves, making her start, making her suddenly shiver. James was breathing as though he were
asleep. All at once he stirred. He patted her shoulder two or three times in
a kindly and business-like way. ‘I know
what that means,’ she said, ‘when you pat me like that.’ And she patted him – pat-pat-pat, very
quickly. ‘It means you’re going to bed.’ ‘How do you know?’ he asked. ‘Do you think I don’t know you after all this
time? I know that pat by heart.’ And suddenly all her warm, quiet happiness
evaporated; it was all gone. ‘I’m only a
machine for going to bed with,’ she said.
‘That’s all I am for you.’ She
felt she would like to cry. But James
only laughed and said, ‘Nonsense!’ and pulled his arm clumsily from underneath
her. ‘You go to sleep,’ he said, and
kissed her on the forehead. Then he got
out of bed, and she heard him bumping clumsily about in the darkness. ‘Damn!’ he said once. Then he found the door, opened, and was gone.
She
thought of those long stories she used to make up when she went shopping. The fastidious lady; the
poets; all the adventures.
Toto’s
hands were wonderful.
She
saw, she heard Mr Mercaptan reading his essay.
Poor father, reading aloud from the Hibbert
Journal!
And
now the Cossack, covered with blood. He,
too, might read aloud from the Hibbert
Journal – only backwards, so to speak.
She had a bruise on her arm. ‘You
think there’s nothing inherently wrong and disgusting in it?’ he had
asked. ‘There is, I tell you.’ He had laughed and kissed her and stripped
off her clothes and caressed her. And
she had cried, she had struggled, she had tried to turn away; and in the end
she had been overcome by a pleasure more piercing and agonizing than anything
she had ever felt before. And all the
time Coleman had hung over her, with his blood-stained beard, smiling into her
face, and whispering, ‘Horrible, horrible, infamous and shameful.’ She lay in a kind of stupor. Then, suddenly, there had been that
ringing. The Cossack had left her. And now she was awake again, and it was
horrible, it was shameful. She
shuddered; she jumped out of bed and began as quickly as she could to put on
her clothes.
‘Really,
really, won’t you come?’ Mrs Viveash was
insisting. She was not used to people
saying no when she asked, when she insisted.
She didn’t like it.
‘No.’ Coleman shook
his head. ‘You may be having the last
supper. But I have a date here with the
Magdalen.’
‘Oh,
a woman,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘But why
didn’t you say so before?’
‘Well,
as I’d left the door open,’ said Coleman, ‘I thought it was unnecessary.’
‘Fie,’
said Mrs Viveash. ‘I find this very repulsive. Let’s go away.’ She plucked Gumbril by the sleeve.
‘Goodbye,’
said Coleman, politely. He shut the door
after them and turned back across the little hall.
‘What!
Not thinking of going?’ he exclaimed, as he came in. Rosie was sitting down on the edge of the bed
pulling on her shoes.
‘Go
away,’ she said. ‘You disgust me.’
‘But
that’s splendid,’ Coleman declared.
‘That’s all as it should be, all as I intended.’ He sat down beside her on the divan. ‘Really,’ he said, admiringly, ‘what
exquisite legs!’
Rosie
would have given anything in the world to be back again in
‘This
time,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘we simply must go through
‘It’ll
only be about two miles farther.’
‘Well,
that isn’t much.’
Gumbril
leaned out and gave the word to the driver.
‘And
besides, I like driving about like this,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘I like driving for driving’s sake. It’s like the Last Ride Together. Dear Theodore!’ She laid her hand on his.
‘Thank
you,’ said Gumbril, and kissed it.
The
little cab buzzed along down the empty Mall.
They were silent. Through the
thick air one could see the brightest of the stars. It was one of those evenings when men feel
that truth, goodness and beauty are one.
In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others
read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous. It was one of those evenings when love is
once more invented for the first time.
That, too, seems a little ridiculous, sometimes, in the morning.
