Aldous Huxley’s
ANTIC HAY
___________
My
men like satyrs grazing on the lawns
Shall
with their goat-feet dance the Antic Hay
MARLOWE
____________________
CHAPTER I
GUMBRIL,
Theodore Gumbril Junior, B.A. Oxon., sat in his oaken stall on the north side
of the School Chapel and wondered, as he listened through the uneasy silence of
half a thousand schoolboys to the First Lesson, pondered, as he looked up at
the vast window opposite, all blue and jaundiced and bloody with
nineteenth-century glass, speculated in his rapid and rambling way about the
existence and the nature of God.
Standing in front of the spread brass eagle and fortified in
his convictions by the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy (for this first Sunday of
term was the Fifth after Easter), the Reverend Pelvey could speak of these
things with an enviable certainty.
‘Hear, O Israel,’ he was booming out over the top of the portentous
Book: ‘the Lord our God is one Lord.’
One Lord; My Pelvey knew; he had studied theology. But if theology and theosophy, then why not
theography and theometry, why not theognomy, theotrophy, theotomy,
theogamy? Why not theophysics and
theo-chemistry? Why not that ingenious
toy, the theotrope or wheel of gods? Why
not a monumental theodrome?
In the great window opposite, young David stood like a cock, crowing
on the dunghill of a tumbled giant. From
the middle of Goliath’s forehead there issued, like a narwhal’s budding horn, a
curious excrescence. Was it the embedded
pebble? Or perhaps the giant’s married
life?
‘ … with all thine heart,’ declaimed the Reverend Pelvey, ‘and
with all thy soul, and with all thy might.’
No, but seriously, Gumbril reminded himself, the problem was
very troublesome indeed. God as a sense
of warmth about the heart, God as exultation, God as tears in the eyes, God as
a rush of power or thought – that was all right. But God as truth, God as 2+2=4 – that wasn’t
so clearly all right. Was there any
chance of their being the same? Were
there bridges to join the two worlds?
And could it be that the Reverend Pelvey, M.A., foghorning away from
behind the imperial bird, could it be that he had an answer and a clue? That was hardly believable. Particularly if one knew Mr Pelvey
personally. And Gumbril did.
‘And these words which I command thee this day,’ retorted Mr
Pelvey, ‘shall be in thine heart.’
Or in the heart, or in the head? Reply, Mr Pelvey, reply. Gumbril jumped between the horns of the
dilemma and voted for other organs.
‘And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and
shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by
the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.’
Diligently unto thy children…. Gumbril remembered his own
childhood; they had not been very diligently taught to him. ‘Beetles, black beetles’ – his father had a
really passionate feeling about the clergy.
Mumbo-jumbery was another of his favourite words. An atheist and an anti-clerical of the strict
old school he was. Not that, in any
case, he gave himself much time to think about these things; he was too busy
being an unsuccessful architect. As for
Gumbril’s mother, her diligence had not been dogmatic. She had just been diligently good, that was
all. Good; good? It was a word people only used nowadays with
a kind of deprecating humorousness.
Good. Beyond good and evil? We are all that nowadays. Or merely below them, like earwigs? I glory in the name of earwig. Gumbril made a mental gesture and inwardly
declaimed. But good in any case, there
was no getting out of that, good she had been.
Not nice, not merely molto
simpatico – how charmingly and effectively these foreign tags assist one in
calling a spade by some other name! – but good.
You felt the active radiance of her goodness when you were near her….
And that feeling, was that less real and valid than two plus two?
The Reverend Pelvey had nothing to reply. He was reading with a holy gusto of ‘houses
full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou
diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not.’
She had been good and she had died when he was still a boy;
died – but he hadn’t been told that till much later – of creeping and devouring
pain. Malignant disease – oh, caro nome!
‘Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God,’ said Mr Pelvey.
Even when the ulcers are benign; thou shalt fear. He had travelled up from school to see her,
just before he died. He hadn’t known
that she was going to die, but when he entered her room, when he saw he lying
so weakly in the bed, he had suddenly begun to cry, uncontrollably. All the fortitude, the laughter even, had
been hers. And she had spoken to
him. A few words only; but they had
contained all the wisdom he needed to live by.
She had told him what he was, and what he should try to be, and how to
be it. And crying, still crying, he had
promised that he would try.
‘And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes,’ said Mr
Pelvey, ‘for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this
day.’
And had he kept his promise, Gumbril wondered, had he
preserved himself alive?
‘Here endeth the First Lesson.’ Mr Pelvey retreated from the eagle, and the
organ presaged the coming Te Deum.
Gumbril hoisted himself to his feet; the folds of his B.A.
gown billowed nobly about him as he rose.
He sighed and shook his head with the gesture of one who tries to shake
off a fly or an importunate thought.
When the time came for singing, he sang.
On the opposite side of the chapel two boys were grinning and whispering
to one another behind their lifted Prayer Books. Gumbril frowned at them ferociously. The two boys caught his eye and their faces
at once took on an expression of sickly piety; they began to sing with unction. They were two ugly, stupid-looking louts, who
ought to have been apprenticed years ago to some useful trade. Instead of which they were wasting their own
and their teacher’s and their more intelligent comrades’ time in trying, quite
vainly, to acquire an elegant literary education. The minds of dogs, Gumbril reflected, do not
benefit by being treated as though they were the minds of men.
‘O Lord, have mercy upon us: have mercy upon us.’
Gumbril shrugged his shoulders and looked round the chapel at
the faces of the boys. Lord, indeed,
have mercy upon us! He was disturbed to
find the sentiment echoed on a somewhat different note in the Second Lesson,
which was drawn from the twenty-third chapter of St Luke. ‘Father, forgive them,’ said Mr Pelvey in his
unvaryingly juicy voice; ‘for they know not what they do.’ Ah, but suppose one did know what one was
doing? suppose one knew only too well?
And of course one always did know.
One was not a fool.
But this was all nonsense, all nonsense. One must think of something better than
this. What a comfort it would be, for
example, if one could bring air cushions into chapel! These polished oaken stalls were devilishly
hard; they were meant for stout and lusty pedagogues, not for bony starvelings
like himself. An air cushion, a
delicious pneu.
‘Here endeth,’ boomed Mr Pelvey, closing his book on the back
of the German eagle.
As if by magic, Dr Jolly was ready at the organ with the Benedictus. It was positively a relief to stand again;
this oak was adamantine. But air
cushions, alas, would be too bad an example for the boys. Hardy young Spartans! it was an essential
part of their education that they should listen to the word of revelation
without pneumatic easement. No, air
cushions wouldn’t do. The real remedy,
it suddenly flashed across his mind, would be trousers with pneumatic seats. For all occasions; not merely for
church-going.
The organ blew a thin Puritan-preacher’s note through one of
its hundred nostrils. ‘I believe …’ With
a noise like the breaking of a wave, five hundred turned towards the East. The view of David and Goliath was exchanged
for a Crucifixion in the grand manner of eighteen hundred and sixty. ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what
they do.’ No, no, Gumbril preferred to
look at the grooved stonework rushing smoothly up on either side of the great
east window towards the vaulted roof; preferred to reflect, like the dutiful
son of an architect he was, that Perpendicular at its best – and its best is
its largest – is the finest sort of English Gothic. At its worst and smallest, as in most of the
colleges of
For prayer, Gumbril reflected, there would be Dunlop
knees. Still, in the days when he had
made a habit of praying, they hadn’t been necessary. ‘Our Father …’ The words were the same as they
were in the old days; but Mr Pelvey’s method of reciting them made them sound
rather different. Her dresses, when he
had leaned his forehead against her knee to say those words – those words, good
Lord! that Mr Pelvey was oboeing out of existence – were always black in the
evenings, and of silk, and smelt of orris root.
And when she was dying, she had said to him: ‘Remember the Parable of
the Sower, and the seeds that fell in shallow ground.’ No, no.
Amen, decidedly. ‘O Lord, show
thy mercy upon us,’ chanted oboe Pelvey, and Gumbril trombone responded,
profoundly and grotesquely: ‘And grant us thy salvation.’ No, the knees were obviously less important,
except for people like revivalists and housemaids, than the seat. Sedentary are commoner than genuflectory
professions. One would introduce little
flat rubber bladders between two layers of cloth. At the upper end, hidden when one wore a
coat, would be a tube with a valve: like a hollow tail. Blow it up -
and there would be perfect comfort even for the boniest, even on
rock. How did the Greeks stand marble
benches in their theatres?
The moment had now come for the Hymn. This being the first Sunday of the Summer
term, they sang that special hymn, written by the Headmaster, with music by Dr
Jolly, on purpose to be sung on the first Sundays of terms. The organ quietly sketched out the tune. Simple it was, uplifting and manly.
One, two, three, four; one, two three – 4.
One, two-and-three-and-four-and; One, two THREE – 4.
ONE – 2, THREE – 4; ONE – 2 – 3 – 4,
and-One – 2, THREE – 4; ONE – 2 – 3 – 4.
One, two-and-three, four; One, two THREE – 4.
Five hundred flawed adolescent voices took it up. For good example’s sake, Gumbril opened and
closed his mouth; noiselessly, however.
It was only at the third verse that he gave rein to his uncertain baritone. He particularly liked the third verse; it
marked, in his opinion, the Headmaster’s highest poetical achievement.
(f) For
slack hands and (dim.) idle minds
(mf) Mischief
still the Tempter finds.
(ff) Keep
him captive in his lair.
At this point Dr Jolly enriched his tune
with a thick accompaniment in the lower registers, artfully designed to
symbolize the depth, the gloom and general repulsiveness of the Tempter’s home.
(ff) Keep
him captive in his lair.
(f) Work
will bind him. (dim.) Work is (pp) prayer.
Work, thought Gumbril, work.
Lord, how passionately he disliked work!
Let
Gumbril sat down again.
It might be convenient, he thought, to have the tail so long that one
could blow up one’s trousers while one actually had them on. In which case, it would have to be coiled
round the waist like a belt; or looped up, perhaps, and fastened to a clip on
one’s braces.
‘The nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, part of
the thirty-fourth verse.’ The Headmaster’s
loud, harsh voice broke violently out from the pulpit. ‘All with one voice about the space of two
hours cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’
Gumbril composed himself as comfortably as he could on his
oaken seat. It was going to be one of
the Headmaster’s real swingeing sermons.
Great is Diana. And Venus? Ah, these seats, these seats!
Gumbril did not attend evening chapel. He stayed at home in his lodgings to correct
the sixty-three Holiday Task Papers which had fallen to his share. They lay, thick piles of them, on the floor
beside his chair: sixty-three answers to ten questions about the Italian
Risorgimento. The Risorgimento, of all
subjects! It has been one of the
Headmaster’s caprices. He had called a
special masters’ meeting at the end of last term to tell them all about the
Risorgimento. It was his latest
discovery.
‘The Risorgimento, gentlemen, is the most important event in
modern European history.’ And he had
banged the table; he had looked defiantly round the room in search of
contradictors.
But nobody had contradicted him. Nobody ever did; they all knew better. For the Headmaster was as fierce as he was
capricious. He was forever discovering
something new. Two terms ago it had been
singeing; after the haircut and before the shampoo, there must be singeing.
‘The hair, gentlemen, is a tube. If you cut it and leave the end unsealed, the
water will get in and rot the tube.
Hence the importance of singeing, gentlemen. Singeing seals the tube. I shall address the boys about it after
chapel tomorrow morning; and I trust that all housemasters’ – and he had glared
around him from under his savage eyebrows – will see that their boys get
themselves regularly singed after cutting.’
For weeks afterwards every boy trailed behind him a faint and
nauseating whiff of burning, as though he were fresh from hell. And now it was the Risorgimento. One of these days, Gumbril reflected, it
would be birth control, or the decimal system, or rational dress.
He picked up the nearest batch of papers. The printed questions were pinned to the
topmost of them.
‘Give a brief account of the character and career of Pope Pius
IX, with dates wherever possible.’
Gumbril leaned back in his chair and thought of his own
character, with dates. 1896: the first
serious and conscious and deliberate lie.
Did you break the vase, Theodore?
No, mother. It lay on his
conscience for nearly a month, eating deeper and deeper. Then he had confessed the truth. Or rather he had not confessed; that was too
difficult. He led the conversation, very
subtly, as he thought, round through the non-malleability of glass, through
breakages in general, to this particular broken vase; he practically forced his
mother to repeat her question. And then,
with a burst of tears, he had answered, yes.
It had always been difficult to say things directly, point-blank. His mother had told him, when she was dying….
No, no; not that.
In 1898 or 1899 – oh, these dates! – he had made a pact with
his little cousin, Molly, that she should let him see her with no clothes on,
if he would do the same by her. She had
fulfilled her part of the bargain; but he, overwhelmed at the last moment by a
passion of modesty, had broken his promise.
Then, when he was about twelve and still at his preparatory
school, in 1902 or 1903 he had done badly in his exams, on purpose; he had been
frightened of Sadler, who was in the same form, and wanted to get the
prize. Sadler was stronger than he was,
and had a genius for persecution. He had
done so badly that his mother was unhappy; and it was impossible for him to
explain.
In 1906 he had fallen in love for the first time – ah, much
more violently than ever since - with a boy of his own age. Platonic it had been and profound. He had done badly that term, too; not on
purpose, but because he had spent so much time helping young Vickers with his
work. Vickers was really very stupid. The next term he had ‘come out’ – Staphylococcus pyogenes is a lover of
growing adolescence – with spots and boils all over his face and neck. Gumbril’s affection ceased as suddenly as it
had begun. He finished that term, he
remembered, with a second prize.
But it was time to be thinking seriously of Pio Nono. With a sigh of disgusted weariness, Gumbril
looked at his papers. What had Falarope
Major to say of the Pontiff? ‘Pius IX was called Ferretti. He was a liberal before he was a Pope. A kindly man of less than average
intelligence, he thought that all difficulties could be settled by a little
goodwill, a few reforms and a political amnesty. He wrote several encyclicals and a
syllabus.’ Gumbril admired the phrase
about less than average intelligence; Falarope Major should have at least one
mark for having learnt it so well by heart.
He turned to the next paper.
Higgs was of opinion that ‘Pius the Ninth was a good but stupid man, who
thought he could settle the Risorgimento with a few reforms and a political
armistice.’ Beddoes was severer. ‘Pius IX was a bad man, who said that he was
infallible, which showed he had a less than average intelligence.’ Sopwith Minor shared the general opinion
about Pio’s intelligence, and displayed a great familiarity with the wrong
dates. Clegg-Weller was voluminous and
informative. ‘Pius IX was not so clever
as his prime minister, Cardinal Antonelli.
When he came to the tiara he was a liberal, and Metternich said he had
never reckoned on a liberal pope. He then
became a conservative. He was kindly,
but not intelligence, and he thought Garibaldi and Cavour would be content with
a few reforms and an amnesty.’ At the
top of Garstang’s paper was written: ‘I have had measles all he holidays, so
have been unable to read more than the first thirty pages of the book. Pope Pius IX does not come into these pages,
of the contents of which I will proceed to give in the follow précis.’ And the précis duly followed. Gumbril would have liked to give him full
marks. But the business-like answer of
Appleyard called him back to a better sense of his duty. ‘Pius IX became Pope in 1846 and died in
1878. He was a kindly man, but his
intelligence was below the …’
Gumbril laid the paper down and shut his eyes. No, this was really impossible. Definitely, it couldn’t go on, it could not
go on. There were thirteen weeks in the
summer term, there would be thirteen in the autumn and eleven or twelve in the
spring; and then another summer of thirteen, and so it would go on for
ever. For ever. It wouldn’t do. He would go away and live uncomfortably on his
three hundred. Or, no, he would go away
and he would make money – that was more like it – money on a large scale,
easily; he would be free and he would live.
For the first time, he would live.
Behind his closed eyes, he saw himself living.
Over the plushy floors of some vast and ignoble Ritz slowly he
walked, at ease, with confidence: over the plushy floors and there, at the end
of a long vista, there was Myra Viveash, waiting, this time, for him; coming
forward impatiently to meet him, his abject lover now, not the cool, free,
laughing mistress who had lent herself contemptuously once to his pathetic and
silent importunity and then, after a day, withdrawn the gift again. Over the plushy floors to dine. Not that he was in love with
He sat in his own house.
The Chinese statues looked out from the niches; the Maillols
passionately meditated, slept, and were more than alive. The Goyas hung on the walls, there was a
Boucher in the bathroom; and when he entered with his guests, what a Piazzetta
exploded above the dining-room mantelpiece!
Over the ancient wine they talked together, and he knew everything they
knew and more; he gave, he inspired, it was the others who assimilated and were
enriched. After dinner there were Mozart
quartets; he opened his portfolios and showed his Daumiers, his Tiepolos, his
Canaletto sketches, his drawings by Picasso and Lewis, and the purity of his
naked Ingres. And later, talking of
Odalisques, there were orgies without fatigue or disgust, and the women were
pictures and lust in action, art.
When he spoke to women – how easily and insolently he spoke
now! - they listened and laughed and
looked at him sideways and dropped their eyelids over the admission, the
invitation, of their glance. With
Phyllis once he had sat, for how long? in a warm and moonless darkness, saying
nothing, risking no gesture. And in the
end they had parted, reluctantly and still in silence. Phyllis was now with him once again in the
summer night; but this time he spoke, now softly, now in the angry breathless
whisper of desire, he reached out and took her, and she was naked in his
arms. All chance encounters, all plotted
opportunities, recurred; he knew, now, how to live, how to take advantage of
them.
Over the empty plains towards
Feeling a little ashamed at having been interrupted in what
was, after all, one of the ignobler and more trivial occupations of his new
life, Gumbril went down to his fatty chop and green peas. It was the first meal to be eaten under the
new dispensation; he ate it, for all that it was unhappily indistinguishable
from the meals of the past, with elation and a certain solemnity, as though he
were partaking of a sacrament. He felt
buoyant with the thought that at last, at last, he was doing something about
life.
What the chop was eaten, he went upstairs and, after filling
two suitcases and a Gladstone bag with the most valued of his possessions,
addressed himself to the task of writing to the Headmaster. He might have gone away, of course, without
writing. But it would be nobler, more in
keeping, he felt, with his new life, to leave a justification behind – or
rather not a justification, a denouncement.
He picked up his pen and denounced.
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.’
CHAPTER III
‘MISTER GUMBRIL!’ Surprise was mingled with delight. ‘This is indeed a pleasure!’ Delight was now the prevailing emotion
expressed by the voice that advanced, as yet without a visible source, from the
dark recesses of the shop.
‘The pleasure, Mr Bojanus, is mine.’ Gumbril closed the shop door behind him.
A very small man, dressed in a
frock-coat, popped out from a canyon that opened, a mere black crevice, between
two stratified precipices of mid-season suitings, and advancing into the open
space before the door bowed with an old-world grace, revealing a nacreous scalp
thinly mantled with long, damp creepers of brown hair.
‘And to what, may I ask, do I owe the
pleasure, sir?’ Mr Bojanus looked up
archly with a sideways cock of his head that tilted the rigid points of his
waxed moustache. The fingers of his
right hand were thrust into the bosom of his frock-coat and his toes were
turned out in the dancing-master’s First Position. ‘A light spring greatcoat, is it?’ Or a new suit? I notice,’ his eye travelled professionally
up and down Gumbril’s long, thin form, ‘I notice that the garments you are
wearing at present, Mr Gumbril, look – how shall I say? – well, a trifle
negleejay, as the French would put it, a trifle negleejay.’
Gumbril looked down at himself. He resented Mr Bojanus’s negleejay, he was pained
and wounded by the aspersion.
Negleejay? And he had fancied
that he really looked rather elegant and distinguished (but, after all, he
always looked that, even in rags) – no, that he looked positively neat, like Mr
Porteous, positively soldierly in his black jacket and his musical-comedy
trousers and his patent-leather shoes.
And the black felt hat – didn’t that add just the foreign, the Southern
touch which saved the whole composition from banality? He regarded himself, trying to see his
clothes – garments, Mr Bojanus had called them; garments, good Lord! – through
the tailor’s expert eyes. There were
sagging folds about the overloaded pockets, there was a stain on his waistcoat,
the knees of his trousers were baggy and puckered like the bare knees of Hélène
Fourmont in Rubens’s fur-coat portrait at Vienna. Yes, it was all horribly negleejay. He felt depressed; but looking at Mr
Bojanus’s studied and professional correctness, he was a little comforted. That frock-coat, for example. It was like something in a very modern
picture – such a smooth, unwrinkled cylinder about the chest, such a sense of
pure and abstract conic-ness in the sleekly rounded skirts. Nothing could have been less negleejay. He was reassured.
‘I want you,’ he said at last, clearing
his throat importantly, ‘to make me a pair of trousers to a novel specification
of my own. It’s a new idea.’ And he gave a brief description of Gumbril’s
Patent Small-Clothes.
My Bojanus listened with attention.
‘I can make them for you,’ he said, when
the description was finished. ‘I can
make them for you – if you really
wish, Mr Gumbril,’ he added.
‘Thank you,’ said Gumbril.
‘And do you intend, may I ask, Mr
Gumbril, to wear these … these
garments?’
Guiltily, Gumbril denied himself. ‘Only to demonstrate the idea, Mr
Bojanus. I am exploiting the invention
commercially, you see.’
‘Commercially? I see, Mr Gumbril.’
‘Perhaps you would like a share,’
suggested Gumbril.
Mr Bojanus shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t do for my cleeantail, I fear, Mr
Gumbril. You could ‘ardly expect the
Best People to wear such things.’
‘Couldn’t you?’
My Bojanus went on shaking his head. ‘I know them,’ he said, ‘I know the Best
People. Well.’ And he added with an irrelevance that was, perhaps,
only apparent, ‘Between ourselves, Mr Gumbril, I am a great admirer of Lenin …’
‘So am I,’ said Gumbril,
‘theoretically. But then I have so
little to lose to Lenin. I can afford to
admire him. But you, Mr Bojanus, you,
the prosperous bourgeois – oh, purely in the economic sense of the word, Mr
Bojanus …’
Mr Bojanus accepted the explanation with
one of his old-world bows.
‘… you would be among the first to suffer
if an English Lenin were to start his activities here.’
‘There, Mr Gumbril, if I may be allowed
to say so, you are wrong.’ Mr Bojanus
removed his hand from his bosom and employed it to emphasize the points of his
discourse. ‘When the revolution comes,
Mr Gumbril – the great and necessary revolution, as Alderman Beckford called it
– it won’t be the owning of a little money that’ll get a man into trouble. It’ll be his class-habits, Mr Gumbril, his
class-speech, his class-education. It’ll
be Shibboleth all over again, Mr Gumbril; mark my words. The Red Guards will stop people in the street
and ask them to say such words as “towel”.
If the call it “towel”, like you and your friends, Mr Gumbril, why then
…’ Mr Bojanus went through the gestures of pointing a rifle and pulling the
trigger; he clicked his tongue against his teeth to symbolize the report…. ‘That’ll
be the end of them. But if they say
“tèaul”, like the rest of us, Mr Gumbril, it’ll be: “Pass Friend and Long Live
the Proletariat.” Long live Tèaul.’
‘I’m afraid you may be right,’ said
Gumbril.
‘I’m convinced of it,’ said Mr
Bojanus. ‘It’s my clients, Mr Gumbril,
it’s the Best People that the other people resent. It’s their confidence, their ease, it’s the
habit their money and their position give them of ordering people about, it’s
the way they take their place in the world for granted, it’s their prestige,
which the other people would like to deny, but can’t – it’s all that, Mr
Gumbril, that’s so galling.’
Gumbril nodded. He himself had envied his securer friends
their power of ignoring the humanity of those who were not of their class. To do that really well, one must always have
lived in a large house full of clockwork servants; one must never have been
short of money, never at a restaurant ordered the cheaper thing instead of the
more delicious; one must never have regarded a policeman as anything but one’s
paid defender against the lower orders, never for a moment have doubted one’s
divine right to do so, within the accepted limits, exactly what one liked
without a further thought to anything or anyone but oneself and one’s own
enjoyment. Gumbril had been brought up
among these blessed beings; but he was not one of them. Alas? or fortunately? He hardly knew which.
‘And what good do you expect the
revolution to do, Mr Bojanus?’ he asked at last.
Mr Bojanus replaced his hand in his bosom. ‘None whatever, Mr Gumbril,’ he said. ‘None whatever.’
‘But Liberty,’ Gumbril suggested,
‘equality and all that. What about
those, Mr Bojanus?’
Mr Bojanus smiled up at him tolerantly and
kindly, as he might have smiled at someone who had suggested, shall we say,
that evening trousers should be turned up at the bottom. ‘Liberty, Mr Gumbril?’ he said; ‘you don’t
suppose any serious-minded person imagines a revolution is going to bring liberty,
do you?’
‘The people who make the revolution
always seem to ask for liberty.’
‘But do they ever get it, Mr
Gumbril?’ Mr Bojanus cocked his head
playfully and smiled. ‘Look at ‘istory,
Mr Gumbril, look at ‘istory. First it’s
the French Revolution. They ask for
political liberty. And they gets
it. Then comes the Reform Bill, then
Forty-Eight, then all the Franchise Acts and Votes for Women – always more and
more political liberty. And what’s the result, Mr Gumbril? Nothing at all. Who’s freer for political liberty? Not a soul, Mr Gumbril. There was never a greater swindle ‘atched in
the ‘ole of ‘istory. And when you think
‘ow those poor young men like Shelley talked about it – it’s pathetic,’ said Mr
Bojanus, shaking his head, ‘reelly pathetic.
Political liberty’s a swindle because a man doesn’t spend his time being
political. He spends it sleeping,
eating, amusing himself a little and working – mostly working. When they’d got all the political liberty
they wanted – or found they didn’t want – they began to understand this. And so now it’s all for the industrial
revolution, Mr Gumbril. But bless you,
that’s as big a swindle as the other.
How can there ever be liberty under any system? No amount of profit-sharing or
self-government by the workers, no amount of hyjeenic conditions or cocoa
villages or recreation grounds can get rid of the fundamental slavery – the
necessity of working. Liberty? why, it
doesn’t exist! There’s no liberty in
this world; only gilded cages. And then,
Mr Gumbril, even suppose you could somehow get rid of the necessity of working,
suppose a man’s time were all leisure.
Would he be free then? I say
nothing of the natural slavery of eating and sleeping and all that, Mr Gumbril;
I say nothing of that, because that, if I may say so, would be too
‘air-splitting and metaphysical. But
what I do ask you is this,’ and Mr Bojanus wagged his forefinger almost
menacingly at the sleeping partner in his dialogue: ‘would a man with unlimited
leisure be free, Mr Gumbril? I say he
would not. Not unless he ‘appened to be
a man like you or me, Mr Gumbril, a man of sense, a man of independent
judgement. An ordinary man would not be
free. Because he wouldn’t know how to
occupy his leisure except in some way that would be forced on ‘im by other
people. People don’t know ‘ow to
entertain themselves now; they leave it to other people to do it for them. They swallow what’s given them. They ‘ave to swallow it, whether they like it
or not. Cinemas, newspapers, magazines,
gramophones, football matches, wireless, telephones – take them or leave them,
if you want to amuse yourself. The
ordinary man can’t leave them. He takes;
and what’s that but slavery? And so you
see, Mr Gumbril,’ Mr Bojanus smiled with a kind of roguish triumph, ‘you see
that even in the purely ‘ypothetical case; at any rate so far as concerns the
sort of people who want a revolution.
And as for the sort of people who do enjoy leisure, even now – why I
think, Mr Gumbril, you and I know enough about the Best People to know that
freedom, except possibly sexual freedom, is not their strongest point. And sexual freedom – what’s that?’ Mr Bojanus
dramatically inquired. ‘You and I, Mr Gumbril,’
he answered confidentially, ‘we know.
It’s an ‘orrible, ‘ideous slavery.
That’s what it is. Or am I wrong,
Mr Gumbril?’
‘Quite right, quite right, Mr Bojanus,’
Gumbril hastened to reply.
‘From all of which,’ continued Mr
Bojanus, ‘it follows that, except for a few, a very few people like you and me,
Mr Gumbril, there’s no such thing as liberty.
It’s an ‘oax, Mr Gumbril. An
‘orrible plant. And if I may be allowed
to say so,’ Mr Bojanus lowered his voice, but still spoke with emphasis, ‘a
bloodly swindle.’
‘But in that case, Mr Bojanus, why are
you so anxious to have a revolution?’ Gumbril inquired.
Thoughtfully, Mr Bojanus twisted to a
finer point his waxed moustaches.
‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘it would be a nice change. I was always one for change and a little
excitement. And then there’s the
scientific interest. You never quite now
‘ow an experiment will turn out, do you, Mr Gumbril? I remember when I was a boy, my old dad – a
great gardener he was, a regular floriculturist, Mr Gumbril – he tried the
experiment of grafting a sprig of Gloire de Dijon on to a blackcurrant
bush. And, would you believe it? the
roses came out black, coal black, Mr Gumbril.
Nobody would ever have guessed that if the thing had never been tried. And that’s what I say about the
revolution. You don’t know what’ll come
of it till you try. Black roses, blue
roses – ‘oo knows, Mr Gumbril, ‘oo knows?’
‘Who indeed?’ Gumbril looked at his watch. ‘About those trousers …’ he added.
‘Those garments,’ corrected Mr
Bojanus. ‘Ah, yes. Should we say next Tuesday?’
‘Let us say next Tuesday.’ Gumbril opened the shop door. ‘Good morning, Mr Bojanus.’
Mr Bojanus bowed him out, as though he
had been a prince of the blood.
The sun was shining and at the end of the
street between the houses the sky was blue.
Gauzily the distances faded to a soft, rich indistinctness; there were
veils of golden muslin thickening down the length of every vista. On the trees in the
From the world of tailors Gumbril passed
into that of the artificial-pearl merchants, and with a still keener
appreciation of the amorous qualities of this clear spring day, he began a
leisured march along the perfumed pavements of
‘Forthcoming Exhibition of Works by
Casimir Lypiatt.’ The announcement
caught his eye. And so poor old Lypiatt
was on the warpath again, he reflected, as he pushed open the doors of the
Albemarle Galleries. Poor old
Lypiatt! Dear old Lypiatt, even. He liked Lypiatt. Though he had his defects. It would be fun to see him again.
Gumbril found himself in the midst of a
dismal collection of etchings. He passed
them in review, wondering why it was that, in these hard days when no painter
can sell a picture, almost any dull fool who can scratch a conventional
etcher’s view of two boats, a suggested cloud and the flat sea should be able
to get rid of his prints by the dozen and at guineas apiece. He was interrupted in his speculations by the
approach of the assistant in charge of the gallery. He came up shyly and uncomfortably, but with
the conscientious determination of one ambitious to do his duty and make
good. He was a very young man with pale
hair, to which heavy oiling had given a curious greyish colour, and a face of
such childish contour and so inbred that he looked like a little boy playing at
grown-ups. He had only been at his job a
few weeks and he found it very difficult.
‘This,’ he remarked, with a little
introductory cough, pointing to one view of the two boats and the flat sea, ‘is
an earlier state than this.’ And he
pointed to another view, where the boats were still two and the sea seemed just
as flat – though possibly, on a closer inspection, it might really have been
flatter.
‘Indeed,’ said Gumbril.
The assistant was rather pained by his
coldness. He brushed but constrained
himself to go on. ‘Some excellent
judges,’ he said, ‘prefer the earlier state, though it is less highly
finished.’
‘Ah?’
‘Beautiful atmosphere, isn’t it?’ The assistant put his head on one side and
pursed his childish lips appreciatively.
Gumbril nodded.
With desperation, the assistant indicated
the shadowed rump of one of the boats.
‘A wonderful feeling in this passage,’ he said, redder than ever.
‘Very intense,’ said Gumbril.
The assistant smiled at him
gratefully. ‘That’s the word,’ he said,
delighted. ‘Intense. That’s it.
Very intense.’ He repeated the
word several times, as though to make sure of remembering it for use when the
occasion next presented itself. He was
determined to make good.
‘I see Mr Lypiatt is to have a show here
soon,’ remarked Gumbril, who had had enough of the boats.
‘He is making the final arrangements with
Mr Albemarle at this very moment,’ said the assistant triumphantly, with the
air of one who produces, at the dramatic and critical moment, a rabbit out of
the empty hat.
‘You don’t say so?’ Gumbril was duly impressed. ‘Then I’ll wait till he comes out,’ he said,
and sat down with his back to the boats.
The assistant returned to his desk and
picked up the gold-belted fountain pen which his aunt had given him when he
first went into business, last Christmas.
‘Very intense,’ he wrote in capitals on a half-sheet of notepaper. ‘The feeling in this passage is very
intense.’ He studied the paper for a few
moments, then folded it up carefully and put it away in his waistcoat
pocket. ‘Always make a note of it.’ That was one of the business mottoes he had
himself written out so laboriously in Indian ink and Old English
lettering. It hung over his bed between
‘The Lord is my Shepherd,’ which his mother had given him, and a quotation from
Dr Frank Crane, ‘A smiling face sells more goods than a clever tongue’. Still, a clever tongue, the young assistant
had often reflected, was a very useful thing, especially in this job. He wondered whether one could say that the
composition of a picture was very intense.
Mr Albemarle was very keen on the composition, he noticed. But perhaps it was better to stick to plain
‘fine’, which was a little commonplace, perhaps, but very safe. He would ask Mr Albemarle about it. And then there was all that stuff about
plastic values and pure plasticity. He
sighed. It was all very difficult. A chap might be as willing and eager to make
good as he liked; but when it came to this about atmosphere and intense
passages and plasticity – well, really, what could a chap do? Make a note of it. It was the only thing.
In Mr Albemarle’s private room Casimir
Lypiatt thumped the table. ‘Size, Mr
Albemarle,’ he was saying, ‘size and vehemence and spiritual significance –
that’s what the old fellows had, and we haven’t….’ He gesticulated as he talked, his face worked
and his green eyes, set in their dark, charred orbits, were full of a troubled
light. The forehead was precipitous, the
nose long and sharp; in the bony and almost fleshless face, the lips of the
wide mouth were surprisingly full.
‘Precisely, precisely,’ said Mr Albemarle
in his juicy voice. He was a round,
smooth little man with a head like a egg; he spoke, he moved with a certain
pomp, a butlerish gravity, that were evidently meant to be ducal.
‘That’s what I’ve set myself to
recapture,’ Lypiatt went on: ‘the size, the masterfulness of the masters.’ He felt a warmth running through him as he
spoke, flushing his cheeks, pulsing hotly behind the eyes, as though he had
drunk a draught of some heartening red wine.
His own words elated him, and drunkenly gesticulating, he was as though
drunken. The greatness of the masters –
he felt it in him. He knew his own
power, he knew, he knew. He could do all
that they had done. Nothing was beyond
his strength.
Egg-headed
‘It’s been my mission,’ he shouted, ‘all
these years.’
All these years…. Time had worn the hair
from his temples; the high, steep forehead seemed higher than it really
was. He was forty now; the turbulent
young Lypiatt who had once declared that no man could do anything worth doing
after he was thirty, was forty now. But
in these fiery moments he could forget the years, he could forget the
disappointments, the unsold pictures, the bad reviews. ‘My mission,’ he repeated; ‘and by God! I
feel I know I can carry it through.’
Warmly the blood pulsed behind his eyes.
‘Quite,’ said Mr Albemarle, nodding the
egg. ‘Quite.’
‘And how small the scale is nowadays!’
Lypiatt went on rhapsodically. ‘How
trivial the conception, how limited the scope!
You see no painter-sculptor-poets, like Michelangelo; no
scientist-artists, like Leonardo; no mathematician-courtiers, like Boscovitch;
no impresario-musicians, like Handel; no geniuses of all trades, like
Wren. I have set myself against this
abject specialization of ours. I stand
alone, opposing it with my example.’
Lypiatt raised his hand. Like the
statue of
‘Nevertheless,’ began Mr Albemarle.
‘Painter, poet, musician,’ cried Lypiatt. ‘I am all three. I …’
‘… there is a danger of – how shall I put
it – dissipating one’s energies,’ Mr Albemarle went on with determination. Discreetly, he looked at his watch. The conversation, he thought, seemed to be
prolonging itself unnecessarily.
‘There is a greater danger in letting
them stagnate and atrophy,’ Lypiatt retorted.
‘Let me give you my experience.
Vehemently, he gave it.
Out in the gallery, among the boats, the
views of the
A door suddenly opened and a loud,
unsteady voice, now deep and harsh, now breaking to shrillness, exploded into
the gallery.
‘… like a Veronese,’ it was saying;
‘enormous, vehement, a great swirling composition’ (‘swirling composition’ –
mentally, the young assistant made a note of that), ‘but much more serious, of
course, much more spiritually significant, much more –‘
‘Lypiatt!’ Gumbril had risen from his chair, had turned,
had advanced, holding out his hand.
‘Why, it’s Gumbril. Good Lord!’ and Lypiatt seized the proffered
hand with an excruciating cordiality. He
seemed to be in exuberantly good spirits. ‘We’re settling about my show,’ Mr Albemarle
and I,’ he explained. ‘You know Gumbril,
Mr Albemarle?’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Mr
Albemarle. ‘Our friend, My Lypiatt,’ he
added richly, ‘has the true artistic temp …’
‘It’s going to be magnificent.’ Lypiatt could not wait till Mr Albemarle had
finished speaking. He gave Gumbril a
heroic blow on the shoulder.
‘… artistic temperament, as I was
saying,’ pursued Mr Albemarle. ‘He is
altogether too impatient and enthusiastic for us poor people …’ a ducal smile
of condescension accompanied this graceful act of self-abasement … ‘who move in
the prosaic, practical, workaday world.’
Lypiatt laughed, a loud, discordant
peal. He didn’t seem to mind being
accused of having an artistic temperament; he seemed, indeed, to enjoy it, if
anything. ‘Fire and water,’ he said
aphoristically, ‘brought together, beget steam.
Mr Albemarle and I go driving along like a steam engine. Psh, psh!’
He worked his arms like a pair of alternate pistons. He laughed; but Mr Albemarle only coldly and
courteously smiled. ‘I was just telling
Mr Albemarle about the great Cruxifixion I’ve just been doing. It’s as big and headlong as a Veronese, but
much more serious, more….’
Behind them the little assistant was
expounding to a new visitor the beauties of the etchings. ‘Very intense,’ he was saying, ‘the feeling
in this passage.’ The shadow, indeed,
clung with an insistent affection round the stern of the boat. ‘And what a fine, what a …’ he hesitated for
an instant, and under his pale, oiled hair his face became suddenly very red …
‘what a swirling composition.’ He looked
anxiously at the visitor. The remark had
been received without comment. He felt
immensely relieved.
They left the galleries together. Lypiatt set the pace, striding along at a
great rate and with a magnificent brutality through the elegant and leisured
crowd, gesticulating and loudly talking as he went. He carried his hat in his hand; his tie was
brilliantly orange. People turned to
look at him as he passed and he liked it.
He had, indeed, a remarkable face – a face that ought by rights to have
belonged to a man of genius. Lypiatt was
aware of it. The man of genius, he liked
to say, bears upon his brow a kind of mark of Cain, by which men recognize him
at once – ‘and, having recognized, generally stone him,’ he would add with that
peculiar laugh he always uttered whenever he said anything rather bitter or
cynical; a laugh that was meant to show that the bitterness, the cynicism,
justifiable as events might have made them, were really only a mask, and that
beneath it the artist was still serenely and tragically smiling. Lypiatt thought a great deal about the ideal
artist. That titanic abstraction stalked
within his own skin. He was it – a
little too consciously, perhaps.
‘This time,’ he kept repeating, ‘they’ll
be bowled over. This time…. It’s going
to be terrific.’ And with the blood
beating behind his eyes, with the exultant consciousness and certainty of power
growing and growing in him with every word he spoke, Lypiatt began to describe
the pictures that would be at his show; he talked about the preface he was
writing to the catalogue, the poems that would be printed in it by way of
literary complement to the pictures. He
talked, he talked.
Gumbril listened, not very
attentively. He was wondering how anyone
could talk so loud, could boast so extravagantly. It was as though the man had to shout in
order to convince himself of his own existence.
Poor Lypiatt; after all these years, Gumbril supposed, he must have some
doubts about it. Ah, but this time, this
time he was going to bowl them all over.
‘You’re pleased, then, with what you’ve
done recently,’ he said at the end of one of Lypiatt’s long tirades.
‘Pleased?’ exclaimed Lypiatt; ‘I should think
I was.’
Gumbril might have reminded him that he
had been as well pleased in the past and that ‘they’ had by no means been
bowled over. He preferred, however, to
say nothing. Lypiatt went on about the
size and universality of the old masters.
He himself, it was tacitly understood, was one of them.
They parted near the bottom of the
Tottenham Court Road, Lypiatt to go northward to his studio off
‘Goodbye,’ said Gumbril, raising his hand
to the salute. ‘And I’ll beat up some
people for dinner on Friday.’ (For they had agreed to meet again.) He turned
away, thinking that he had spoken the last words; but he was mistaken.
‘Oh, by the way,’ said Lypiatt, who had
also turned to go, but who now came stepping quickly after his companion. ‘Can you, by any chance, lend me five
pounds? Only till after the exhibition,
you know. I’m a bit short.’
Poor old Lypiatt! But it was with reluctance that Gumbril
parted from his Treasury notes.
CHAPTER IV
LYPIATT
had a habit, which some of his friends found rather trying – and not only
friends, for Lypiatt was ready to let the merest acquaintance, the most
absolute strangers, even, into the secrets of his inspiration – a habit of
reciting at every possible opportunity his own verses. He would declaim in a voice loud and
tremulous, with an emotion that never seemed to vary with the varying
subject-matter of his poems, for whole quarters of an hour at a stretch; would
go on declaiming till his auditors were overwhelmed with such a confusion of
embarrassment and shame, that the blood rushed to their cheeks and they dared
not meet one another’s eyes.
He was declaiming now; not merely across
the dinner-table to his own friends, but to the whole restaurant. For at the first reverberating lines of his
latest, ‘The Conquistador’, there had been a startled turning of heads, a
craning of necks from every corner of the room.
The people who came to this
‘Look down on
The Conquistador, Lypiatt had made it
clear, was the Artist, and the Vale of Mexico on which he looked down, the
towered cities of Tlacopan and Chalco, of Tenochtitlan and Iztapalapan
symbolized – well, it was difficult to say precisely what. The universe, perhaps?
‘Look down,’ cried Lypiatt, with a
quivering voice.
‘Look down, Conuistador!
There on the valley’s broad green floor,
There lies the lake; the jewelled cities
gleam;
Chalco and Tlacopan
Await the coming
Look down on
Land of your golden dream.’
‘Not “dream”, said Gumbril, putting down
the glass from which he had been profoundly drinking. ‘You can’t possibly say “dream”, you know.’
‘Why do you interrupt me?’ Lypiatt turned
on him angrily. His wide mouth twitched
at the corners, his whole long face worked with excitement. ‘Why don’t you let me finish?’ He allowed his hand, which had hung awkwardly
in the air above him, suspended, as it were, at the top of a gesture, to sink
slowly to the table. ‘Imbecile!’ he
said, and once more picked up his knife and fork.
‘But really,’ Gumbril insisted, ‘you
can’t say “dream”. Can you now,
seriously?’ He had drunk the best part
of a bottle of
‘And why not?’ Lypiatt asked.