‘Here
are the lights again,’ said Mrs Viveash.
‘Hop, twitch, flick – yes, genuinely an illusion of
jollity, Theodore. Genuinely.’
Gumbril
stopped the cab. ‘It’s after half-past
eight,’ he said. ‘At this rate we shall
never get anything to eat. Wait a
minute.’
He
ran into Appenrodt’s, and came back in a moment with a packet of smoked salmon
sandwiches, a bottle of white wine and a glass.
‘We
have a long way to go,’ he explained, as he got into the taxi.
They
ate their sandwiches, they drank their wine.
The taxi drove on and on.
‘This
is positively exhilarating,’ said Mrs Viveash, as they turned into the
Polished
by the wheels and shining like an old and precious bronze, the road stretched
before them, reflecting the lamps. It
had the inviting air of a road which goes on for ever.
‘They
used to have such good peepshows in this street,’ Gumbril tenderly remembered:
‘Little black shops where you paid twopence to see the genuine mermaid, which
turned out to be a stuffed walrus, and the tattooed lady, and the dwarf, and
the living statuary, which one always hoped, as a boy, was really going to be
rather naked and thrilling, but which was always the most pathetic of
unemployed barmaids, dressed in the thickest of pink Jaeger.’
‘Do
you think there’d be any of those now?’ asked Mrs Viveash.
Gumbril
shook his head. ‘They’ve moved on with
the march of civilization. But where?’ He spread
out his hands interrogatively. ‘I don’t
know which direction civilization marches – whether north towards Kilburn and
Golders Green, or over the river to the Elephant, to Clapham and Sydenham and
all those other mysterious places. But,
in any case, high rents have marched up here; there are no more genuine
mermaids in the
‘Do
you think we shall ever have any?’ Mrs Viveash asked.
‘One
can never tell.’
‘I
should have thought one could,’ said Mrs Viveash. Children – that would be the most desperate
experiment of all. The most desperate, and perhaps the only one having any chance of
being successful. History recorded cases
… On the other hand, it recorded other cases that
proved the opposite. She had often
thought of this experiment. There were
so many obvious reasons for not making it.
But some day, perhaps – she always put it off, like that.
The
cab had turned off the main road into quieter and darker streets.
‘Where
are we now?’ asked Mrs Viveash.
‘Penetrating into Maida Vale. We shall soon be there. Poor old Shearwater!’ He laughed.
Other people in love were always absurd.
‘Shall
we find him in, I wonder?’ It would be
fun to see Shearwater again. She liked
to hear him talking learnedly, and like a child. But when the child is six feet high and three
feet wide and two feet thick, when it tries to plunge head first into your life
– then, really, no … ‘But what did you want with me?’ he had asked. ‘Just to look at you,’ she answered. Just to look; that was all. Music hall, not boudoir.
‘Here
we are.’ Gumbril got out and rang the
second-floor bell.
The
door was opened by an impertinent-looking little maid.
‘Mr
Shearwater’s at the lavatory,’ she said, in answer to Gumbril’s question.
‘Laboratory?’
he suggested.
‘At the ‘ospital.’
That made it clear.
‘And
is Mrs Shearwater at home?’ he asked maliciously.
The
little maid shook her head. ‘I expected
‘er, but she didn’t come back to dinner.’
‘Would
you mind giving her a message when she does come in,’ said Gumbril. ‘Tell her that Mr Toto was very sorry he
hadn’t time to speak to her when he saw her this evening in Pimlico.’
‘Mr who?’
‘Mr
Toto.’
‘Mr
Toto is sorry ‘e ‘adn’t the time to speak to Mrs Shearwater when ‘e saw ‘er in
Pimlico this evening. Very well, sir.’
‘You
won’t forget?’ said Gumbril.
‘No,
I won’t forget.’
He
went back to the cab and explained that they had drawn blank once more.