‘Oh, because one simply can’t.’ Gumbril leaned back in his chair, smiled and
caressed his drooping blond moustache.
‘Not in this year of grace,
‘But why?’ Lypiatt repeated, with
exasperation.
‘Because it’s altogether too late in the day,’ declared precious
Mr Mercaptan, rushing up to his emphasis with flutes and roaring, like a true
Conquistador, to fall back, however, at the end of the sentence rather
ignominiously into a breathless confusion.
He was a sleek, comfortable young man with smooth brown hair parted in
the centre and conducted in a pair of flowing curves across the temples, to be
looped in damp curls behind his ears.
His face ought to have been rather more exquisite, rather more refinedly
dix-huitième than it actually
was. It had a rather gross, snouty look,
which was sadly out of harmony with Mr Mercaptan’s inimitably graceful
style. For Mr Mercaptan had a style and
used it, delightfully, in his middle articles for the literary weeklies. His most precious work, however, was that
little volume of essays, prose poems, vignettes and paradoxes, in which he had
so brilliantly illustrated his favourite theme – the pettiness, the simian limitations,
the insignificance and the absurd pretentiousness of Homo soi-disant Sapiens. Those who met Mr Mercaptan personally often
came away with the feeling that perhaps, after all, he was right in judging so
severely of humanity.
‘Too
late in the day,’ he repeated. ‘Times
have changed. Sunt lacrymae rerum, nos et mutamur in illis.’ He laughed his own applause.
‘Quot
hominess, tot disputandum est,’ said Gumbril, taking another sip of his
Beaune Supérieure. At the moment, he was
all for Mercaptan.
‘But why
is it too late?’ Lypiatt insisted.
Mr Mercaptan made a delicate
gesture. ‘Ça se sent, mon cher ami,’ he said, ‘ça ne s’explique pas.’
Satan, it is said, carries hell in his heart; so it was with Mr
Mercaptan – wherever he was it was
‘After you’ve accepted the war, swallowed
the Russian famine, said Gumbril.
‘Dreams!’
‘They belonged to the Rostand epoch,’ said Mr Mercaptan, with
a little titter. ‘Le Rève – ah!’
Lypiatt dropped his knife and fork with a
clatter and leaned forward, eager for battle.
‘Now I have you,’ he said, ‘now I have you on the hip. You’ve given yourselves away. You’ve given away the secret of your
spiritual poverty, your weakness and pettiness and impotence….’
‘Impotence? You malign me, sir,’ said Gumbril.
Shearwater ponderously stirred. He had been silent all the time, sitting with
hunched shoulders, his elbows on the table, his big round head bent forward,
absorbed, apparently, in the slow meticulous crumbling of a piece of
bread. Sometimes he put a piece of crust
in his mouth and under the bushy black moustache his jaw moved slowly,
ruminatively, with a sideways motion, like a cow’s. He nudged Gumbril with his elbow. ‘Ass,’ he said, ‘be quiet.’
Lypiatt went on torrentially. ‘You’re afraid of ideals, that’s what it
is. You daren’t admit to having
dreams. Oh, I call them dreams,’ he
added parenthetically. ‘I don’t mind
being thought a fool and old-fashioned.
The word’s shorter and more English.
Besides, it rhymes with gleams. Ha,
ha!’ And Lypiatt laughed his loud
Titan’s laugh, the laugh of cynicism which seems to belie, but which, for those
who have understanding, reveals the high, positive spirit within. ‘Ideals – they’re not sufficiently genteel
for you civilized young men. You’ve
quite outgrown that sort of thing. No
dream, no religion, no morality.’
‘I glory in the name of earwig,’ said
Gumbril. He was pleased with that little
invention. It was felicitous; it was
well chosen. ‘One’s an earwig in sheer
self-protection,’ he explained.
But Mr Mercaptan refused to accept the
name of earwig at any price. ‘What there is to be ashamed of in being
civilized, I really don’t know,’ he
said, in a voice that was now the bull’s, now the piping robin’s. ‘No, if I glory in anything, it’s in my
little rococo boudoir, and the conversations across the polished mahogany, and
the delicate, lascivious, witty
little flirtations on ample sofas inhabited by the soul of Crebillon Fils. We needn’t all be Russians, I hope.
These revolting Dostoievskys.’ Mr
Mercaptan spoke with a profound feeling.
‘Nor all Utopians. Homo au naturel …’ Mr Mercaptan applied his
thumb and forefinger to his, alas! too snout-like nose, ‘ça pue And as for Homo à la
H.G. Wells – ça ne pue pas assez. What I glory in is the civilized, middle way
between stink and asepsis. Give me a
little musk, a little intoxicating feminine exhalation, the bouquet of old wine
and strawberries, a lavender bag under every pillow and potpourri in the
corners of the drawing-room. Readable
books, amusing conversation, civilized women, graceful art and dry vintage,
music, with a quiet life and reasonable comfort – that’s all I ask for.’
‘Talking about comfort,’ Gumbril put in,
before Lypiatt had time to fling his answering thunders, ‘I must tell you about
my new invention. Pneumatic trousers,’
he explained. ‘Blow them up. Perfect comfort. You see the idea? You’re a sedentary man, Mercaptan. Let me put you down for a couple of pairs.’
Mr Mercaptan shook his head. ‘Too Wellsian,’ he said. ‘Too horribly Utopian. They’d be ludicrously out of place in my
boudoir. And besides, my sofa is well
enough sprung already, thank you.’
‘But what about Tolstoy?’ shouted
Lypiatt, letting out his impatience in a violent blast.
Mr Mercaptan waved his hand. ‘Russian,’ he said, ‘Russian.’
‘And Michelangelo?’
‘Alberti,’ said Gumbril, very seriously,
giving them all a piece of his father’s mind – ‘Alberti was much the better
architect, I assure you.’
‘And pretentiousness for pretentiousness,’
said Mr Mercaptan. ‘I prefer old
Borromini and the baroque.’
‘What about Beethoven?’ went on
Lypiatt. ‘What about Blake? Where do they come in under your scheme of
things?’
Mr Mercaptan shrugged his shoulders. ‘They stay in the hall,’ he said. ‘I don’t let them into the boudoir.’
‘You disgust me,’ said Lypiatt, with
rising indignation, and making wilder gestures.
‘You disgust me – you and your odious little sham eighteenth-century
civilization; your piddling little poetry; your art for art’s sake instead of
for God’s sake; your nauseating little copulations without love or passion;
your hoggish materialism; your bestial indifference to all that’s unhappy and
your yelping hatred of all that’s great.’
‘Charming, charming,’ murmured Mr Mercaptan,
who was pouring oil on his salad.
‘How can you ever hope to achieve
anything decent or solid, when you don’t even believe in decency or
solidity? I look about me,’ and Lypiatt
cast his eyes wildly round the crowded room, ‘and I find myself alone,
spiritually alone. I strive on by
myself, by myself.’ He struck his
breast, a giant, a solitary giant. ‘I
have set myself to restore painting and poetry to their rightful position among
the great moral forces. They have been
amusements, they have been mere games for too long. I am giving my life for that. My life.’
His voice trembled a little. ‘People
mock me, hate me, stone me, deride me.
But I go on, I go on. For I know
I’m right. And in the end they too will
recognize that I’ve been right.’ It was
a loud soliloquy. One could fancy that
Lypiatt had been engaged in recognizing himself.
‘All the same,’ said Gumbril with a
cheerful stubbornness, ‘I persist that the word “dreams” is inadmissible.’
‘Inadmissible,’
repeated Mr Mercaptan, imparting to the word an additional significance by
giving it its French pronunciation. ‘In
the age of Rostand, well and good. But
now….’
‘Now,’ said Gumbril, ‘the word merely
connotes Freud.’
‘It’s a matter of literary tact,’
explained Mr Mercaptan. ‘Have you no
literary tact?’
‘No,’ said Lypiatt, with emphasis, ‘thank
God, I haven’t. I have no tact of any
kind. I do things straightforwardly,
frankly, as the spirit moves me. I don’t
like compromises.’
He struck the table. The gesture startlingly let loose a peal of
cracked and diabolic laughter. Gumbril
and Lypiatt and Mr Mercaptan looked quickly up; even Shearwater lifted his
great spherical head and turned towards the sound the large disk of his face. A young man with a blond, fan-shaped beard
stood by the table, looking down at them through a pair of bright blue eyes and
smiling equivocally and disquietingly as though his mind were full of some
nameless and fantastic malice.
‘Come
sta la Sua Terribilitá?’ he asked; and, taking off his preposterous bowler
hat, he bowed profoundly to Lypiatt.
‘How I recognize my Buonarrotti!’ he added affectionately.
Lypiatt laughed, rather uncomfortably,
and no longer on the Titanic scale. ‘How
I recognize my Coleman!’ he echoed, rather feebly.
‘On the contrary,’ Gumbril corrected,
‘how almost completely I fail to recognize.
This beard’ – he pointed to the blond fan – ‘why, may I ask?’
‘More Russianism,’ said Mr Mercaptan, and
shook his head.
‘Ah, why indeed?’ Coleman lowered his voice to a confidential
whisper. ‘For religious reasons,’ he
said, and made the sign of the cross.
‘Christlike is my behaviour,
Like every good believer,
I imitate the Saviour,
And cultivate a beaver.
There be beavers
which have made themselves beavers for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. But there are some beavers, on the other
hand, which were so born from their mother’s womb.’ He burst into a fit of outrageous laughter
which stopped as suddenly and as voluntarily as it had begun.
Lypiatt shook his head. ‘Hideous,’ he said, ‘hideous.’
‘Moreover,’ Coleman went on, without
paying any attention, ‘I have other and, alas! less holy reasons for this
change of face. It enables one to make
such delightful acquaintances in the street.
You head someone saying, “Beaver”, as you pass, and you immediately have
the right to rush up and get into conversation.
I owe to this dear symbol,’ and he caressed the golden beard tenderly
with the palm of his hand, ‘the most admirably dangerous relations.’
‘Magnificent,’ said Gumbril, drinking his
own health. ‘I shall stop shaving at
once.’
Shearwater looked round the table with
raised eyebrows and a wrinkled forehead.
‘This conversation is rather beyond me,’ he said gravely. Under the formidable moustache, under the
thick, tufted eyebrows, the mouth was small and ingenuous, the mild grey eyes
full of an almost childish inquiry.
‘What does the word “beaver” signify in this context? You don’t refer, I suppose, to the rodent, Castor fiber?’
‘But this is a very great man,’ said
Coleman, raising his bowler. ‘Tell me,
who he is?’
‘Our friend Shearwater,’ said Gumbril,
‘the physiologist.’
Coleman bowed. ‘Physiological Shearwater,’ he said. ‘Accept my homage. To one who doesn’t know what a beaver is, I
resign all my claims to superiority.
There’s nothing else but beavers in all the papers. Tell me, do you ever read the Daily Express?’
‘No.’
‘Nor the Daily Mail?’
Shearwater shook his head.
‘Nor the Mirror? nor the Sketch?
nor the Graphic? Nor even (for I was forgetting
that physiologists must surely have Liberal opinions) – even the Daily News?’
Shearwater continued to shake his large
spherical head.
‘Nor any of the evening papers?’
‘No.’
Coleman once more lifted his hat. ‘O eloquent, just and mighty Death!’ he
exclaimed, and replaced it on his head.
‘You never read any papers at all – nor even our friend Mercaptan’s
delicious little middles in the weeklies?
How is your delicious little middle, by the way?’ Coleman turned to Mr Mercaptan and with the
point of his huge stick gave him a prod in the stomach. ‘Ça
‘Never,’ said Shearwater. ‘I have more serious things to think about
than newspapers.’
‘And what serious things, may I ask?’
‘Well, at the present moment,’ said
Shearwater, ‘I am chiefly preoccupied with the kidneys.’
‘The kidneys!’ In an ecstasy of delight, Coleman thumped the
floor with the ferule of his stick. ‘The
kidneys! Tell me all about kidneys. This is of the first importance. This is really life. And I shall sit down at your table without
asking permission of Buonarrotti here, and in the teeth of Mercaptan, and without
so much as thinking about this species of Gumbril, who might as well not be
there at all. I shall sit down and …’
‘Talking of sitting,’ said Gumbril, ‘I
wish I could persuade you to order a pair of my patent pneumatic trousers. They will …’
Coleman waved him away. ‘Not now, not now,’ he said. ‘I shall sit down and listen to the
physiologue talking about grunions, while I myself actually eat them – sautés.
Sautés, mark my words.’
Laying his hat and stick on the floor
beside him, he sat down at the end of the table, between Lypiatt and
Shearwater.
‘Two believers,’ he said, laying his hand
for a moment on Lypiatt’s arm, ‘and three black-hearted unbelievers –
confronted. Eh, Buonarrotti? You and I are both croyants et pratiquants, as Mercaptan would say. I believe in one devil, father
quasi-almighty, Samael and his wife, the Woman of Whoredom. Ha, ha!’
He laughed his ferocious, artificial laugh.
‘Here’s an end to any civilized
conversation,’ Mr Mercaptan complained, hissing on the c, labiating lingeringly on the v
of ‘civilized’ and giving the first two i’s
their fullest value. The word, in his
mouth, seemed to take on a special and richer significance.
Coleman ignored him. ‘Tell me, you physiologue,’ he went on, ‘tell
me about the physiology of the Archetypal Man.
This is most important; Buonarrotti shares my opinion about this, I
know. Has the Archetypal Man a boyau rectum, as Mercaptan would say
again, or not? Everything depends on
this, as Voltaire realized ages ago.
“His feet,” as we know already on inspired authority, “were straight
feet; and the soles of his feet were like the soles of a calf’s foot.” But the viscera, you must tell us something
about the viscera. Mustn’t he,
Buonarrotti? And where are my rognons sautés?’ he shouted at the
waiter.
‘You revolt me,’ said Lypiatt.
‘Not mortually, I ‘ope?’ Coleman turned
with solicitude to his neighbour; then shook his head. ‘Mortually I fear. Kiss me ‘Ardy, and I die happy.’ He blew a kiss into the air. ‘But why is the physiologue so slow? Up, pachyderm, up! Answer.
You hold the key to everything.
The key, I tell you, the key. I
remember, when I used to hang about the biological laboratories at school,
eviscerating frogs – crucified with pins, they were, belly upwards, like little
green Christs – I remember once, when I was sitting there, quietly poring over
the entrails, in came the laboratory boy and said to the stinks usher: “Please,
sir, may I have the key of the Absolute?”
And, would you believe it, that usher calmly put his hand in his trouser
pocket and fished out a small Yale key and gave it [to] him without a
word. What a gesture! The key of the Absolute. But it was only the absolute alcohol the
urchin wanted – to pickle some loathsome fœtus in, I suppose. God rot his soul in peace! And now, Castor Fiber, out with your
key. Tell us about the Archetypal Man,
tell us about the primordial Adam. Tell
us about the boyau rectum.’
Ponderously, Shearwater moved his clumsy
frame; leaning back in his chair he scrutinized Coleman with a large,
benevolent curiosity. The eyes under the
savage eyebrows were mild and gentle; behind the fearful disguise of the
moustache he smiled poutingly, like a baby who sees the approaching
bottle. The broad, domed forehead was
serene. He ran his hand through his
thick brown hair, scratched his head meditatively and then, when he had
thoroughly examined, had comprehended and duly classified the strange
phenomenon of Coleman, opened his mouth and uttered a little good-natured laugh
of amusement.
‘Voltaire’s question,’ he said at last,
in his slow, deep voice, ‘seemed at the time he asked it an unanswerable piece
of irony. It would have seemed almost
equally ironic to his contemporaries, if he had asked whether God had a pair of
kidneys. We know a little more about the
kidneys nowadays. If he had asked me, I
should answer: why not? The kidneys are
so beautifully organized; they do their work of regulation with such a
miraculous – it’s hard to find another word – such a positively divine
precision, such knowledge and wisdom, that there’s no reason why your
archetypal man, whoever he is, or anyone else, for that matter, should be
ashamed of owning a pair.’
Coleman clapped his hands. ‘The key,’ he cried, ‘the key. Out of the trouser pocket of babes and
sucklings it comes. The genuine, the unique
Yale. How right I was to come here
tonight! But, holy Sephiroth, there’s my
trollop.’
He picked up his stick, jumped from his
chair and threaded his way between the tables.
A woman was standing near the door.
Coleman came up to her, pointed without speaking to the table, and
returned, driving her along in front of him, tapping her gently over the
haunches with his stick, as one might drive a docile animal to the slaughter.
‘Allow me to introduce,’ said
Coleman. ‘The sharer of my joys and
sorrows. Les compagne de mes nuits blanche and de mes jours plutôt sales. In a word, Zoe. Qui no
comprend pas le français, qui me déteste avec une passion égale à la mienne, et
qui mangera, ma foi, des rognons pour fair honneur au physiologue.’
‘Have some
Zoe nodded and pushed forward her
glass. She was dark-haired, had a pale
skin and eyes like round blackberries.
Her mouth was small and floridly curved.
She was dressed, rather depressingly, like a picture by Augustus John,
in blue and orange. Her expression was
sullen and ferocious, and she looked about her with an air of profound
contempt.
‘Shearwater’s no better than a mystic,’
fluted Mr Mercaptan. ‘A mystical
scientist; really, one hadn’t reckoned on that.’
‘Like a Liberal Pope,’ said Gumbril. ‘Poor Metternich, you remember? Pio Nono.’
And he burst into a fit of esoteric laughter. ‘Of less than average intelligence,’ he
murmured delightedly, and refilled his glass.
‘It’s only the deliberately blind who wouldn’t
reckon on the combination,’ Lypiatt put in, indignantly. ‘What are science and art, what are religion
and philosophy, but so many expressions in human terms of some reality more
than human?
‘Alberti, I beg you,’ said Gumbril. ‘I assure you he was the better architect.’
‘Fi
donc!’ said Mr Mercaptan. ‘San Carlo
alle Quattro Fontane …’ But he got no further.
Lypiatt abolished him with a gesture.
‘One reality,’ he cried, ‘there is only
one reality.’
‘One reality,’ Coleman reached out a hand
across the table and caressed Zoe’s bare white arm, ‘and that is
callipygous.’ Zoe jabbed at his hand
with her fork.
‘We are all trying to talk about it,’
continued Lypiatt. ‘The physicists have
formulated their laws, which are after all no more than stammering provisional
theories about a part of it. The
physiologists are penetrating into the secrets of life, psychologists into the
mind. And we artists are trying to say
what is revealed to us about the moral nature, the personality of that reality,
which is the universe.’
Mr Mercaptan threw up his hands in
affected horror. ‘Oh, barabaridad, barabaridad!’ Nothing less than the pure Castilian would
relieve his feelings. ‘But all this is
meaningless.’
‘Quite right about the chemists and
physicists,’ said Shearwater. ‘They’re
always trying to pretend that they’re nearer the truth than we are. They take their crude theories as facts and
try to make us accept them when we’re dealing with life. Oh, they are sacred, their theories. Laws of Nature they call them; and they talk
about their known truths and our romantic biological fancies. What a fuss they make when we talk about
life! Bloodly fools!’ said Shearwater,
mild and crushing. ‘Nobody but a fool
could talk of mechanism in face of the kidneys.
And there are actually imbeciles who talk about the mechanism of
heredity and reproduction.’
‘All the same,’ began Mr Mercaptan very
earnestly, anxious to deny his own life, ‘there are eminent authorities. I can only quote what they say, of
course. I can’t pretend to know anything
about it myself. But …’
‘Reproduction, reproduction,’ Coleman
murmured the word to himself ecstatically.
‘Delightful and horrifying to think they all come to that, even the most
virginal; that they were all made for that, little she-dogs, in spite of their
china-blue eyes. What sort of a mandrake
shall we produce, Zoe and I?’ he asked, turning to Shearwater. ‘How I should like to have a child,’ he went
on without waiting for an answer. ‘I
shouldn’t teach it anything; no language, nothing at all. Just a child of nature. I believe it would really be the devil. And then what fun it would be if it suddenly
started to say “Bekkos”, like the children in Herodotus. And Buonarrotti here would paint an
allegorical picture of it and write an epic called “The Ignoble Savage”. And Castor Fiber would come and sound its
kidneys and investigate its sexual instincts.
And Mercaptan would write one of his inimitable middle articles about
it. And Gumbril would make a pair of
patent trousers. And Zoe and I would
look parentally on and fairly swell with pride.
Shouldn’t we, Zoe?’ Zoe preserved
her expression of sullen, unchanging contempt and did not deign to answer. ‘Ah, how delightful it would be! I long for posterity. I live in hopes. I stope against Stopes. I …’
Zoe threw a piece of bread, which caught
him on the cheek, a little below the eye.
Coleman leaned back and laughed and laughed till the tears rolled down
his face.
CHAPTER V
ONE after
another, they engaged themselves in the revolving doors of the restaurant,
trotted round in the moving cage of glass and ejected themselves into the
coolness and darkness of the street.
Shearwater lifted up his large face and took two or three deep
breaths. ‘Too much carbon dioxide and
ammonia in there,’ he said.
‘It is unfortunate that when two or three
are gathered together in God’s name, or even in the more civilized name of
Mercaptan of the delicious middle,’ Mercaptan dexterously parried the prod
which Coleman aimed at him, ‘it is altogether deplorable that they should
necessarily impest the air.’
Lypiatt had turned his eyes
heavenwards. ‘What stars,’ he said, ‘and
what prodigious gaps between the stars!’
‘A real light opera summer night.’ And Mercaptan began to sing, in fragmentary
German, the ‘Barcarolle’ from the Tales
of Hoffmann. ‘Liebe Nacht, du schöne
Nacht, oh stille mein tumpty-tum. Te,
tum, Te tum…. Delicious
They walked along without any particular
destination, but simply for the sake of walking through this soft cool
night. Coleman led the way, tapping the
pavement at every step with the ferrule of his stick. ‘The blind leading the blind,’ he explained. ‘Ah, if only there were a ditch, a crevasse,
a great hole full of stinging centipedes and dung. How gleefully I should lead you all into it!’
‘I think you would do well,’ said
Shearwater gravely, ‘to go and see a doctor.’
Coleman gave vent to a howl of delight.
‘Does it occur to you,’ he went on, ‘that
at this moment we are walking through the midst of seven million distinct and
separate individuals, each with distinct and separate lives and all completely
indifferent to our existence? Seven
million people, each one of whom thinks himself quite as important as each of
us does. Millions of them are now
sleeping in an empested atmosphere.
Hundreds of thousands of couples are at this moment engaged in mutually
caressing one another in a manner too hideous to be thought of, but in no way
differing from the manner in which each of us performs, delightfully,
passionately and beautifully, his similar work of love. Thousands of women are now in the throes of
parturition, and of both sexes thousands are dying of the most diverse and
appalling diseases, or simply because they have lived too long. Thousands are drunk, thousands have
over-eaten, thousands have not had enough to eat. And they are all alive, all unique and
separate and sensitive, like you and me.
It’s a horrible thought. Ah, if I
could lead them all into that great hole of centipedes.’
He tapped and tapped on the pavement in
front of him, as though searching for the crevasse. At the top of his voice he began to chant: ‘O
all ye Beasts and Cattle, curse ye the Lord: curse him and vilify him for ever.’
‘All this religion,’ sighed Mercaptan. ‘What with Lypiatt on one side, being a
muscular Christian artist, and Coleman on the other, howling the black mass….
Really!’ He elaborated an Italianate
gesture, and turned to Zoe. ‘What do you
think of it all?’ he asked.
Zoe jerked her head in Coleman’s
direction. ‘I think ‘e’s a bloody
swine,’ she said. They were the first
words she had spoken since she had joined the party.
‘Hear, hear!’ cried Coleman, and he waved
his stick.
In the warm yellow light of the coffee-stall
at Hyde Park Corner loitered a little group of people. Among the peaked caps and the chaufferus’
dust-coats, among the weather-stained workmen’s jackets and the knotted
handkerchiefs, there emerged an alien elegance.
A tall tubed hat and a silk-faced overcoat, a cloak of flame-coloured
satin, and in bright, coppery hair a great Spanish comb of carved
tortoiseshell.
‘Well, I’m damned,’ said Gumbril as they
approached. ‘I believe it’s Myra
Viveash.’
‘So it is,’ said Lypiatt, peering in his
turn. He began suddenly to walk with an
affected swagger, kicking his heels at every step. Looking at himself from outside, his divining
eyes pierced through the veil of cynical je-m’en-fichisme
to the bruised heart beneath. Besides,
he didn’t want anyone to guess.
‘The Viveash, is it?’ Coleman quickened his rapping along the
pavement. ‘And who is the present
incumbent?’ He pointed at the top hat.
‘Can it be Bruin Opps?’ said Gumbril
dubiously.
‘Opps!’ Coleman yelled the name. ‘Opps!’
The top hat turned, revealing a shirt
front, a long grey face, a glitter of circular glass over the left eye. ‘Who the devil are you?’ The voice was harsh and arrogantly offensive.
‘I am that I am,’ said Coleman. ‘But I have with me’ – he pointed to
Shearwater, to Gumbril, to Zoe – ‘a physiologue, a pedagogue and a priapagogue;
for I leave out of account mere artists and journalists whose titles do not end
with the magic syllable. And finally,’
indicating himself, ‘plain Dog, which, being interpreted kabbalistically
backwards, signifies God. All at your
service.’ He took off his hat and bowed.
The top hat turned back towards the
Spanish comb. ‘Who is this horrible
drunk?’ it inquired.
Mrs Viveash did not answer him, but
stepped forward to meet the newcomers. In
one hand she held a peeled, hard-boiled egg and a thick slice of bread and
butter in the other, and between her sentences she bit at them alternately.
‘Coleman!’ she exclaimed, and her voice,
as she spoke, seemed always on the point of expiring, as though each word were
the last, uttered faintly and breakingly from a deathbed – the last, with all
the profound and nameless significance of the ultimate word. ‘It’s a very long time since I heard you
raving last. And you, Theodore darling,
why do I never see you now?’
Gumbril shrugged his shoulders. ‘Because you don’t want to, I suppose,’ he
said.
‘It’s tomorrow I’m sitting for you,
Casimir, isn’t it?’
‘Ah, you remembered.’ The veil parted for a moment. Poor Lypiatt!
‘And happy Mercaptan? Always
happy?’
Gallantly Mercaptan kissed the back of
the hand which held the egg. ‘I might be
happier,’ he murmured, rolling up at her from the snouty face a pair of small
brown eyes. ‘Puis-je espérer?’
Mrs Viveash laughed expiringly from her
inward deathbed and turned on him, without speaking, her pale unwavering
glance. Her eyes had a formidable
capacity for looking and expressing nothing; they were like the pale blue eyes
which peer out of the Siamese cat’s black-velvet mask.
‘Bellissima,’ murmured Mercaptan,
flowering under their cool light.
Mrs Viveash addressed herself to the
company at large. ‘We have had the most
appalling evening,’ she said. ‘Haven’t
we, Bruin?’
Bruin Opps said nothing, but only
scowled. He didn’t like these damned
intruders. The skin of his contracted
brows oozed over the rim of his monocle, on to the shining glass.
‘I thought it would be fun,’
‘What is there about islands?’ put in
Mercaptan, in a deliciously whimsical parenthesis, ‘that makes them so
peculiarly voluptuous?
‘Another charming middle.’ Coleman pointed his stick menacingly; Mr
Mercaptan stepped quickly out of range.
‘So we took a cab,’ Mrs Viveash
continued, ‘and set out. And what a cab,
my God! A cab with only one gear, and
that the lowest. A cab as old as the
century, a museum specimen, a collector’s piece.’ They had been hours and hours on the
way. And when they got there, the food
they were offered to eat, the wine they were expected to drink! From her eternal deathbed Mrs Viveash cried
out in unaffected horror. Everything
tasted as though it had been kept soaking for a week in the river before being
served up – rather weedy, with that delicious typhoid flavour of Thames
water. There was
‘Oh, a terrible evening,’ Mrs Viveash
concluded. ‘The only thing which kept up
my spirits was the spectacle of Bruin’s bad temper. You’ve no idea, Bruin, what an incomparable
comic you can be.’
Bruin ignored the remark. With an expression of painfully repressed
disgust he was eating a hard-boiled egg.
Mrs Viveash looked about her. ‘Am I never to know who this mysterious
person is?’ She pointed to Shearwater,
who was standing a little apart from the group, his back leaning against the
park railings and staring thoughtfully at the ground.
‘The physiologue,’ Coleman explained,
‘and he has the key. The key, the key!’ He hammered the pavement with his stick.
Gumbril performed the introduction in
more commonplace style.
‘You don’t seem to take much interest in
us, Mr Shearwater,’
Shearwater shook his heavy head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I do.’
‘Why don’t you?’
‘Why should I? There’s not time to be
interested in everything. One can only
be interested in what’s worthwhile.’
‘And we’re not worthwhile?’
‘Not to me personally,’ replied
Shearwater with candour. ‘The
‘And what do you allow yourself to be
interested in?’
‘Shall we go?’ said Bruin impatiently; he
had succeeded in swallowing the last fragment of his hard-boiled egg. Mrs Viveash did not answer, did not even look
at him.
Shearwater, who had hesitated before
replying, was about to speak. But
Coleman answered for him. ‘Be
respectful,’ he said to Mrs Viveash.
‘This is a great man. He reads no
papers, not even those in which our Mercaptan so beautifully writes. He does not know what a beaver is. And he lives for nothing but the kidneys.’
Mrs Viveash smiled her smile of
agony. ‘Kidneys? But what a momento mori! There are
other portions of the anatomy.’ She
threw back her cloak, revealing an arm, a bare shoulder, a slant of pectoral
muscle. She was wearing a white dress
that, leaving her back and shoulders bare, came up, under either arm, to a
point in front and was held there by a golden thread about the neck. ‘For example,’ she said, and twisted her hand
several times over and over, making the slender arm turn at the elbow, as
though to demonstrate the movement of the articulations and the muscular play.
‘Momento
vivere,’ Mr Mercaptan
aptly commented. ‘Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus.’
Mrs Viveash dropped her arm and pulled
the cloak back into place. She looked at
Shearwater, who had followed all her movements with conscientious attention,
and who now nodded with an expression of interrogation on his face, as though
to ask: what next?
‘We all know that you’ve got beautiful
arms,’ said Bruin angrily. ‘There’s no
need for you to make an exhibition of them in the street, at
Mrs Viveash looked round. The cab-drivers and the other consumers of
‘Mayn’t the poor wretches talk?’ asked
Mrs Viveash, turning back to Bruin. ‘I
never knew anyone who had the lower classes on the brain as much as you have.’
‘I loathe them,’ said Bruin. ‘I hate everyone poor, or ill, or old. Can’t abide them; they make me positively
sick.’
‘Quelle
âme bien-née,’ piped Mr Mercaptan.
‘And how well and frankly you express what we all feel and lack the
courage to say.
Lypiatt gave vent to indignant laughter.
‘I remember when I was a little boy,’
Bruin went on, ‘my old grandfather used to tell me stories about his
childhood. He told me that when he was
about five or six, just before the passing of the Reform Bill of ‘thirty-two,
there was a song which all right-thinking people used to sing, with a chorus
that went like this: “Rot the People, blast the People, damn the Lower
Classes”. I wish I knew the rest of the
words and the tune. It must have been a
good song.’
Coleman was enraptured with the
song. He shouldered his walking-stick
and began marching round and round the nearest lamp-post chanting the words to
a stirring march tune. ‘Rot the People,
blast the People …’ He marked the rhythm with heavy stamps of his feet.
‘Ah, if only they’d invent servants with
internal combustion engines,’ said Bruin, almost pathetically. ‘However well trained they are, they always
betray their humanity occasionally. And
that is really intolerable.’
‘How tedious is a guilty conscience!’
Gumbril murmured the quotation.
‘But Mr Shearwater,’ said
‘Nothing at all,’ said Shearwater. ‘I’m occupied with the regulation of the
blood at the moment.’
‘But is it true what he says, Theodore?’ She appealed to Gumbril.
‘I should think so.’ Gumbril’s answer was rather dim and
remote. He was straining to hear the
talk of Bruin’s canaille, and Mrs
Viveash’s question seemed a little irrelevant.
‘I used to do certain jobs,’ the man with
the teacup was saying. ‘’Ad a van and a nold pony of me own. And didn’t do so badly neither. The only trouble was me lifting furniture and
‘eavy weights about the place. Because I
‘ad malaria out of
‘Nor even – you compel me to violate the
laws of modesty – nor even,’ Mrs Viveash went on, smiling painfully, speaking
huskily, expiringly, ‘of legs?’
A spring of blasphemy was touched in
Coleman’s brain. ‘Neither delighteth He
in any man’s legs,’ he shouted, and with an extravagant show of affection he
embraced Zoe, who caught hold of his hand and bit it.
‘It comes back on you when you get tired
like, malaria does.’ The man’s face was
sallow and there was an air of peculiar listlessness and hopelessness about his
misery. ‘It comes back on you, and then
you go down with fever and you’re as weak as a child.’
Shearwater shook his head.
‘Nor even of the heart?’ Mrs Viveash lifted her eyebrows. ‘Ah, now the inevitable word has been
pronounced, the real subject of conversation has appeared on the scene. Love, Mr Shearwater!’
‘But as I says,’ recapitulated the man
with the teacup, ‘we didn’t do so badly after all. We ‘ad nothing to complain about. ‘Ad we, Florrie?’
The black bundle made an affirmative
movement with its upper extremity.
‘That’s one of the subjects,’ said
Shearwater, ‘like the Great Wall of China and the habits of Trematodes, I don’t
allow myself to be interested in.’
Mrs Viveash laughed, breathed out a
little ‘Good God!’ of incredulity and astonishment, and asked, ‘Why not?’
‘No time,’ he explained. ‘You people of leisure have nothing else to
do or think about. I’m busy, and so
naturally less interested in the subject than you; and I take care, what’s
more, to limit such interest as I have.’
‘I was goin’ up Ludgate ‘ill one day with
a vanload of stuff for a chap in Clerkenwell.
I was leadin’ Jerry up the ‘ill – Jerry’s the name of our ole pony….’
‘One can’t have everything,’ Shearwater
was explaining, ‘not all at the same time, in any case. I’ve arranged my life for work now. I’m quietly married, I simmer away
domestically.’
‘Quelle
horreur!’ said Mr Mercaptan. All the
Louis Quinze Abbé in him was shocked and revolted by the thought.
‘But love?’ questioned Mrs Viveash. ‘Love?’
‘Love!’ Lypiatt echoed. He was looking up at the Milky Way.
‘All of a sudden out jumps a copper at
me. “’Ow old is that ‘orse?” ‘e
says. ‘It ain’t fit to drawr a load, it
limps in all four feet,” ‘e says. “No,
it doesn’t,” I says. “None of your
answerin’ back,” ‘e says. “Take it outer
the shafts at once.”’
‘But I know all about love already. I know precious little still about kidneys.’
‘But, my good Shearwater, how can you
know all about love before you’ve made it with all women?’
‘Off we goes, me and the cop and the
‘orse, up in front of the police-court magistrate….’
‘Or are you one of those imbeciles,’ Mrs
Viveash went on, ‘who speak of women with a large W and pretend we’re all the
same?’ Poor Theodore here might possibly
think so in his feebler moments.’
Gumbril smiled vaguely from a distance.
He was following the man with the teacup into the magistrate’s stuffy
court. ‘And Mercaptan certainly does,
because all the women who ever sat on his dix-huitième
sofa certainly were exactly like one another.
And perhaps Casimir does too; all women look like his absurd ideal. But you, Shearwater, you’re intelligent. Surely you don’t believe anything so stupid?’
Shearwater shook his head.
‘The cop, ‘e gave evidence against
me. “Limping in all four feet,” ‘e
says. “It wasn’t,” I says, and the
police-court vet, ‘e bore me out. “The
‘orse ‘as been very well treated,” ‘e says.
“But ‘e’s old, ‘e’s very old.” “I
know ‘e’s old,” I says. “But where am I
goin’ to find the price for a young one?”’
‘x2-y2,’ Shearwater was saying,
‘=(x+y)(x-y). And the equation holds
good whatever the values of x and y…. It’s the same with your love
business, Mrs Viveash. The relation is
still fundamentally the same, whatever the value of the unknown personal
quantities concerned. Little individual
tics and peculiarities – after all, what do they matter?’
‘What indeed!’ said Coleman. ‘Tics, mere tics. Sheep ticks, horse ticks, bedbugs, tapeworms,
taint worms, guinea worms, liver flukes….’
‘“The ‘orse must be destroyed,” says the
beak. “’E’s too old for work.” ‘But I’m not,” I says. ‘I can’t get an old-age pension at
thirty-two, can I? ‘Ow am I to earn my
living if you take away what I earns my living by?”’
Mrs Viveash smiled agonizingly. ‘Here’s a man who thinks personal
pecularities are trivial and unimportant,’ she said. ‘You’re not even interested in people, then?’
‘“I don’t know what you can do,” ‘e
says. “I’m only ‘ere to administer the
law.” “Seems a queer sort of law,” I
says. “What law is it?”’
Shearwater scratched his head. Under his formidable black moustache he
smiled at last his ingenuous, childish smile.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I suppose I’m
not. It hadn’t occurred to me, until you
said it. But I suppose I’m not. No.’ He
laughed, quite delighted, it seemed, by this discovery about himself.
‘“What law is it?” ‘e says. “The Croolty to Animals law. That’s what it is,” ‘e says.’
The smile of mockery and suffering
appeared and faded. ‘One of these days,’
said Mrs Viveash, ‘you may find them more absorbing than you do now.’
‘Meanwhile,’ said Shearwater.
‘I couldn’t find a job ‘ere, and ‘aving
been workin’ on my own, my own master like, couldn’t get unemployment pay. So when we ‘eard of jobs at
‘Meanwhile, I have my kidneys.’
‘“’Opeless,” ‘e says to me, “quite
‘opeless. More than two hundred come for
three vacancies.” So there was nothing
for it but to walk back again. Took us
four days it did, this time. She was
very bad on the way, very bad. Being
nearly six months gone. Our first it
is. Things will be ‘arder still, when it
comes.’
From the black bundle there issued a
sound of quiet sobbing.
‘Look here,’ said Gumbril, making a sudden
irruption into the conversation. ‘This
is really too awful.’ He was consumed
with indignation and pity; he felt like a prophet in
‘There are two wretched people here,’ and
Gumbril told them breathlessly what he had overheard. It was terrible, terrible. ‘All the way to
Coleman exploded with delight. ‘Gravid,’ he kept repeating, ‘gravid,
gravid. The laws of gravity, first
formulated by
Between them they raised five
pounds. Mrs Viveash undertook to give
them to the black bundle. The cabmen
made way for her as she advanced; there was an uncomfortable silence. The black bundle lifted a face that was old
and worn, like the face of a statue in the portal of a cathedral; an old face,
but one was aware, somehow, that it belonged to a woman still young by the
reckoning of years. Her hands trembled
as she took the notes, and when she opened her mouth to speak her hardly
articulate whisper of gratitude, one saw that she had lost several of her
teeth.
The party disintegrated. All went their ways: Mr Mercaptan to his
rococo boudoir, his sweet barocco bedroom in Sloane Street; Coleman and Zoe
towards goodness only knew what scenes of intimate life in Pimlico; Lypiatt to
his studio off the Tottenham Court Road, alone, silently brooding and perhaps
too consciously bowed with unhappiness.
But the unhappiness, poor Titan! was real enough, for had he not seen
Mrs Viveash and the insufferable, the stupid and loutish Opps driving off in
one taxi? ‘Must finish up with a little
dancing,’ Myra had huskily uttered from that deathbed on which her restless
spirit for ever and wearily exerted itself.
Obediently, Bruin had given an address and they had driven off. But after the dancing? Oh, was it possible that that odious,
bad-blooded young cad was her lover? And
that she should like him? It was no
wonder that Lypiatt should have walked, bent like Atlas under the weight of a
world. And when, in Piccadilly, a
belated and still unsuccessful prostitute sidled out of the darkness, as he
strode by unseeing in his misery when she squeaked up at him a despairing
‘Cheer up, duckie,’ Lypiatt suddenly threw up his head and laughed titanically,
with the terrible bitterness of a noble soul in pain. Even the poor drabs at the street corners
were affected by the unhappiness that radiated out from him, wave after
throbbing wave, like music, he liked to fancy, into the night. Even the wretched drabs. He walked on, more desperately bowed than
ever; but met no further adventure on his way.
Gumbril and Shearwater both lived in
Paddington; they set off in company up Park Lane, walking in silence. Gumbril gave a little skip to get himself
into step with his own companion. To be
out of step, when steps so loudly and flat-footedly flapped on empty pavements,
was disagreeable, he found, was embarrassing, was somehow dangerous. Stepping, like this, out of time, one gave
oneself away, so to speak, one made the night aware of two presences, when there
might, if steps sounded in unison, be only one, heavier, more formidable, more
secure than either of the separate two.
In unison, then, they flapped up Park Lane. A policeman and the three poets, sulking back
to back on their fountain, were the only human things besides themselves under
the mauve electric moons.
‘It’s appalling, it’s horrible,’ said
Gumbril at last, after a long, long silence, during which he had, indeed, been
relishing to the full the horror of it all.
Life, don’t you know.
‘What’s appalling?’ Shearwater
inquired. He walked with his big head
bowed, his hands clasped behind his back and clutching his hat; walked
clumsily, with sudden lurches of his whole massive anatomy. Wherever he was, Shearwater always seemed to
take up the space that two or three ordinary people would normally occupy. Cool fingers of wind passed refreshingly
through his hair. He was thinking of the
experiment he meant to try, in the next few days, down at the physiological laboratory. You’d put a man on an ergometer in a heated
chamber and set him to work – hours at a time.
He’d sweat, of course, prodigiously.
You’d make arrangements for collecting the sweat, weighing it, analyzing
it and so on. The interesting thing
would be to see what happened at the end of a few days. The man would have got rid of so much of his
salts, that the blood composition might be altered and all sorts of delightful
consequences might follow. It ought to
be a capital experiment. Gumbril’s exclamation
disturbed him. ‘What’s appalling?’ he
asked rather irritably.
‘Those people at the coffee-stall,’
Gumbril answered. ‘It’s appalling that
human beings should have to live like that.
Worse than dogs.’
‘Dogs have nothing to complain of.’ Shearwater went off at a tangent. ‘Nor guinea-pigs, nor rats. It’s these blasted anti-vivisection maniacs
who make all the fuss.’
‘But think,’ cried Gumbril, ‘what these
wretched people have had to suffer!
Walking all the way to Portsmouth in search work; and the woman with
child. It’s horrifying. And then, the way people of that class are
habitually treated. One has no idea of
it until one has actually been treated that way oneself. In the war, for example, when one went to
have one’s mitral murmurs listened to by the medical board – they treated one
then as though one belonged to the lower orders, like all the rest of the poor
wretches. It was a real eye-opener. One felt like a cow being got into a
train. And to think that the majority of
one’s fellow beings pass their whole lives being shoved about like maltreated
animals!’
‘H’m,’ said Shearwater. If you went on sweating indefinitely, he
supposed, you would end by dying.