‘I’m
rather glad,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘If we ever
did find anybody, it would mean the end of this Last-Ride-Together
feeling. And that would be sad. And it’s a lovely night. And really, for the moment, I feel I can do
without my lights. Suppose we just drove
for a bit now.’
But
Gumbril would not allow that. ‘We
haven’t had enough to eat yet,’ he said, and he gave the cabman Gumbril
Senior’s address.
Gumbril
Senor was sitting on his little iron balcony among the dried-out pots that had
once held geraniums, smoking his pipe and looking earnestly out into the
darkness in front of him. Clustered in
the fourteen plane-trees of the square, the starlings were already asleep. There was no sound but the rustling of the
leaves. But sometimes, every hour or so,
the birds would wake up. Something – perhaps
it might be a stronger gust of wind, perhaps some happy dream of worms, some
nightmare of cats simultaneously dreamed by all the flock together – would
suddenly rouse them. And then they would
all start to talk at once, at the tops of their shrill voices – for perhaps
half a minute. Then in an instant they
all went to sleep again and there was once more no sound but the rustling of
the shaken leaves. At these moments Mr
Gumbril would lean forward, would strain his eyes and his ears in the hope of
seeing, of hearing something – something significant, explanatory,
satisfying. He never did, of course; but
that in no way diminished his happiness.
Mr
Gumbril received them on his balcony with courtesy.
‘I
was just thinking of going in to work,’ he said. ‘And now you come and give me a good excuse
for sitting out here a little longer.
I’m delighted.’
Gumbril
Junior went downstairs to see what he could find in the way of food. While he was gone, his father explained to
Mrs Viveash the secrets of the birds.
Enthusiastically, his light floss of grey hair floating up and falling
again about his head as he pointed and gesticulated, he told her; the great
flocks assembled – goodness only knew where! – they
flew across the golden sky, detaching here a little troop, there a whole
legion, they flew until at last all had found their appointed resting-places
and there were no more to fly. He made
this nightly flight sound epical, as though it were a migration of peoples, a
passage of armies.
‘And
it’s my firm belief,’ said Gumbril Senior, adding notes to his epic, ‘that they
make use of some sort of telepathy, some kind of direct mind-to-mind
communication between themselves. You
can’t watch them without coming to that conclusion.’
‘A
charming conclusion,’ said Mrs Viveash.
‘It’s
a faculty,’ Gumbril Senior went on, ‘we all possess, I believe. All we animals.’ He made a gesture which included himself, Mrs Viveash and the invisible birds among the
plane-trees. ‘Why don’t we use it more?
You may well ask. For the simple reason,
my dear young lady, that half our existence is spent dealing with things that
have no mind – things with which it is impossible to hold telepathetic
communication. Hence the development of
the five senses. I have eyes that
preserve me from running into the lamppost, ears that warn me I’m in the
neighbourhood of
He
was silent. Mrs Viveash looked towards
the dark trees and listened. A full
minute passed. Then the old gentleman
burst out happily laughing.
‘Completely
wrong!’ he said. ‘They’ve never been
more soundly asleep.’ Mrs Viveash
laughed too. ‘Perhaps they all changed
their minds, just as they were waking up,’ she suggested.
Gumbril
Junior reappeared; glasses clinked as he walked, and there was a little rattle
of crockery. He was carrying a tray.
‘Cold beef,’ he said, ‘and salad and a bit of a cold apple-pie. It might be worse.’
They
drew up chairs to Gumbril Senior’s work-table and there, among the letters and
the unpaid bills and the sketchy elevations of archiducal palace, they ate
their beef and the apple-pie, and drank the one-and-ninepenny vin ordinaire of the house. Gumbril Senior, who had already supped,
looked on at them from the balcony.
‘Did
I tell you,’ said Gumbril Junior, ‘that we saw Mr Porteous’s son the other
evening – very drunk?’
Gumbril
Senior threw up his hands. ‘If you knew
the calamities that young imbecile has been the cause of!’