Gumbril looked through the railings at
the profound darkness of the park. Vast
it was and melancholy, with a string, here and there, of receding lights. ‘Terrible,’ he said, and repeated the word
several times. ‘Terrible,
terrible.’ All the legless soldiers
grinding barrel-organs, all the hawkers of toys stamping their leaky boots in
the gutters of the Strand; at the corner of Cursitor Street and Chancery Lane,
the old woman with matches, for ever holding to her left eye a handkerchief as
yellow and dirty as the winter fog. What
was wrong with the eye? He had never
dared to look, but hurried past as though she were not there, or sometimes,
when the fog was more than ordinarily cold and stifling, paused for an instant
with averted eyes to drop a brown coin into her tray of matches. And then there were the murderers hanged at
eight o’clock, while one was savouring, almost with voluptuous consciousness,
the final dream-haunted doze. There was
the phthisical charwoman who used to work at his father’s house, until she got
too weak and died. There were the lovers
who turned on the gas and the ruined shopkeepers jumping in front of
trains. Had one a right to be contented
and well-fed, had one a right to one’s education and good taste, a right to
knowledge and conversation and the leisurely complexities of love?
He looked once more through the railings
at the park’s impenetrable, rustic night, at the lines of beaded lamps. He looked, and remembered another night,
years ago, during the war, when there were no lights in the park and the
electric moons above the roadway were in almost total eclipse. He had walked up this street alone, full of
melancholy emotion which, though the cause of them was different, were in
themselves much the same as the melancholy emotions which swelled windily up
within him tonight. He had been horribly
in love.
‘What do you think,’ he asked abruptly,
‘of Myra Viveash?’
‘Think?’ said Shearwater. ‘I don’t know that I thought very much about
her. Not a case for ratiocination
exactly, is she? She seemed to me
entertaining enough, as women go. I said
I’d lunch with her on Thursday.’
Gumbril felt, all of a sudden, the need
to speak confidentially. ‘There was a
time,’ he said in a tone that was quite unreally airy, off-hand and disengaged,
‘years ago, when I totally lost my head about her. Totally.’
Those tear-wet patches on his pillow, cold against his cheek in the
darkness; and oh, the horrible pain of weeping, vainly, for something that was
nothing, that was everything in the world!
‘Towards the end of the war it was.
I remember walking up this dismal street one night, in the pitch
darkness, writhing with jealousy.’ He
was silent. Spectrally, like a dim,
haunting ghost, he had hung about her; dumbly, dumbly imploring,
appealing. ‘The weak, silent man, she
used to call him. And once for two or
three days, out of pity, out of affection, out of a mere desire, perhaps, to
lay the tiresome ghost, she had given him what his mournful silence implored –
only to take it back, almost as soon as accorded. That other night, when he had walked up this
street before, desire had eaten out his vitals and his body seemed empty,
sickeningly and achingly void; jealousy was busily reminding him, with an
unflagging malice, of her beauty – of her beauty and the hateful, ruffian hands
which now caressed, the eyes which looked on it. That was all long ago.
‘She is certainly handsome,’ said Shearwater,
commenting, at one or two removes, on Gumbril’s last remark. ‘I can see that she might make anyone who got
involved with her decidedly uncomfortable.’
After a day or two’s continuous sweating, it suddenly occurred to him,
one might perhaps find seawater more refreshing than fresh water. That would be queer.
Gumbril burst out ferociously
laughing. ‘But there were other times,’
he went on jauntily, ‘when other people were jealous of me.’ Ah, revenge, revenge. In the better world of the imagination it was
possible to get one’s own back. What
fiendish vendettas were there carried to successful ends! ‘I remember once writing her a quatrain in
French.’ (He had written it years after the whole thing was over, he had never
sent it to anyone at all; but that was all one.) ‘How did it go? Ah, yes.’
And he recited, with suitable gestures:
‘“Puisque nous sommes là, je dois
Vous averter, sans trop de honte,
Que je n’égale pas le Comte
Casanovesque de Sixfois.”
Rather prettily turned,
I flatter myself. Rather elegantly
gross.’
Gumbril’s laughter went hooting past the
Marble Arch. It stopped rather suddenly,
however, at the corner of the Edgeware Road.
He had suddenly remembered Mr Mercaptan, and the thought depressed him.
CHAPTER VI
IT was
between Whitfield Street and the Tottenham Court Road, in a ‘heavenly Mews’, as
he liked to call it (for he had a characteristic weakness for philosophical
paronomasia), that Casimir Lypiatt lived and worked. You passed under an archway of bald and sooty
brick – and at night, when the green gaslamp underneath the arch threw lived
lights and enormous architectural shadows, you could fancy yourself at the
entrance of one of Piranesi’s prisons – and you found yourself in a long
cul-de-sac, flanked on either side by low buildings, having stabling for horses
below and, less commodiously, stabling for human beings in the attics
above. An old-fashioned smell of animals
mingled with the more progressive stink of burnt oil. The air was a little thicker here, it seemed,
than in the streets outside; looking down the mews on even the clearest day,
you could see the forms of things dimming and softening, the colours growing
richer and deeper with every yard of distance.
It was the best place in the world, Lypiatt used to say, for studying
aerial perspective; that was why he lived there. But you always felt about poor Lypiatt that
he was facing misfortune with a jest a little too self-consciously.
Mrs Viveash’s taxi drove in under the
Piranesian arch, drove in slowly and as though with a gingerly reluctance to
soil its white wheels on pavements so sordid.
The cabman looked round inquiringly.
‘This right?’ he asked.
With a white-gloved finger Mrs Viveash
prodded the air two or three times, indicating that he was to drive straight
on. Half-way down the mews she rapped
the glass; the man drew up.
‘Never been down ‘ere before,’ he said, for the sake of making a little
conversation, while Mrs Viveash fumbled for her money. He looked at her with a polite and slightly
ironic curiosity that was frankly mingled with admiration.
‘You’re lucky,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘We poor decayed gentlewomen – you see what
we’re reduced to.’ And she handed him a
florin.
Slowly the taxi-man unbuttoned his coat
and put the coin away in an inner pocket.
He watched her as she crossed the dirty street, placing her feet with a
meticulous precision one after the other in the same straight line, as though
she were treading a knife edge between goodness only knew what invisible gulfs. Floating she seemed to go, with a little
spring at every step and the skirt of her summery dress – white it was, with a
florid pattern painted in black all over it – blowing airily out around her
swaying march. Decayed gentlewomen
indeed! The driver started his machine
with an unnecessary violence; he felt, for some reason, positively indignant.
Between the broad double-doors through
which the horses passed to their fodder and repose were little narrow human
doors – for the Yahoos, Lypiatt used to say in his large allusive way; and when
he said it he laughed with the loud and bell-mouthed cynicism of one who sees
himself as a misunderstood and embittered Prometheus. At one of these little Yahoo doors Mrs Viveash
halted and rapped as loudly as a small and stiff-hinged knocker would
permit. Patiently she waited; several
small and dirty children collected to stare at her. She knocked again, and again waited. More children came running up from the far
end of the mews; two young girls of fifteen or sixteen appeared at a
neighbouring doorway and immediately gave tongue in whoops of mirthless,
hyena-like laughter.
‘Have you ever read about the Pied Piper
of Hamelin?’ Mrs Viveash asked the nearest child. Terrified, it shrank away. ‘I thought not,’ she said, and knocked again.
There was a sound, at last, of heavy feet
slowly descending steep stairs; the door opened.
‘Welcome to the palazzo!’ It was Lypiatt’s heroic formula of
hospitality.
‘Welcome at last,’ Mrs Viveash corrected,
and followed him up a narrow, dark staircase that was as steep as a
ladder. He was dressed in a velveteen
jacket and linen trousers that should have been white, but needed washing. He was dishevelled and his hands were dirty.
‘Did you knock more than once?’ he asked,
looking back over his shoulder.
‘More than twenty times,’ Mrs Viveash
justifiably exaggerated.
‘I’m infinitely sorry,’ protested
Lypiatt. ‘I get so deeply absorbed in my
work, you know. Did you wait long?’
‘The children enjoyed it, at any
rate.’ Mrs Viveash was irritated by a
suspicion, which was probably, after all, quite unjustified, that Casimir had
been rather consciously absorbed in his work; that he had heard her first knock
and plunged the more profoundly into those depths of absorption where the true
artist always dwells, or at any rate ought to dwell; to rise at her third
appeal with a slow, pained reluctance, cursing, perhaps, at the importunity of
a world which thus noisily interrupted the flow of his inspiration. ‘Queer, the way they stare at one,’ she went
on, with a note in her dying voice of a petulance that the children had not
inspired. ‘Does one look such a guy?’
Lypiatt threw open the door at the head
of the stairs and stood there on the threshold, waiting for her. ‘Queer?’ he repeated. ‘Not a bit.’
And as she moved past him into the room, he laid his hand on her
shoulder and fell into step with her, leaving the door to slam behind them. ‘Merely an example of the mob’s instinctive
dislike of the aristocratic individual.
That’s all. “Oh, why was I born
with a different face?’ Thank God I was,
though. And so were you. But the difference has its disadvantages; the
children throw stones.’
‘They didn’t throw stones.’ Mrs Viveash was too truthful, this time.
They halted in the middle of the
studio. It was not a very large room and
there were too many things in it. The easel stood near the centre of the
studio; round it Lypiatt kept a space permanently cleared. There was a broad fairway leading to the
door, and another, narrower and tortuously winding between boxes and piled-up
furniture and tumbled books, gave access to his bed. There was a piano and a table permanently set
with dirty plates and strewed with the relics of two or three meals. Bookshelves stood on either side of the
fireplace, and lying on the floor were still more books, piles on dusty
piles. Mrs Viveash stood looking at the
picture on the easel (abstract again – she didn’t like it), and Lypiatt, who
had dropped his hand from her shoulder, and had stepped back the better to see
her, stood earnestly looking at Mrs Viveash.
‘May I kiss you?’ he asked after a
silence.
Mrs Viveash turned towards him, smiling
agonizingly, her eyebrows ironically lifted, her eyes steady and calm and
palely, brightly inexpressive. ‘If it
really gives you any pleasure,’ she said.
‘It won’t, I may say, to me.’
‘You make me suffer a great deal,’ said
Lypiatt, and said it so quietly and unaffectedly, that Myra was almost
startled; she was accustomed, with Casimir, to noisier and more magniloquent
protestations.
‘I’m very sorry,’ she said; and, really,
she felt sorry. ‘But I can’t help it,
can I?’
‘I suppose you can’t,’ he said. ‘You can’t,’ he repeated, and his voice had
now become the voice of Prometheus in his bitterness. ‘Nor can tigresses.’ He had begun to pace up and down the
unobstructed fairway between his easel and the door; Lypiatt liked pacing while
he talked. ‘You like playing with the victim,’
he went on; ‘he must die slowly.’
Reassured, Mrs Viveash faintly smiled. This was the familiar Casimir. So long as he could talk like this, could
talk like an old-fashioned French novel, it was all right; he couldn’t really
be so very unhappy. She sat down on the
nearest unencumbered chair. Lypiatt
continued to walk back and forth, waving his arms as he walked.
‘But perhaps it’s good for one to
suffer,’ he went on, ‘perhaps it’s unavoidable and necessary. Perhaps I ought to thank you. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against
the horrible inclemency of life?’ He
halted in front of her, with arms extended in a questioning gesture. Mrs Viveash slightly shrugged her
shoulders. She really didn’t know; she
couldn’t answer. ‘Ah, but that’s all
nonsense,’ he burst out again, ‘all rot.
I want to be happy and contented and successful; and of course I should
work better if I were. And I want, oh,
above everything, everything, I want you: to posses you completely and
exclusively and jealously and for ever.
And the desire is like rust corroding my heart, it’s like moths eating
holes in the fabric of my mind. And you
merely laugh.’ He threw up his hands and
let them limply fall again.
‘But I don’t laugh,’ said Mrs
Viveash. On the contrary, she was very
sorry for him; and, what was more, he rather bored her. For a few days, once, she had thought she
might be in love with him. His
impetuosity had seemed a torrent strong enough to carry her away. She had found out her mistake very soon. After that he had rather amused her: and now
he rather bored her. No, decidedly, she
never laughed. She wondered why she
still went on seeing him. Simply because
one must see someone? or why? ‘Are you
going to go on with my portrait?’ she asked.
Lypiatt sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose I’d better be
getting on with my work. Work – it’s the
only thing. “Portrait of a Tigress”.’ The cynical Titan spoke again. ‘Or shall I call it, “Portrait of a Woman who
has never been in Love”?’
‘That would be a very stupid title,’ said
Mrs Viveash.
‘Or, “Portrait of the Artist’s Heart
Disease”? That would be good, that would
be damned good!’ Lypiatt laughed very
loudly and slapped his thighs. He
looked, Mrs Viveash thought, peculiarly ugly when he laughed. He face seemed to go all to pieces; not a
corner of it but was wrinkled and distorted by the violent grimace of
mirth. Even the forehead was ruined when
he laughed. Foreheads are generally the
human part of people’s faces. Let the
nose twitch and the mouth grin and the eyes twinkle as monkeyishly as you like;
the forehead can still be calm and serene, the forehead still knows how to be
human. But when Casimir laughed, his
forehead joined in the general disintegrating grimace. And sometimes even when he wasn’t laughing,
when he was vivaciously talking, his forehead seemed to lose its calm and would
twitch and wrinkle itself in a dreadful kind of agitation. ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Heart Disease’ –
she didn’t find it so very funny.
‘The critics would think it was a problem
picture,’ Lypiatt went on. ‘And it would
be, by God, so it would be. You are a problem. a problem.
You’re the Sphinx. I wish I were Œdipus and could kill you.’
All this mythology! Mrs Viveash shook her head.
He made his way through the intervening
litter and picked up a canvas that was leaning with averted face against the
wall near the window. He held it out at
arm’s length and examined it, his head critically cocked on one side. ‘Oh, it’s good,’ he said softly. ‘It’s good.
Look at it.’ And, stepping out
once more into the open, he propped it up against the table so that Mrs Viveash
could see it without moving from her chair.
It was a stormy vision of her; it was
Myra seen, so to speak, through a tornado.
He had discovered her in the portrait, had made her longer and thinner
than she really was, had turned her arms into sleek tubes and put a bright,
metallic polish on the curve of her cheek.
The figure in the portrait seemed to be leaning backwards a little from
the surface of the canvas, leaning sideways too, with the twist of an ivory
statuette curved out of the curving tip of a great tusk. Only somehow in Lypiatt’s portrait the curve
seemed to lack grace, it was without point, it had no sense.
‘You’ve made me look,’ said Mrs Viveash
at last, ‘as though I were being blown out of shape by the wind.’ All this show of violence – what was the
point of it? She didn’t like it, she
didn’t like it at all. But Casimir was
delighted with her comment. He slapped
his thighs and once more laughed his restless, sharp-featured face to pieces.
‘Yes, by God,’ he shouted, ‘by God,
that’s right! Blown out of shape by the
wind. That’s it: you’ve said it.’ He began stamping up and down the room again,
gesticulating. ‘The wind, the great wind
that’s in me.’ He struck his
forehead. ‘The wind of life, the wild
west wind. I feel it inside me, blowing,
blowing. It carries me along with it;
for though it’s inside me, it’s more than I am, it’s a force that comes from
somewhere else, it’s Life itself, it’s God.
It blows me along in the teeth of opposing fate, it makes me work on,
fight on.’ He was like a man who walks
along a sinister road at night and sings to keep up his own spirits, to
emphasize and magnify his own existence.
‘And when I paint, when I write or improvise my music, it bends the
things I have in my mind, it pushes them in one direction, so that everything I
do has the look of a tree that streams north-east with all its branches and all
its trunk from the root upwards, as though it were trying to run from before
the Atlantic gale.’
Lypiatt stretched out his two hands and,
with fingers splayed out to the widest and trembling in the excessive tension
of the muscles, moved them slowly upwards and sideways, as though he were running
his palms up the stem of a little wind-wizened tree on a hilltop above the
ocean.
Mrs Viveash continued to look at the
unfinished portrait. It was as noisy and
easy and immediately effective as a Vermouth advertisement in the streets of
Padua. Cinzano, Bonomelli, Campari –
illustrious names. Giotto and Mantegna mouldered meanwhile in their respective
chapels.
‘And look at this,’ Lypiatt went on. He took down the canvas that was clamped to
the easel and held it out for her inspection.
It was one of Casimir’s abstract paintings: a procession of machine-like
forms rushing up diagonally from right to left across the canvas, with as it
were a spray of energy blowing back from the crest of the wave towards the top
right-hand corner. ‘In this painting,’ he
said, ‘I symbolize the Artist’s conquering spirit – rushing on the universe,
making it its own.’ He began to declaim:
‘Look
down, Conquistador,
There on the valley’s broad green floor,
There lies the lake, the jewelled cities
gleam,
Chalco and Tlacopan;
Await the coming Man;
Look down on Mexico, Conquistador,
Land of your golden dream.
Or the same idea in
terms of music …’ and Lypiatt dashed to the piano and evoked a distorted ghost
of Scriabin. ‘You see?’ he asked
feverishly, when the ghost was laid again and the sad, cheap jangling had faded
again into silence. ‘You feel?
The artist rushes on the world, conquers it, gives it beauty, imposes a
moral significance.’ He returned to the
picture. ‘This will be fine when it’s
finished,’ he said. ‘Tremendous. You feel the wind blowing there, too.’ And with a pointing finger he followed up the
onrush of the forms. ‘The great
south-wester driving them on. “Like
leaves from an enchanter fleeing.” Only
not chaotically, not in disorder.
They’re blown, so to speak, in columns of four – by a conscious
wind.’ He leaned the canvas against the
table and was free again to march and brandish his conquering fists.
‘Life,’ he said, ‘life – that’s the
great, essential thing. You’ve got to
get life into your art, otherwise it’s nothing.
And life only comes out of life, out of passion and feeling; it can’t
come out of theories. That’s the
stupidity of all this chatter about art for art’s sake and the æsthetic
emotions and purely formal values and all that.
It’s only the formal relations that matter; one subject is just as good
as another – that’s the theory. You’ve
only got to look at the pictures of the people who put it into practice to see
that it won’t do. Life comes out of life. You must paint with passion, and the passion
will stimulate your intellect to create the right formal relations. And to paint with passion, you must paint
things that passionately interest you, moving things, human things. Nobody, except a mystical pantheist, like Van
Gogh, can seriously be as much interested in napkins, apples and bottles as in
his lover’s face, or the resurrection, or the destiny of man. Could Mantegna have devised his splendid
compositions if he had painted arrangements of Chianti flasks and cheeses
instead of Crucifixions, martyrs, and triumphs of great men? Nobody but a fool could believe it. And could I have painted that portrait if I
hadn’t loved you, if you weren’t killing me?’
Ah, Bonomelli and illustrious Cinzano!
‘Passionately I paint passion. I draw life out of life. And I wish them joy of their bottles and
their Canadian apples and their muddy table napkins with the beastly folds in
them that look like loops of tripe.’
Once more Lypiatt disintegrated himself with laughter; then was silent.
Mrs Viveash nodded, slowly and
reflectively. ‘I think you’re right,’
she said. Yes, he was surely right;
there must be life, life was the important thing. That was precisely why his paintings were so
bad – she saw now; there was no life in them.
Plenty of noise there was, and gesticulation and a violent galvanized
twitching; but no life, only the theatrical show of it. There was a flaw in the conduit; somewhere
between the man and his work life leaked out.
He protested too much. But it was
no good; there was no disguising the deadness.
Her portrait was a dancing mummy.
He bored her now. Did she even
positively dislike him? Behind her
unchanging pale eyes Mrs Viveash wondered.
But in any case, she reflected, one needn’t always like the people with
whom one associates. There are
music-halls as well as confidential boudoirs; some people are admitted to the
tea-party and the tête-à-tête,
others, on a stage invisible, poor things! to themselves, do their little
song-and-dance, roll out their characteristic patter, and having provided you
with your entertainment are dismissed with their due share of applause. But then, what if they become boring?
‘Well,’ said Lypiatt at last – he had
stood there, motionless, for a long time, biting his nails, ‘I suppose we’d
better begin our sitting.’ He picked up
the unfinished portrait and adjusted it on the easel. ‘I’ve wasted a lot of time,’ he said, ‘and
there isn’t, after all, so much of it to waste.’ He spoke gloomily, and his whole person had
become, all of a sudden, curiously shrunken and deflated. ‘There isn’t so much of it,’ he repeated, and
sighed. ‘I still think of myself as a
young man, young and promising, don’t you know.
Casimir Lypiatt – it’s a young, promising sort of name, isn’t it? But I’m not young, I’ve passed the age of
promise. Every now and then I realize
it, and it’s painful, it’s depressing.’
Mrs Viveash stepped up to the model’s
dais and took her seat. ‘Is that right?’
she asked.
Lypiatt looked first at her, then at his
picture. Her beauty, his passion – were
they only to meet on the canvas? Opps
was her lover. Time was passing; he felt
tired. ‘That’ll do,’ he said, and began
painting. ‘How young are you?’ he asked
after a moment.
‘Twenty-five, I should imagine,’ said Mrs
Viveash.
‘Twenty-five? Good Lord, it’s nearly fifteen years since I
was twenty-five. Fifteen years, fighting
all the time. God, how I hate people sometimes! Everybody.
It’s not their malignity I mind; I can give them back as good as they
give me. It’s their power of silence and
indifference, it’s their capacity for making themselves deaf. Here am I with something to say to them,
something important and essential. And
I’ve been saying it for more than fifteen years, I’ve been shouting it. They pay no attention. I bring them my head and heart on a charger,
and then don’t even notice that the things are there. I sometimes wonder how much longer I can
manage to go on.’ His voice had become
very low, and it trembled. ‘One’s nearly
forty, you know….’ The voice faded huskily away into silence. Languidly and as though the business
exhausted him, he began mixing colours on his palette.
Mrs Viveash looked at him. No, he wasn’t young; at the moment, indeed,
he seemed to have become much older than he really was. An old man was standing there, peaked and
sharp and worn. He had failed, he was
unhappy. But the world would have been
unjuster, less discriminating if it had given him success.
‘Some people believe in you,’ she said;
there was nothing else for her to say.
Lypiatt looked up at her. ‘You?’ he asked.
Mrs Viveash nodded, deliberately. It was a lie.
But was it possible to tell the truth?
‘And then there is the future,’ she reassured him, and her faint
deathbed voice seemed to prophesy with a perfect certainty. ‘You’re not forty yet; you’ve got twenty,
thirty years of work in front of you.
And there were others, after all, who had to wait – a long time –
sometimes till after they were dead.
Great men; Blake, for instance….’ She felt positively ashamed; it was
like a little talk by Doctor Frank Crane.
But she felt still more ashamed when she saw that Casimir had begun to
cry, and that the tears were rolling, one after another, slowly down his face.
He put down his palette, he stepped on to
the dias, he came and knelt at Mrs Viveash’s feet. He took one of her hands between his own and
he bent over it, pressing it to his forehead, as though it were a charm against
unhappy thoughts, sometimes kissing it; soon it was wet with tears. He wept almost in silence.
‘It’s all right,’ Mrs Viveash kept
repeating, ‘it’s all right,’ and she laid her free hand on his bowed head, she
patted it comfortingly as one might pat the head of a large dog that comes and
thrusts its muzzle between one’s knees.
She felt, even as she made it, how meaningless and unintimate the
gesture was. If she had liked him, she
would have run her fingers through his hair; but somehow his hair rather
disgusted her. ‘It’s all right, all
right.’ But, of course, it wasn’t all
right; and she was comforting him under false pretences and he was kneeling at
the feet of somebody who simply wasn’t there – so utterly detached, so far away
she was from all this scene and all his misery.
‘You’re the only person,’ he said at
last, ‘who cares or understands.’
Mrs Viveash could almost have laughed.
He began once more to kiss her hand.
‘Beautiful and enchanting Myra – you were
always that. But now you’re good and
dear as well, now I know you’re kind.’
‘Poor Casimir!’ she said. Why was it that people always got involved in
one’s life? If only one could manage
things on the principle of the railways!
Parallel tracks – that was the thing.
For a few miles you’d be running at the same speed. There’d be delightful conversation out of the
windows; you’d exchange the omelette in your restaurant car for the vol-au-vent
in theirs. And when you’d said all there
was to say, you’d put on a little more steam, wave your hand, blow a kiss and away
you’d go, forging ahead along the smooth, polished rails. But instead of that, there were these
dreadful accidents; the points were wrongly set, the trains came crashing
together; or people jumped on as you were passing through the stations and made
a nuisance of themselves and wouldn’t allow themselves to be turned off. Poor Casimir!
But he irritated her, he was a horrible bore. She ought to have stopped seeing him.
‘You can’t wholly dislike me, then?’
‘But of course not, my poor Casimir!’
‘If you knew how horribly I loved
you!’ He looked up at her despairingly.
‘But what’s the good?’ said Mrs Viveash.
‘Have you ever known what it’s like to
love someone so much that you feel you could die of it? So that it hurts all the time. As thought there were a wound. Have you ever known that?’
Mrs Viveash smiled her agonizing smile,
nodded slowly and said, ‘Perhaps. And
one doesn’t die, you know. One doesn’t
die.’
Lypiatt was leaning back, staring fixedly
up at her. The tears were dry on his
face, his cheeks were flushed. ‘Do you know
what it is,’ he asked, ‘to love so much that you begin to long for the anodyne
of physical pain to quench the pain of the soul? You don’t know that.’ And suddenly, with his clenched fist, he
began to bang the wooden dias on which he was kneeling, blow after blow, with
all his strength.
Mrs Viveash leant forward and tried to
arrest his hand. ‘You’re mad, Casimir,’
she said. ‘You’re mad. Don’t do that.’ She spoke with anger.
Lypiatt laughed till his face was all
broken up with the grimace, and proffered for her inspection his bleeding
knuckles. The skin hung in little white
tags and tatters, and from below the blood was slowly oozing up to the
surface. ‘Look,’ he said, and laughed
again. Then suddenly, with an
extraordinary agility, he jumped to his feet, bounded from the dias and began
once more to stride up and down the fairway between his easel and the door.
‘By God,’ he kept repeating, ‘by God, by
God. I feel it in me. I can face the whole lot of you; the whole
damned lot. Yes, and I shall get the
better of you yet. An Artist’ – he
called up that traditional ghost and it comforted him; he wrapped himself with
a protective gesture within the ample folds of its bright mantle – ‘an Artist
doesn’t fail under unhappiness. He gets
new strength from it. The torture makes him sweat new masterpieces….’
He began to talk about his books, his
poems and pictures; all the great things in his head, the things he had already
done. He talked about his exhibition –
ah, by God, that would astonish them, that would bowl them over, this
time. The blood mounted to his face;
there was a flush over the high projecting cheekbones. He could feel the warm blood behind his eyes. He laughed aloud; he was a laughing
lion. He stretched out his arms; he was
enormous, his arms reached out like the branches of a cedar. The Artist walked across the world and the
mangy dogs ran yelping and snapping behind him.
The great wind blew and blew, driving him on; it lifted him and he began
to fly.
Mrs Viveash listened. If didn’t look as though he would get much
further with the portrait.
CHAPTER VII
IT was
Press Day. The critics had begun to
arrive; Mr Albermarle circulated among them with a ducal amiability. The young assistant hovered vaguely about,
straining to hear what the great men had to say and trying to pretend that he
wasn’t eavesdropping. Lypiatt’s pictures
hung on the walls, and Lypiatt’s catalogue, thick with its preface and its
explanatory notes, was in all hands.
‘Very strong,’ Mr Albermarle kept repeating,
‘very strong indeed!’ It was his
password for the day.
Little Mr Clew, who represented the Daily Post, was inclined to be
enthusiastic. ‘How well he writes!’ he
said to Mr Albermarle, looking up from the catalogue. ‘And how well he paints! What impasto!’
Impasto,
impasto – the young assistant sidled of unobtrusively to the desk and made
a note of it. He would look the word up
in Grubb’s Dictionary of Art and Artists
later on. He made his way back, and as
though by accident, into Mr Clew’s neighbourhood.
Mr Clew was one of those rare people who
have a real passion for art. He loved
painting, all painting, indiscriminately.
In a picture-gallery he was like a Turk in a harem; he adored them
all. He loved Memling as much as
Raphael, he loved Grünewald and Michelangelo, Holman Hunt and Manet, Romney and
Tintoretto; how happy he could be with all of them! Sometimes, it is true, he hated; but that was
only when familiarity had not yet bred love.
At the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, for example, in 1911, he had
taken a very firm stand. ‘This is an
obscene farce,’ he had written then.
Now, however, there was no more passionate admirer of Matisse’s genius. As a connoisseur and Kuntsforscher, Mr Clew was much esteemed. People would bring him dirty old pictures to
look at, and he would exclaim at once: Why, it’s an El Greco, a Piazzetta, or
some other suitable name. Asked how he
knew, he would shrug his shoulders and say: But it’s signed all over. His certainty and his enthusiasm were infectious. Since the coming of El Greco into fashion, he
had discovered dozens of early works by that great artist. For Lord Petersfield’s collection alone he
had found four early El Grecos, all by pupils of Bassano. Lord Petersfield’s confidence in Mr Clew was
unbounded; not even that affair of the Primitives had shaken it. It was a sad affair: Lord Petersfield’s
Duccio had shown signs of cracking; the estate carpenter was sent for to take a
look at the panel; he had looked. ‘A
worse-seasoned piece of Illinois hickory,’ he said, ‘I’ve never seen.’ After that he looked at the Simone Martini;
for that, on the contrary, he was full of praise. Smooth-grained, well-seasoned – it wouldn’t
crack, no, not in a hundred years. ‘A
nicer slice of board never came out of America.’ He had a hyperbolical way of speaking. Lord Petersfield was extremely angry; he
dismissed the estate carpenter on the spot.
After that he told Mr Clew that he wanted a Giorgione, and Mr Clew went
out and found him one which was signed all over.
‘I like this very much,’ said Mr Clew,
pointing to one of the thoughts with which Lypiatt had prefaced his
catalogue. ‘“Genius,”’ he adjusted his
spectacles and began to read aloud, ‘“is life.
Genius is a force of nature. In
art, nothing else counts. The modern
impotents, who are afraid of genius and who are envious of it, have invented in
self-defence the notion of the Artist.
The Artist with his sense of form, his style, his devotion to pure
beauty, et cetera, et cetera. But Genius
includes the Artist; every Genius has, among very many others, the qualities
attributed by the impotents to the Artist.
The Artist without genius is a carver of fountains through which no
water flows.” Very true,’ said Mr Clew,
‘very true indeed.’ He marked the
passage with his pencil.
Mr Albermarle produced the password. ‘Very strongly put,’ he said.
‘I have always felt that myself,’ said Mr
Clew. ‘El Greco, for example …’
‘Good morning. What about El Greco?’ said a voice, all in
one breath. The thin, long, skin-covered
skeleton of Mr Mallard hung over them like a guilty conscience. Mr Mallard wrote every week in the Hebdomadal Digest. He had an immense knowledge of art, and a
sincere dislike of all that was beautiful.
The only modern painter whom he really admired was Hodler. All others were treated by him with a
merciless savagery; he tore them to pieces in his weekly articles with all the
holy gusto of a Calvinist iconoclast smashing images of the Virgin.
‘What about El Greco?’ he repeated. He had a peculiarly passionate loathing of El
Greco.
Mr Clew smiled up at him propitiatingly;
he was afraid of Mr Mallard. His
enthusiasms were no match for Mr Mallard’s erudite and logical disgusts. ‘I was merely quoting him as an example,’ he
said.
‘An example, I hope, of incompetent
drawing, baroque composition, disgusting forms, garish colouring and hysterical
subject-matter.’ Mr Mallard showed his
old ivory teeth in a menacing smile.
‘Those are the only things which El Greco’s work exemplifies.’
Mr Clew gave a nervous little laugh. ‘What do you think of these?’ he asked,
pointing to Lypiatt’s canvasses.
‘They look to me very ordinarily bad,’
answered Mr Mallard.
The young assistant listened
appalled. In a business like this, how
was it possible to make good?
‘All the same,’ said Mr Clew
courageously, ‘I like that bowl of roses in the window with the landscape
behind. Number twenty-nine.’ He looked in the catalogue. ‘And there’s a really charming little verse
about it:
“O beauty of the rose,
Goodness as well as perfume exhaling!
Who gazes on these flowers,
On this blue hill and ripening field – he
knows
Where duty leads and that the nameless Powers
In a rose can speak their will.”
Really
charming!’ Mr Clew made another mark
with his pencil.
‘But commonplace, commonplace.’ Mr Mallard shook his head. ‘And in any case a verse can’t justify a bad
picture. What an unsubtle harmony of
colour! And how uninteresting the
composition is! That receding diagonal –
it’s been worked to death.’ He too made
a mark in his catalogue – a cross and a little circle, arranged like the skull
and cross-bones on a pirate’s flag. Mr
Mallard’s catalogues were always covered with these little marks: they were his
symbols of condemnation.
Mr Albemarle, meanwhile, had moved away
to greet the new arrivals. To the critic
of the Daily Cinema he had to explain
that there were no portraits of celebrities.
The reporter from the Evening
Planet had to be told which were the best pictures.
‘Mr Lypiatt,’ he dictated, ‘is a poet and
philosopher as well as a painter. His
catalogue is a – h’m – declaration of faith.’
The reporter took it down in
shorthand. ‘And very nice too,’ he
said. ‘I’m most grateful to you, sir,
most grateful.’ And he hurried away, to
get to the Cattle Show before the King should arrive. Mr Albemarle affably addressed himself to the
critic of the Morning Globe.
‘I always regard this gallery,’ said a
loud and cheerful voice, full of bulls and canaries in chorus, ‘as positively a
mauvais lieu. Such exhibitions!’ And Mr Mercaptan shrugged his shoulders
expressively. He halted to wait for his
companion.
Mrs Viveash had lagged behind, reading
the catalogue as she slowly walked along.
‘It’s a complete book,’ she said, ‘full of poems and essays and short
stories even, so far as I can see.’
‘Oh, the usual cracker mottoes,’ Mr
Mercaptan laughed. ‘I know the sort of
thing. “Look after the past and the
future will look after itself.” “God
squared minus man squared equals Art-plus-life times Art-minus-Life.” “The Higher the Art the fewer the morals” –
only that’s too nearly good sense to have been invented by Lypiatt. But I know the sort of thing. I could go on life that for ever.’ Mr Mercaptan was delighted with himself.
‘I’ll read you one of them,’ said Mrs
Viveash. ‘“A picture is a chemical combination of plastic form and spiritual
significance.”’
‘Crikey!’ said Mr Mercaptan.
‘“Those who think that a picture is a
matter of nothing but plastic form are like those who imagine that water is
made of nothing but hydrogen.”’
Mr Mercaptan made a grimace. ‘What writing!’ he exclaimed; ‘le style c’est l’homme. Lypiatt hasn’t got a style. Argal – inexorable conclusion – Lypiatt
doesn’t exist. My word, though. Look at those horrible great nudes
there. Like Caraccis with cubical
muscles.’
‘Samson and Delilah,’ said Mrs
Viveash. ‘Would you like me to read
about them?’
‘Certainly not.’
Mrs Viveash did not press the
matter. Casimir, she thought, must have
been thinking of her when he wrote this little poem about Poets and Women,
crossed genius, torments, the sweating of masterpieces. She sighed.
‘Those leopards are rather nice,’ she said, and looked at the catalogue
again. ‘“An animal is a symbol and its form is significant. In the long process of adaptation, evolution
has refined and simplified and shaped, till every part of the animal expresses
one desire, a single idea. Man, who has
become what he is, not by specialization, but by generalization, symbolizes
with his body no one thing. He is a
symbol of everything from the most hideous and ferocious bestiality to
godhead.”’
‘Dear me,’ said Mr Mercaptan.
A canvas of mountains and enormous clouds
like nascent sculptures presented itself.
‘“Aerial Alps”’ Mrs Viveash began to
read.
‘“Aerial
Alps of amber and snow,
Junonian flesh, and bosomy alabaster
Carved by the wind’s uncertain hands …”’
Mr Mercaptan stopped his ears. ‘Please, please,’ he begged.
‘Number seventeen,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘is
called “Woman on a Cosmic Background.”’
A female figure stood leaning against a pillar on a hilltop, and beyond
was a blue night with stars. ‘Underneath
is written: “For one at least, she is more than the starry universe.”’ Mrs Viveash remembered that Lypiatt had once
said very much that sort of thing to her.
‘So many of Casimir’s things remind me,’ she said, ‘of those Italian
vermouth advertisements. You know –
Cinzano, Bonomelli and all those. I wish
they didn’t. This woman in white with
her head in the Great Bear….’ She shook her head. ‘Poor Casimir.’
Mr Mercaptan roared and squealed with
laughter. ‘Bonomelli,’ he said; ‘that’s
precisely it. What a critic, Myra! I take off my hat.’ They moved on. ‘And what’s this grand transformation scene?’
he asked.
Mrs Viveash looked at the catalogue. ‘It’s called “The Sermon on the Mount’,’ she
said. ‘And really, do you know, I rather
like it. All that crowd of figures
slanting up the hill and the single figure on the top – it seems to me very dramatic.’
‘Mr dear,’
protested Mr Mercaptan.
‘And in spite of everything,’ said Mrs
Viveash, feeling suddenly and uncomfortably that she had somehow been betraying
the man, ‘he’s really very nice, you know.
Very nice indeed.’ Her expiring
voice sounded very decidedly.
‘Ah, ces
femmes,’ exclaimed Mr Mercaptan, ‘ces
femmes! They’re all Pasiphaes and Ledas.
They all in their hearts prefer beasts to men, savages to civilized
beings. Even you, Myra, I really
believe.’ He shook his head.
Mrs Viveash ignored the outburst. ‘Very nice,’ she repeated thoughtfully. ‘Only rather a bore …’ Her voice expired
altogether.
They continued their round of the
gallery.
CHAPTER
VIII
CRITICALLY,
in the glasses of Mr Bojanus’s fitting-room, Gumbril examined his profile, his
back view. Inflated, the Patent
Small-Clothes bulged, bulged decidedly, though with a certain gracious opulence
that might, in a person of the other sex, have seemed only deliciously natural. In him, however, Gumbril had to admit, the
opulence seemed a little misplaced and paradoxical. Still, if one has to suffer in order to be
beautiful, one must also expect to be ugly in order not to suffer. Practically, the trousers were a tremendous
success. He sat down heavily on the hard
wooden bench of the fitting-room and was received as though on a lap of
bounding resiliency; the Patent Small-Clothes, there was no doubt, would be
proof enough even against marble. And
the coat, he comforted himself, would mask with its skirts the too decided
bulge. Or if it didn’t, well, there was
no help for it. One must resign oneself
to bulging, that was all.
‘Very nice,’ he declared at last.
Mr Bojanus, who had been watching his
client in silence and with a polite but also, Gumbril could not help feeling, a
somewhat ironical smile, coughed. ‘It
depends,’ he said, ‘precisely what you mean by “nice”.’ He cocked his head on one side, and the fine
waxed end of his moustache was like a pointer aimed up at some remote star.
Gumbril said nothing, but catching sight
once more of his own side view, nodded a dubious agreement.
‘If by nice,’ continued Mr Bojanus, ‘you
mean comfortable, well and good. If,
however, you mean elegant, then, Mr Gumbril, I fear I must disagree.’
‘But elegance,’ said Gumbril, feebly playing
the philosopher, ‘is only relative, Mr Bojanus.
There are certain African negroes among whom it is considered elegant to
pierce the lips and distend them with wooden plates, until the mouth looks like
a pelican’s beak.’
Mr Bojanus placed his hand in his bosom
and slightly bowed. ‘Very possibly, Mr
Gumbril,’ he replied. ‘But if you’ll
pardon my saying so, we are not African negroes.’
Gumbril was crushed, deservedly. He looked at himself again in the
mirrors. ‘Do you object,’ he asked after
a pause, ‘to all eccentricities in dress, Mr Bojanus? Would you put us all into your elegant
uniform?’
‘Certainly not,’ replied Mr Bojanus. ‘There are certain walks of life in which
eccentricity in appearance is positively a sine
qua non, Mr Gumbril, and I might almost say de rigueur.’
‘And which walks of life, Mr Bojanus, may
I ask? You refer, perhaps, to the
artistic walks? Sombreros and Byronic
collars and possibly velveteen trousers?
Though all that sort of thing is surely a little out of date, nowadays.’
Enigmatically Mr Bojanus smiled, a
playful Sphinx. He thrust his right hand
deeper into his bosom and with his left twisted to a finer needle the point of
his moustache. ‘Not artists, Mr
Gumbril.’ He shook his head. ‘In practice they may show themselves a
little eccentric and negleejay. But they
have no need to look unusual on principle.
It’s only the politicians who need to do it on principle. It’s only de
rigueur, as one might say, in the political walks, Mr Gumbril.’
‘You surprise me,’ said Gumbril. ‘I should have thought that it was to the
politician’s interest to look respectable and normal.’
‘But it is still more to his interest as
a leader of men to look distinguished,’ Mr Bojanus replied. ‘Well, not precisely distinguished,’ he
corrected himself, ‘because that implies that politicians look distangay, which I regret to say, Mr
Gumbril, they very often don’t.
Distinguishable, is more what I mean.’
‘Eccentricity is their badge of office?’
suggested Gumbril. He sat down
luxuriously on the Patent Small-Clothes.
‘That’s more like it,’ said Mr Bojanus,
tilting his moustaches. ‘The leader has
got to look different from the other ones.
In the good old days they always wore their official badges. The leader ‘ad his livery, like everyone
else, to show who he was. That was
sensible, Mr Gumbril. Nowadays he has no
badge – at least not for ordinary occasions – for I don’t count Privy
Councillors’ uniforms and all that sort of once-a-year fancy dress. ‘E’s reduced to dressing in some eccentric
way or making the most of the peculiarities of ‘is personal appearance. A very ‘apazard method of doing things, Mr
Gumbril, very ‘apazard.’
Gumbril agreed.
Mr Bojanus went on, making small, neat
gestures as he spoke. ‘Some of them,’ he
said, ‘wear ‘uge collars, like Mr Gladstone.
Some wear orchids and eyeglasses, like Joe Chamberlain. Some let their ‘air grow, like Lloyd George. Some wear curious ‘ats, like Winston
Churchill. Some put on black shirts,
like this Mussolini, and some put on red ones, like Garibaldi. Some turn up their moustaches, like the
German Emperor. Some turn them down,
like Clemenceau. Some grow whiskers,
like Tirpitz. I don’t speak of all the
uniforms, orders, armaments, ‘ead dresses, feathers, crowns, buttons,
tattooings, earrings, sashes, swords, trains, tiaras, urims, thummims and what
not, Mr Gumbril, that ‘ave been used in the past and in other parts of the
world to distinguish the leader. We ‘oo
know our ‘istory, Mr Gumbril, we know all about that.’
Gumbril made a deprecating gesture. ‘You speak for yourself, Mr Bojanus,’ he
said.
Mr Bojanus bowed.
‘Pray continue,’ said Gumbril.
Mr Bojanus bowed again. ‘Well, Mr Gumbril,’ he said, ‘the point of
all these things, as I’ve already remarked, is to make the leader look
different, so that ‘e can be recognized as the first coop d’oil, as you might say, by the ‘erd ‘e ‘appens to be
leading. For the ‘uman ‘erd, Mr Gumbril,
is an ‘erd which can’t do without a leader.
Sheep, for example: I never noticed that they ‘ad a leader; nor
rooks. Bees, on the other ‘and, I take
it, ‘ave. At least when they’re
swarming. Correct me, Mr Gumbril, if I’m
wrong. Natural ‘istory was never, as you
might say, my forty.’