‘What’s
he done?’
‘Gambled
away I don’t know how much borrowed money.
And poor Porteous can’t afford anything – even now.’ Mr Gumbril shook his head and clutched and
combed his beard. ‘It’s a fearful blow,
but of course, Porteous is very steadfast and serene and … There!’ Gumbril
Senior interrupted himself, holding up his hand. ‘Listen!’
In
the fourteen plane-trees the starlings had suddenly woken up.
There
was a wild outburst, like a stormy sitting in the Italian Parliament. Then all was silent. Gumbril Senior listened, enchanted. His face, as he turned back towards the
light, revealed itself all smiles. His
hair seemed to have blown loose of its own accord, from within, so to speak; he
pushed it into place.
‘You
heard them?’ he asked Mrs Viveash. ‘What
can they have to say to one another, I wonder, at this time of the night?’
‘And
did you feel they were going to wake up?’ Mrs Viveash inquired.
‘No,’
said Gumbril Senior with candour.
‘When
we’ve finished,’ Gumbril Junior spoke with his mouth full, ‘you must show
His
father looked all of a sudden very much embarrassed. ‘I don’t think it would interest Mrs Viveash
much,’ he said.
‘Oh,
yes it would. Really,’ she declared.
‘Well,
as a matter of fact it isn’t here.’
Gumbril Senior pulled with fury at his beard.
‘Not
here? But what’s happened to it?’
Gumbril
Senior wouldn’t explain. He just ignored
his son’s question and began to talk once more about the starlings. Later on, however, when Gumbril and Mrs
Viveash were preparing to go, the old man drew him apart into a corner and
began to whisper the explanation.
‘I
didn’t want to blare it out in front of strangers,’ he said, as though it were
a question of the housemaid’s illegitimate baby or a repair to the
watercloset. ‘But the fact is, I’ve sold it. The
Victoria and Albert had wind that I was making it; they’ve been
wanting it all the time. And I’ve
let them have it.’
‘But why?’ Gumbril Junior asked in a tone of
astonishment. He knew with what a
paternal affection – no, more than paternal; for he was sure that his father
was more wholeheartedly attached to his models than to his son – with what
pride he regarded these children of his spirit.
Gumbril
Senior sighed. ‘It’s all
that young imbecile,’ he said.
‘What
young imbecile?’
‘Porteous’s son, of course.
You see, poor Porteous has had to sell his library, among other
things. You don’t know what that means
to him. All these
precious books. And collected at the price of such hardships. I thought I’d like to buy a few of the best
ones back for him. They gave me quite a
good price at the Museum.’ He came out
of his corner and hurried across the room to help Mrs Viveash with her
cloak. ‘Allow me, allow me,’ he said.
Slowly
and pensively Gumbril Junior followed him.
Beyond good and evil? Below good and evil? The name of earwig … The tubby pony
trotted. The wild columbines suspended,
among the shadows of the hazel copse, hooked spurs, helmets of aerial
purple. The Twelfth Sonata of Mozart was
insecticide; no earwigs could crawl through that music. Emily’s breasts were firm and pointed and she
had slept at last without a tremor. In
the starlight, good, true and beautiful became one. Write the discovery in books – in books quos, in the morning, legimus cacantes. They descended the stairs. The cab was waiting outside.
‘The
Last Ride again,’ said Mrs Viveash.
‘
‘Drive,
drive, drive,’ repeated Mrs Viveash. ‘I
like your father, Theodore. One of these
days he’ll fly away with the birds. And how nice it is of those starlings to wake themselves up like
that in the middle of the night, merely to amuse him. Considering how unpleasant it is to be woken
in the night. Where are we going?’
‘We’re
going to look at Shearwater in his laboratory.’
‘Is
that a long way away?’
‘Immensely,’
said Gumbril.
‘Thank
God for that,’ Mrs Viveash piously and expiringly breathed.