‘Nor mine,’ protested Gumbril.
‘As for elephants and wolves, Mr Gumbril,
I can’t pretend to speak of them with first-‘and knowledge. Nor llamas, nor locusts, nor squab pigeons,
nor lemmings. But ‘uman beings, Mr
Gumbril, those I can claim to talk of with authority, if I may say so in all
modesty, and not as the scribes. I ‘ave
made a special study of them, Mr Gumbril.
And my profession ‘as brought me into contact with very numerous
specimens.’
Gumbril could not help wondering where
precisely in Mr Bojanus’s museum he himself had his place.
‘The ‘uman ‘erd,’ Mr Bojanus went on,
‘must have a leader. And a leader must
have something to distinguish him from the ‘erd. It’s important for ‘is interests that he
should be recognized easily. See a baby
reaching out of a bath and you immediately think of Pears’ Soap; see the white
‘air waving out behind, and you think of Lloyd George. That’s the secret. But in my opinion, Mr Gumbril, the old system
was much more sensible, give them regular uniforms and badges, I say; make
Cabinet Ministers wear feathers in their ‘airr.
Then the people will be looking to a real fixed symbol of leadership,
not to the peculiarities of the mere individuals. Beards and ‘air and funny collars change; but
a good uniform is always the same. Give
them feathers, that’s what I say, Mr Gumbril.
Feathers will increase the dignity of the State and lessen the
importance of the individual. And that,’
concluded Mr Bojanus with emphasis, ‘that, Mr Gumbril, will be all to the
good.’
‘But you don’t mean to tell me,’ said
Gumbril, ‘that if I chose to show myself to the multitude in my inflated
trousers, I could become a leader – do you?’
‘Ah, no,’ said Mr Bojanus. ‘You’d ‘ave to ‘ave the talent for talking
and ordering people about, to begin with.
Feathers wouldn’t give the genius, but they’d magnify the effect of what
there was.’
Gumbril got up and began to divest
himself of the Small-Clothes. He
unscrewed the valve and the air whistled out, dyingly. He too sighed. ‘Curious,’ he said pensively, ‘that I’ve
never felt the need for a leader. I’ve
never met anyone I felt I could wholeheartedly admire or believe in, never
anyone I wanted to follow. It must be
pleasant, I should think, to hand oneself over to somebody else. It must give you a warm, splendid,
comfortable feeling.’
Mr Bojanus smiled and shook his
head. ‘You and I,’ Mr Gumbril,’ he said,
‘we’re not the sort of people to be impressed with feathers or even by talking
and ordering about. We may not be
leaders ourselves. But at any rate we
aren’t the ‘erd.’
‘Not the main herd, perhaps.’
‘Not any ‘erd,’ Mr Bojanus insisted
proudly.
Gumbril shook his head dubiously and
buttoned up his trousers. He was not
sure, now he came to think of it, that he didn’t belong to all the herds – by a
sort of honorary membership and temporarily, as occasion offered, as one
belongs to the Union at the sister university or to the Naval and Military Club
while one’s own is having its annual clean-out.
Shearwater’s herd, Lypiatt’s herd, Mr Mercaptan’s herd, Mrs Viveash’s
herd the architectural herd of his father, the educational herd (but that,
thank God! Was now bleating on distant pastures), the herd of Mr Bojanus – he
belonged to them all a little, to none of them completely. Nobody belonged to his herd. How could they? No chameleon can live with comfort on a
tartan. He put on his coat.
‘I’ll send the garments this evening,’
said Mr Bojanus.
Gumbril left the shop. At the theatrical wig-maker’s in Leicester
Square he ordered a blond fan-shaped beard to match his own hair and
moustache. He would, at any rate, be his
own leader; he would wear a badge, a symbol of authority. And Coleman had said that there were
dangerous relations to be entered into by the symbol’s aid.
Ah, now he was provisionally a member of
Coleman’s herd. It was all very
depressing.
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 hold 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.
CHAPTER X
MR BOLDERO liked
the idea of the Patent Small-Clothes. He
liked it immensely, he said, immensely.
‘There’s money in it,’ he said.
Mr Boldero was a small dark man of about
forty-five, active as a bird and with a bird’s brown, beady eyes, a bird’s
sharp nose. He was always busy, always
had twenty different irons in the fire at once, was always fresh, clear-headed,
never tired. He was also always
unpunctual, always untidy. He had no
sense of time or of order. But he got
away with it, as he liked to say. He
delivered the goods – or rather the goods, in the convenient form of cash,
delivered themselves, almost miraculously it always seemed, to him.
He was like a bird in appearance. But in mind, Gumbril found, after having seen
him once or twice, he was like a caterpillar: he ate all that was put before
him, he consumed a hundred times his own mental weight every day. Other people’s ideas, other people’s
knowledge – they were his food. He
devoured them and they were at once his own.
All that belonged to other people he annexed without a scruple or a
second thought, quite naturally, as though it were already his own. And he absorbed it so rapidly and completely,
he laid public claim to it so promptly that he sometimes deceived people into
believing that he had really anticipated them in their ideas, that he had known
for years and years the things they had just been telling him, and which he
would at once airily repeat to them with the perfect assurance of one who knows
– knows by instinct, as it were, by inheritance.
At their first luncheon he had asked
Gumbril to tell him all about modern painting.
Gumbril had given him a brief lecture; before the savoury had appeared
on the table, Mr Boldero was talking with perfect familiarity of Picasso and
Derain. He almost made it understood
that he had a fine collection of their works in his drawing-room at home. Being a trifle deaf, however, he was not very
good at names, and Gumbril’s all-too-tactful corrections were lost on him. He could not be induced to abandon his Bacosso
in favour of any other version of the Spaniard’s name. Bacosso – why, he had known all about Bacosso
since he was a schoolboy! Bacosso was an
old master, already.
Mr Boldero was very severe with the
waiters and knew so well how things ought to be done at a good restaurant, that
Gumbril felt sure he must recently have lunched with some meticulous
gormandizer of the old school. And when
the waiter made as though to serve them with brandy in small glasses, Mr
Boldero was so passionately indignant that he sent for the manager.
‘Do you mean to tell me,’ he shouted in a
perfect frenzy of righteous anger, ‘that you don’t yet know how brandy ought to
be drunk?’
Perhaps it was only last week that he
himself, Gumbril reflected, had learned to aerate his cognac in Gargantuan
beakers.
Meanwhile, of course, the Patent
Small-Clothes were not neglected. As
soon as he had been told about the things, Mr Boldero began speaking of them
with a perfect and practised familiarity.
They were already his, mentally his.
And it was only Mr Boldero’s generosity that prevented him from making
the Small-Clothes more effectively his own.
‘If it weren’t for the friendship and
respect which I feel for your father, Mr Gumbril,’ he said, twinkling genially
over the brandy, ‘I’d just annex your Small-Clothes. Bag and baggage. Just annex them.’
‘Ah, but they’re my patent,’ said
Gumbril. ‘Or at least they’re in process
of being patented. The agents are at
work.’
Mr Boldero laughed. ‘Do you suppose that would trouble me if I
wanted to be unscrupulous? I’d just take
the idea and manufacture the article.
You’d bring an action. I’d have
it defended with all the professional erudition that could be brought. You’d find yourself let in for a case that
might cost thousands. And how would you
pay for it? You’d be forced to come to
an agreement out of court, Mr Gumbril.
That’s what you’d have to do. And
a damned bad agreement it would be for you, I can tell you.’ Mr Boldero laughed very cheerfully at the
thought of the badness of this agreement.
‘But don’t be alarmed,’ he said.
‘I shan’t do it, you know.’
Gumbril was not wholly reassured. Tactfully, he tried to find out what terms Mr
Boldero was prepared to offer. Mr
Boldero was nebulously vague.
They met again in Gumbril’s rooms. The contemporary drawings on the walls
reminded Mr Boldero that he was now an art expert. He told Gumbril all about it – in Gumbril’s
own words. Every now and then, it was
true, Mr Boldero made a little slip.
Bacosso, for example, remained unshakeably Bacosso. But on the whole the performance was most
impressive. It made Gumbril feel very
uncomfortable, however, while it lasted.
For he recognized in this characteristic of Mr Boldero a horrible
caricature of himself. He too was an
assimilator; more discriminating, no doubt, more tactful, knowing better than
Mr Boldero how to turn the assimilated experience into something new and truly
his own; but still a caterpillar, definitely a caterpillar. He began studying Mr Boldero with a close and
disgustful attention, as one might pore over some repulsive momento mori.
It was a relief when Mr Boldero stopped
talking art and consented to get down to business. Gumbril was wearing for the occasion the
sample pair of Small-Clothes which Mr Bojanus had made for him. For Mr Boldero’s benefit he put them, so to
speak, through their paces. He allowed
himself to drop with a bump on to the floor – arriving there bruiseless and unjarred. He sat in complete comfort for minutes at a
stretch on the edge of the ornamental iron fender. In the intervals he paraded up and down
before Mr Boldero like a mannequin. ‘A
trifle bulgy,’ said Mr Boldero. ‘But
still …’ He was, taking it all round, favourably impressed. It was time, he said, to begin thinking of
details. They would have to begin by
making experiments with the bladders to discover a model combining, as Mr
Boldero put it, ‘maximum efficiency with minimum bulge’. When they had found the right thing, they
would have it made in suitable quantities by any good rubber firm. As for the trousers themselves, they could
rely for those on sweated female labour in the East End. ‘Cheap and good,’ said Mr Boldero.
‘It sounds ideal,’ said Gumbril.
‘And then,’ said Mr Boldero, ‘there’s our
advertising campaign. On that I may
say,’ he went on with a certain solemnity, ‘will depend the failure or success
of our enterprise. I consider it of the
first importance.’
‘Quite,’ said Gumbril, nodding
importantly and with intelligence.
‘We must set to work,’ said Mr Boldero,
‘sci – en – tifically.’
Gumbril nodded again.
‘We have to appeal,’ Mr Boldero went on
so glibly that Gumbril felt sure he must be quoting somebody else’s words, ‘to
the great instincts and feelings of humanity…. They are the sources of
action. They spend the money, if I may
put it like that.’
‘That’s all very well,’ said
Gumbril. ‘But how do you propose to
appeal to the most important of the instincts?
I refer, as you may well imagine, to sex.’
‘I was just going to come to that,’ said
Mr Boldero, raising his hand as though to ask for a patient hearing. ‘Alas! we can’t. I don’t see any way of hanging our
Small-Clothes on the sexual peg.’
‘Then we are undone,’ said Gumbril, too
dramatically.
‘No, no.’
Mr Boldero was reassuring. ‘You
make the error of the Viennese. You
exaggerate the importance of sex. After
all, my dear Mr Gumbril, there is also the instinct of self-preservation; there
is also,’ he leaned forward, wagging his finger, ‘the social instinct, the
instinct of the herd.’
‘True.’
‘Both of them as powerful as sex. What are the Professor’s famous Censors but
forbidding suggestions from the herd without, made powerful and entrenched by
the social instinct within?’
Gumbril had no answer; Mr Boldero
continued, smiling.
‘So that we shall be all right if we
stick to self-preservation and the herd.
Rub in the comfort and the utility, they hygienic virtues of our
Small-Clothes; that will catch their self-preservatory feelings. Aim at their dread of public opinion, at
their ambition to be one better than their fellows and their terror of being
different - at all the ludicrous weaknesses a well-developed social instinct
exposes them to. We shall get them, if
we set to work scientifically.’ Mr
Boldero’s bird-like eyes twinkled very brightly. ‘We shall get them,’ he repeated, and he
laughed a happy little laugh, full of such a childlike diabolism, such an
innocent gay malignity, that it seemed as though a little leprechaun had
suddenly taken the financier’s place in Gumbril’s best armchair.
Gumbril laughed too; for this
leprechaunish mirth was infectious. ‘We
shall get them,’ he echoed. ‘Oh, I’m
sure we shall, if you set about it, Mr Boldero.’
Mr Boldero acknowledged the compliment
with a smile that expressed no false humility.
It was his due, and he knew it.
‘I’ll give you some of my ideas about the
advertising campaign,’ he said. ‘Just to
give you a notion. You can think them
over, quietly, and make suggestions.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Gumbril, nodding.
Mr Boldero cleared his throat. ‘We shall begin,’ he said, ‘by making the
most simple elementary appeal to their instinct of self-preservation: we shall
point out that the Patent Small-Clothes are comfortable; that to wear them is
to avoid pain. A few striking slogans
about comfort – that’s all we want. Very
simple indeed. It doesn’t take much to
persuade a man that it’s pleasanter to sit on air than on wood. But while we’re on the subject of hard seats
we shall have to glide off subtly at a tangent to make a flank attack on the
social instincts.’ And joining the tip
of his forefinger to the tip of his thumb, Mr Boldero moved his hand delicately
sideways, as though he were sliding it along a smooth brass rail. ‘We shall have to speak about the glories and
the trials of sedentary labour. We must
exalt its spiritual dignity and at the same time condemn its physical
discomforts. “The seat of honour”, don’t
you know. We could talk about that. “The Seats of the Mighty.” “The seat that rules the office rocks the
world.” All those lines might be made
something of. And then we could have
little historical chats about thrones; how dignified, but how uncomfortable
they’ve been. We must make the bank
clerk and the civil servant feel proud of being what they are and at the same
time feel ashamed that, being such splendid people, they should have to submit
to the indignity of having blistered hindquarters. In modern advertising you must flatter your
public – not in the oily, abject, tradesman-like style of the old advertisers,
crawling before clients who were their social superiors; that’s all over
now. It’s we who are the social
superiors – because we’ve got more money than the bank clerks and the civil
servants. Our modern flattery must be
manly, straightforward, sincere, the admiration of equal for equal – all the
more flattering as we aren’t equals.’ Mr
Boldero laid a finger to his nose.
‘They’re dirt and we’re capitalists….’ He laughed.
Gumbril laughed too. It was the first time that he had ever
thought of himself as a capitalist, and the thought was exhilarating.
‘We flatter them,’ went on Mr
Boldero. ‘We say that honest work is
glorious and ennobling – which it isn’t’ it’s merely dull and cretinizing. And then we go on to suggest that it would be
finer still, more ennobling, because less uncomfortable, if they were Gumbril’s
Patent Small-Clothes. You see the line?’
Gumbril saw the line.
‘After that,’ said Mr Boldero, ‘we get on
to the medical side of the matter. The
medical side, Mr Gumbril – that’s most important. Nobody feels really well nowadays – at any
rate, nobody who lives in a big town and does the kind of loathsome work that
the people we’re catering for does.
Keeping this fact before our eyes, we have to make it clear that only
those can expect to be healthy who wear pneumatic trousers.’
‘That will be a little difficult, won’t
it?’ questioned Gumbril.
‘Not a bit of it !’ Mr Boldero laughed with an infectious confidence. ‘All we have to do is to talk about the great
nerve-centres of the spine: the shocks they get when you sit down too hard; the
wearing exhaustion to which long-protracted sitting on unpadded seats subjects
them. We’ll have to talk very
scientifically about the great lumbar ganglia – if there are such things, which
I really don’t pretend to know. We’ll
even talk almost mystically about the ganglia.
You know that sort of ganglion philosophy?’
Mr Boldero went on parenthetically. ‘Very interesting it is, sometimes, I
think. We could put in a lot about the
dark, powerful sense-life, sex-life, instinct-life which is controlled by the
lumbar ganglion. How important it is
that that shouldn’t be damaged. That
already our modern conditions of civilization tend unduly to develop the
intellect and the thoracic ganglia controlling the higher emotions. That we’re wearing out, growing feeble,
losing our balance in consequence. And
that the only cure – if we are to continue our present mode of civilized life –
is to be found in Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.’ Mr Boldero brought his hand with an emphatic smack
on to the table as he spoke, as he fairly shouted these last words.
‘Magnificent,’ said Gumbril, with genuine
admiration.
‘This sort of medical and philosophical
dope,’ Mr Boldero went on, ‘is always very effective, if it’s properly
used. The public to whom we are making
our appeal is, of course, almost absolutely ignorant on these, or, indeed, on
almost all other subjects. It is
therefore very much impressed by the unfamiliar words; particularly if they have
such a good juicy sound as the word “ganglia”.’
‘There was a young man of East Anglia,
whose loins were a tangle of ganglia,’ murmured Gumbril, improvvisatore.
‘Precisely,’ said Mr Boldero. ‘Precisely.
You see how juicy it is? Well, as
I say, they’re impressed. And they’re
also grateful. They’re grateful to us
for having given them a piece of abstruse, unlikely information which they can
pass on to their wives, or to such friends as they know don’t read the paper in
which our advertisement appears – can pass on airily, don’t you know, with easy
erudition, as though they’d known all about ganglia from their childhood. And they’ll feel such a flow of superiority
as they hand on the metaphysics and the pathology, that they’ll always think of
us with affection. They’ll buy our
breeks and they’ll get other people to buy.
That’s why,’ Mr Boldero went off again on an instructive tangent,
‘that’s why the day of secret patent medicines is really over. It’s no good saying you have rediscovered
some secret known only, in the past, to the Egyptians. People don’t know anything about Egyptology;
but they have an inkling that such a science exists. And if it does exist, it’s unlikely that
patent-medicine makers should have found out facts unknown to the professors at
the universities. And it’s much the same
even with secrets that don’t come from Egypt.
People know there’s such a thing as medical science and they again feel
it’s improbable that manufacturers should know things ignored by the doctors. The modern democratic advertiser is entirely
above-board. He tells you all about
it. He explains that the digestive
juices acting on bismuth give rise to a disinfectant acid. He points out that lactic ferment gets
destroyed before it reaches the large intestine, so that Metchnikoff’s cure
generally won’t work. And he goes on to
explain that the only way of getting the ferment there is to mix it with starch
and paraffin: starch to feed the ferment on, paraffin to prevent the starch
being digested before it gets to the intestine.
And, in consequence, he convinces you that a mixture of starch, paraffin
and ferment is the only thing that’s any good at all. Consequently you buy it; which you would
never have done without the explanation.
In the same way, Mr Gumbril, we mustn’t ask people to take our trousers
on trust. We must explain scientifically
why these trousers will be good for their health. And by means of the ganglia, as I’ve pointed
out, we can even show that the trousers will be good for their souls and the
whole human race at large. And as you
probably know, Mr Gumbril, there’s nothing like a spiritual message to make
things go. Combine spirituality with
practicality and you’ve fairly got them.
Got them, I may say, on toast.
And that’s what we can do with our trousers; we can put a message into
them, a big, spiritual message.
Decidedly,’ he concluded, ‘we shall have to work these ganglia all we
can.’
‘I’ll undertake to do that,’ said
Gumbril, who felt very buoyant and self-assured. Mr Boldero’s hydrogenous conversation had
blown him up like a balloon.
‘Ann I’m sure you’ll do it well,’ said Mr
Boldero encouragingly. ‘There is no
better training for modern commerce than a literary education. As a practical businessman, I always uphold
the ancient universities, especially in their teaching of the Humanities.’
Gumbril was much flattered. At the moment, it seemed supremely satisfying
to be told that he was likely to make a good businessman. The businessman took on a radiance, began to
glow, as it were, with a phosphorescent splendour.
‘Then it’s very important,’ continued Mr
Boldero, ‘to play on their snobbism; to exploit that painful sense of
inferiority which the ignorant and ingenuous always feel in the presence of the
knowing. We’ve got to make our trousers
the Thing – socially right as well as merely personally comfortable. We’ve got to imply somehow that it’s bad form
not to wear them. We’ve got to make
those who don’t wear them feel rather uncomfortable. Like that film of Charlie Chaplin’s, where
he’s the absentminded young man about town who dresses for dinner immaculately,
from the waist up – white waistcoat, tail coat, stiff shirt, top-hat – and only
discovers, when he gets down into the hall of the hotel, that he’s forgotten to
put on his trousers. We’ve got to make
them feel like that. That’s always very
successful. You know those excellent
American advertisements about young ladies whose engagements are broken off
because they perspire too freely or have an unpleasant breath? How horribly uncomfortable those make you feel! We’ve got to do something of the same sort
for our trousers. Or more immediately
applicable would be those tailor’s advertisements about correct clothes. “Good clothes makes you feel good.” You know the sort of line. And then those grave warning sentences in
which you’re told that a correctly cut suit may make the difference between an
appointment gained and an appointment lost, an interview granted and an
interview refused. But the most masterly
examples I can think of,’ Mr Boldero went on with growing enthusiasm, ‘are
those American advertisements of spectacles, in which the manufacturers first
assume the existence of a social law about goggles, and then proceed to invoke
all the sanctions which fall on the head of the committer of a solecism upon
those who break it. It’s masterly. For sport or relaxation, they tell you, as
though it was a social axiom, you must wear spectacles of pure tortoiseshell. For business, tortoiseshell rims and nickel
ear-pieces lend incisive poise – incisive poise, we must remember that for our
ads, Mr Gumbril. “Gumbril’s Patent
Small-Clothes lend incisive poise to businessmen.” For semi-evening dress, shell rims with gold
ear-pieces and gold nose-bridge. And for
full dress, gold-mounted rimless pince-nez are refinement itself, and
absolutely correct. Thus we see, a
social law has been created, according to which every self-respecting myope or
astigmat must have four distinct pairs of glasses. Think if he should wear the all-shell sports
model with full dress! Revolting
solecism! The people who read
advertisements like that begin to feel uncomfortable; they have only one pair
of glasses, they are afraid of being laughed at, thought low-class and ignorant
and suburban. And since there are few
who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provincialism, they rush out
to buy four new pairs of spectacles. And
the manufacturer gets rich, Mr Gumbril.
Now, we must do something of the kind with our trousers. Imply somehow that they’re correct, that
you’re undressed without, that your fiancée would break off the engagement if
she saw you sitting down to dinner on anything but air.’ Mr Boldero shrugged his shoulders, vaguely
waved his hand.
‘It may be rather difficult,’ said
Gumbril, shaking his head.
‘It may,’ Mr Boldero agreed. ‘But difficulties are made to be
overcome. We must pull the string of
snobbery and shame: it’s essential. We
must find out methods for bringing the weight of public opinion to bear
mockingly on those who do not wear our trousers. It is difficult at the moment to see how it
can be done. But it will have to be
done, it will have to be done,’ Mr Boldero repeated emphatically. ‘We might even find a way of invoking
patriotism to our aid. “English trousers
filled with English air for English men.”
A little farfetched, perhaps. But
there might be something in it.’
Gumbril shook his head doubtfully.
‘Well, it’s one of the things we’ve got
to think about in any case,’ said Mr Boldero.
‘We can’t afford to neglect such powerful social emotions as these. Sex, as we’ve seen, is almost entirely out of
the question. We must run the rest,
therefore, as hard as we can. For
instance, there’s the novelty business.
People feel superior if they possess something new which their
neighbours haven’t got. The mere fact of
newness is an intoxication. We must
encourage that sense of superiority, brew up that intoxication. The most absurd and futile objects can be
sold because they’re new. Not long ago I
sold four million patent soap-dishes of a new and peculiar kind. The point was that you didn’t screw the
fixture into the bathroom wall; you made a hole in the wall and built the
soap-dish into a niche, like a holy water stoup. My soap-dishes possessed no advantage over
other kinds of soap-dishes, and they cost a fantastic amount to install. But I managed to put them across, simply
because they were new. Four million of
them.’ Mr Boldero smiled with
satisfaction at the recollection. ‘We
shall do the same, I hope, with our trousers.
People may be shy of being the first to appear in them; but the shyness
will be compensated for by the sense of superiority and elation produced by the
consciousness of the newness of the things.’
‘Quite so,’ said Gumbril.
‘And then, of course, there’s the economy
slogan. “One pair of Gumbril’s Patent
Small-Clothes will outlast six pairs of ordinary trousers.” That’s easy enough. So easy that it’s really uninteresting.’ Mr Boldero waved it away.
‘We shall have to have pictures,’ said
Gumbril, parenthetically. He had an
idea.
‘Oh, of course.’
‘I believe I know of the very man to do
them,’ Gumbril went on. ‘His name’s
Lypiatt. A painter. You’ve probably heard of him.’
‘Heard of him!’ exclaimed Mr
Boldero. He laughed. ‘But who hasn’t heard of Lydgate.’
‘Lypiatt.’
‘Lypgate, I mean, of course.’
‘I think he’d be the very man,’ said
Gumbril.
‘I’m certain he would,’ said Mr Boldero,
not a whit behindhand.
Gumbril was pleased with himself. He felt he had done someone a good turn. Poor old Lypiatt; be glad of the money. Gumbril remembered also his own fiver. And remembering his own fiver, he also
remembered that Mr Boldero had as yet made no concrete suggestion about terms. He nerved himself at last to suggest to Mr
Boldero that it was time to think of this little matter. Ah, how he hated talking about money! He found it so hard to be firm in asserting
his rights. He was ashamed of showing
himself grasping. He always thought with
consideration of the other person’s point of view – poor devil, could he afford
to pay? And he was always swindled and
always conscious of the fact. Lord, how
he hated life on these occasions! Mr
Boldero was still evasive.
‘I’ll write you a letter about it,’ he
said at last.
Gumbril was delighted. ‘Yes, do,’ he said enthusiastically,
‘do.’ He knew how to cope with letters
all right. He was a devil with the
fountain-pen. It was these personal,
hand-to-hand combats that he couldn’t manage.
He could have been, he always felt, such a ruthless critic and satirist,
such a violent, unscrupulous polemical writer.
And if ever he committed his autobiography to paper, how breathtakingly
intimate, how naked – naked without so much as a healthy sunburn to colour the
whiteness – how quiveringly a sensitive jelly it would be! All the things he had never told anyone would
be in it. Confession at long range – if
anything, it would be rather agreeable.
‘Yes, do write me a letter,’ he
repeated. ‘Do.’
Mr Boldero’s letter came at last, and the
proposals it contained were derisory. A
hundred pounds down and five pounds a week when the business should be
started. Five pounds a week – and for
that he was to act as a managing director, writer of advertisements and
promoter of foreign sales. Gumbril felt
thankful that Mr Boldero had put the terms in a letter. If they had been offered point-blank across
the luncheon table, he would probably have accepted them without a murmur. He wrote a few neat, sharp phrases saying
that he could not consider less than five hundred pounds down and a thousand a
year. Mr Boldero’s reply was amiable;
would Mr Gumbril come and see him?
See him?
Well, of course, it was inevitable.
He would have to see him again some time. But he would send the Complete Man to deal
with the fellow. A Complete Man matched
with a leprechaun – there could be no doubt as to the issue.
‘DEAR MR BOLDERO,’ he wrote back, ‘I should have come to
talk over matters before this. But I
have been engaged during the last few days in growing a beard and until this
has come to maturity, I cannot, as you will easily be able to understand, leave
the house. By the day after tomorrow,
however, I hope to be completely presentable and shall come to see you at your
office at about three o’clock, if that is convenient to you. I hope we shall be able to arrange matters
satisfactorily. – Believe me, dear Mr Boldero, yours very truly, THEODORE GUMBRIL, JR.’
The day after tomorrow became in due
course today; splendidly bearded and Rabelaisianly broad in his whipcord toga,
Gumbril presented himself at Mr Boldero’s office in Queen Victoria Street.
‘I should hardly have recognized you,’
exclaimed Mr Boldero as he shook hands.
‘How it does alter you, to be sure!’
‘Does it?’ The Complete Man laughed with a significant
joviality.
‘Won’t you take off your coat?’
‘No, thanks,’ said Gumbril. ‘I’ll keep it on.’
‘Well,’ said the leprechaun, leaning back
in his chair and twinkling, bird-like, across the table.
‘Well,’ repeated Gumbril on a different
tone from behind the stooks of his corn-like beard. He smiled, feeling serenely strong and safe.
‘I’m sorry we should have disagreed,’
said Mr Boldero.
‘So am I,’ the Complete Man replied. ‘But we shan’t disagree for long,’ he added,
with significance; and as he spoke the words he brought down his fist with such
a bang, that the inkpots on Mr Boldero’s very solid mahogany writing-table
trembled and the pens danced, while Mr Boldero himself started with a genuine
alarm. He had not expected them. And now he came to look at him more closely,
this young Gumbril was a great, hulking, dangerous-looking fellow. He had thought he would be easy to
manage. How could he have made such a
mistake?
Gumbril left the office with Mr Boldero’s
cheque for three hundred and fifty pounds in his pocket and an annual income of
eight hundred. His bruised right hand
was extremely tender to the touch. He
was thankful that a single blow had been enough.
CHAPTER XI
GUMBRIL
had spent the afternoon at Bloxam Gardens.
His chin was still sore from the spirit gum with which he had attached
to it the symbol of the Complete Man; he was feeling also a little
fatigued. Rosie had been delighted to
see him; St Jerome had gone on solemnly communicating all the time.
His father had gone out to dine, and
Gumbril had eaten his rump steak and drunk his bottle of stout alone. He was sitting now in front of the open
french windows which led from his father’s workroom on to the balcony, with a
block on his knee and a fountain-pen in his hand, composing the advertisement
for the Patent Small-Clothes. Outside,
in the plane-trees of the square, the birds had gone through their nightly
performance. But Gumbril had paid no
attention to them. He sat there,
smoking, sometimes writing a word or two – sunk in the quagmire of his own
drowsy and comfortable body. The
flawless weather of the day had darkened into a blue May evening. It was agreeable merely to be alive.
He sketched out two or three
advertisements in the grand idealistic transatlantic style. He imagined one in particular with a picture
of Nelson at the head of the page and ‘England expects …’ printed large beneath
it. ‘England … Duty … these are solemn
words.’ That was how it would
begin. ‘These are solemn words, and we
use them solemnly as men who realize what Duty is, and who do all that in them
lies to perform it as Englishmen should.
The Manufacturer’s is a sacred trust.
The guide and ruler of the modern world, he has, like the Monarch of
other days, responsibilities towards his people; he has a Duty to fulfil. He rules, but he must also serve. We realize our responsibilities, we take them
seriously. Gumbril’s Patent
Small-Clothes have been brought into the world that they may serve. Our Duty towards you is a Duty of
Service. Our proud boast is that we
perform it. But besides his Duty towards
Others, every man has a duty towards Himself.
What is that Duty? It is to keep
himself in the highest possible state of physical and spiritual fitness. Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes protect the
lumbar ganglia….’ After that it would be
plain medical and mystical sailing.
As soon as he got to the ganglia, Gumbril
stopped writing. He put down the block,
sheathed his pen, and abandoned himself to the pleasures of pure idleness. He sat, he smoked his cigar. In the basement, two floors down, the cook
and the house-parlourmaid were reading – one the Daily Mirror, the other the Daily
Sketch. For them, Her Majesty the
Queen spoke kindly words to crippled female orphans; the jockeys tumbled at the
jumps; Cupid was busy in Society, and the murderers who had disembowelled their
mistresses were at large. Above him was
the city of models, was a bedroom, a servant’s bedroom, an attic of tanks and
ancient dirt, the roof and, after that, two or three hundred light-years away,
a star of the fourth magnitude. On the
other side of the party-wall on his right, a teeming family of Jews led their
dark, compact, Jewish lives with a prodigious intensity. At this moment they were all passionately
quarrelling. Beyond the wall on the left
lived the young journalist and his wife.
Tonight it was he who had cooked the supper. The young wife lay on the sofa, feeling
horribly sick; she was going to have a baby, there could be no doubt about it
now. They had meant not to have one; it
was horrible. And, outside, the birds
were sleeping in the trees, the invading children from the slum tumbled and
squealed. Ships meanwhile were walloping
across the Atlantic freighted with more cigars.
Rosie at this moment was probably mending Shearwater’s socks. Gumbril sat and smoked, and the universe
arranged itself in a pattern about him, like iron filings round a magnet.
The door opened, and the
house-parlourmaid intruded Shearwater upon his lazy felicity, abruptly, in her
unceremonious old way, and hurried back to the Daily Sketch.
‘Shearwater! This is very agreeable,’ said Gumbril. ‘Come and sit down.’ He pointed to a chair.
Clumsily, filling the space that two
ordinary men would occupy, Shearwater came zigzagging and lurching across the
room, bumped against the work-table and the sofa as he passed, and finally sat
down in the indicated chair.
It suddenly occurred to Gumbril that this
was Rosie’s husband: he had not thought of that before. Could it be in the marital capacity that he
presented himself so unexpected now?
After this afternoon…. He had come home; Rosie had confessed all…. Ah!
but then she didn’t know who he was. He
smiled to himself at the thought. What a
joke! Perhaps Shearwater had come to
complain to him of the unknown Complete Man – to him! It was delightful. Anon – the author of all those ballads in the
Oxford Book of English Verse: the
famous Italian painter – Ignoto. Gumbril
was quite disappointed when his visitor began to talk of other themes than
Rosie. Sunk in the quagmire of his own
comfortable guts, he felt good-humouredly obscene. The dramatic scabrousness of the situation
would have charmed him in his present mood.
Good old Shearwater – but what an ox of a man! If he, Gumbril, took the trouble to marry a
wife, he would at least take some interest in her.
Shearwater had begun to talk in general
terms about life. What could he be
getting at, Gumbril wondered? What
particulars were ambushed behind these generalizations? There were silences. Shearwater looked, he thought, very
gloomy. Under his thick moustache the
small, pouting, babyish mouth did not smile.
The candid eyes had a puzzled, tired expression in them.
‘People are queer,’ he said after one of
his silences. ‘Very queer. One has no idea how queer they are.’
Gumbril laughed. ‘But I have a very clear idea of their
queerness,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s queer,
and the ordinary, respectable, bourgeois people are the queerest of the lot. How do they manage to live like that? It’s astonishing. When I think of all my aunts and uncles …’ He
shook his head.
‘Perhaps it’s because I’m rather
incurious,’ said Shearwater. ‘One ought
to be curious, I think. I’ve come to
feel lately that I’ve not been curious enough about people.’ The particulars began to peep, alive and
individual, out of the vagueness, like rabbits; Gumbril saw them in his fancy,
at the fringe of a wood.
‘Quite,’ he said encouragingly. ‘Quite.’
‘I think too much of my work,’ Shearwater
went on, frowning. ‘Too much
physiology. There’s also
psychology. People’s minds as well as
their bodies…. One shouldn’t be limited.
Not too much, at any rate.
People’s minds …’ He was silent for a moment. ‘I can imagine,’ he went on at last, as in
the tone of one who puts a very hypothetical case, ‘I can imagine one’s getting
so much absorbed in somebody else’s psychology that one could really think of
nothing else.’ The rabbits seemed
already to come out into the open.
‘That’s a process,’ said Gumbril, with
middle-aged jocularity, speaking out of his private warm morass, ‘that’s
commonly called falling in love.’
There was another silence. Shearwater broke it to begin talking about
Mrs Viveash. He had lunched with her
three or four days running. He wanted
Gumbril to tell him what she was really like.
‘She seems to me a very extraordinary woman,’ he said.
‘Like everybody else,’ said Gumbril
irritatingly. It amused him to see the
rabbits scampering about at last.
‘I’ve never known a woman like that
before.’
Gumbril laughed. ‘You’d say that of any woman you happened to
be interested in,’ he said. ‘You’ve
never known any women at all.’ He knew much
more about Rosie, already, than Shearwater did, or probably ever would.
Shearwater meditated. He thought of Mrs Viveash, her cool, pale,
critical eyes; her laughter, faint and mocking; her words that pierced into the
mind, goading it into thinking unprecedented thoughts.
‘She interests me,’ he repeated. ‘I want you to tell me what she’s really
like.’ He emphasized the word really, as
though there must, in the nature of things, be a vast difference between the
apparent and the real Mrs Viveash.
Most lovers, Gumbril reflected, picture to
themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from
what they see every day. They are in
love with somebody else – their own invention.
And sometimes there is a secret reality; and sometimes reality and
appearance are the same. The discovery,
in either case, is likely to cause a shock.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘How
should I know? You must find out for
yourself.’
‘But you know her, you know her well,’
said Shearwater, almost with anxiety in his voice.
‘Not so well as all that.’
Shearwater sighed profoundly, like a
whale in the night. He felt restless,
incapable of concentrating. His mind was
full of a horrible confusion. A violent
eruptive bubbling up from below had shaken its calm clarity to pieces. All this absurd business of passion – he had
always thought it nonsense, unnecessary.
With a little strength of will one could shut it out. Women – only for half an hour out of the
twenty-four. But she had laughed, and
his quiet, his security had vanished. ‘I
can imagine,’ he had said to her yesterday, ‘I can imagine myself giving up
everything, work and all, to go running round after you.’ ‘And do you suppose I should enjoy that?’ Mrs
Viveash had asked. ‘It would be
ridiculous,’ he said, ‘it would be almost shameful.’ And she had thanked him for the
compliment. ‘And at the same time,’ he
went on, ‘I feel that it might be worth it.
It might be the only thing.’ His
mind was confused, full of new thoughts.
‘It’s difficult,’ he said after a pause, ‘arranging things. Very difficult. I thought I had arranged them so well …’
‘I never arrange anything,’ said Gumbril,
very much the practical philosopher. ‘I
take things as they come.’ And as he
spoke the words, suddenly he became rather disgusted with himself. He shook himself; he climbed out of his own
morass. ‘It would be better, perhaps, if
I arranged things more,’ he added.
‘Render therefore unto Cæsar the things
which are Cæsar’s,’ said Shearwater, as though to himself; ‘and to God, and to
sex, and to work…. There must be a working arrangement.’ He sighed again. ‘Everything in proportion. In proportion,’ he repeated, as though the
word were magical and had power. ‘In
proportion.’
‘Who’s talking about proportion?’ They turned round. In the doorway Gumbril Senior was standing,
smoothing his ruffled hair and tugging at his beard. His eyes twinkled cheerfully behind his
spectacles. ‘Poaching on my
architectural ground?’ he said.
‘This is Shearwater,’ Gumbril Junior put
in, and explained who he was.
The old gentleman sat down. ‘Proportion,’ he said – ‘I was just thinking
about it, now, as I was walking back.
You can’t help thinking about it in these London streets, where it
doesn’t exist. You can’t help pining for
it. There are some streets … oh, my
God!’ And Gumbril Senior threw up his
hands in horror. ‘It’s like listening to
a symphony of cats to walk along them.
Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way. And one street that was really like a
symphony by Mozart – how busily and gleefully they’re pulling it down now! Another year and there’ll be nothing left of
Regent Street. There’ll only be a jumble
of huge, hideous buildings at three-quarters of a million apiece. A concert of Brobdingnagian cats. Order had been turned into a disgusting
chaos. We need no barbarians from
outside; they’re on the premises, all the time.’
The old man paused and pulled his beard
meditatively. Gumbril Junior sat in
silence, smoking; and in silence Shearwater revolved within the walls of his
great round head his agonizing thoughts of Mrs Viveash.
‘It has always struck me as very
curious,’ Gumbril Senior went on, ‘that people are so little affected by the
vile and discordant architecture around them.
Suppose, now, that all these brass bands of unemployed ex-soldiers that
blow so mournfully at all the street corners were suddenly to play nothing but
a series of senseless and devilish discords – why, the first policeman would
move them on, and the second would put them under arrest, and the passers-by
would try to lynch them on their way to the police station. There would be a real spontaneous outcry of
indignation. But when at these same
street corners the contractors run up enormous palaces of steel and stone that
are every bit as stupid and ignoble and inharmonious as ten brass bandsmen each
playing a different tune in a different key, there is no outcry. The police don’t arrest the architect; the
passing pedestrians don’t throw stones at the workmen. They don’t notice that anything’s wrong. It’s odd,’ said Gumbril Senior. ‘It’s very odd.’
‘Very odd,’ Gumbril Junior echoed.
‘The fact is, I suppose,’ Gumbril Senior
went on, smiling with a certain air of personal triumph, ‘the fact is that
architecture is a more difficult and intellectual art than music. Music – that’s just a faculty you’re born
with, as you might be born with a snub nose.
But the sense of plastic beauty – though that’s, of course, also an
inborn faculty – is something that has to be developed and intellectually
ripened. It’s an affair of the mind;
experience and thought have to draw it out.
There are infant prodigies in music, but there are no infant prodigies
in architecture.’ Gumbril Senior
chuckled with a real satisfaction. ‘A
man can be an excellent musician and a perfect imbecile. But a good architect must also be a man of
sense, a man who knows how to think and to profit by experience. Now, as almost none of the people who pass
along the streets in London, or any other city in the world, do know how to
think or to profit be experience, it follows that they cannot appreciate
architecture. The innate faculty is
strong enough in them to make them dislike discord in music; but they haven’t
the wits to develop that other innate faculty – the sense of plastic beauty –
which would enable them to see and disapprove of the same barbarism in
architecture. Come with me,’ Gumbril
Senior added, getting up from his chair, ‘and I’ll show you something that will
illustrate what I’ve been saying.
Something you’ll enjoy, too.
Nobody’s seen it yet,’ he said mysteriously as he led the way
upstairs. ‘It’s only just finished –
after months and years. It’ll cause a
stir when they see it – when I let them see it, if ever I do, that is. The dirty devils!’ Gumbril Senior added
good-humouredly.
On the landing of the next floor he
paused, felt in his pocket, took out a key and unlocked the door of what should
have been the second best bedroom.
Gumbril Junior wondered, without very much curiosity, what the new toy
would turn out to be. Shearwater wondered
only how he could possess Mrs Viveash.
‘Come on,’ called Gumbril Senior from
inside the room. He turned on the
light. They entered.
It was a big room; but almost the whole
of the floor was covered by an enormous model, twenty feet long by ten or
twelve wide, of a complete city traversed from end to end by a winding river
and dominated at its central point by a great dome. Gumbril Junior looked at it with surprise and
pleasure. Even Shearwater was roused
from his bitter ruminations of desire to look at the charming city spread out
at his feet.
‘It’s exquisite,’ said Gumbril
Junior. ‘What is it? The capital of Utopia, or what?’
Delighted, Gumbril Senior laughed. ‘Don’t you see something rather familiar in
the dome?’ he asked.
‘Well, I had thought …’ Gumbril Junior
hesitated, afraid that he might be going to say something stupid. He bent down to look more closely at the
dome. ‘I had thought it looked rather
like St Paul’s – and now that I see that it is St Paul’s.’
‘Quite right,’ said his father. ‘And this is London.’
‘I wish it were,’ Gumbril Junior laughed.
‘It’s London as it might have been if
they’d allowed Wren to carry out his plans of rebuilding after the Great Fire.’
‘And why didn’t they allow him to?’
Shearwater asked.
‘Chiefly,’ said Gumbril Senior, ‘because,
as I’ve said before, they didn’t know how to think or profit from
experience. Wren offered them open
spaces and broad streets; he offered them sunlight and air and cleanliness; he
offered them beauty, order and grandeur.
He offered to build for the imagination and the ambitious spirit of man,
so that even the most bestial, vaguely and remotely, as they walked those
streets, might feel that they were of the same race – or very nearly – as
Michelangelo; that they, too, might feel themselves, in spirit at least,
magnificent, strong and free. He offered
them all these things; he drew a plan for them, walking in peril among the
still-smouldering ruins. But they
preferred to re-erect the old intricate squalor; they preferred the mediæval
darkness and crookedness and beastly irregular quaintness; they preferred holes
and crannies and winding tunnels; they preferred foul smells sunless, stagnant
air, phthisis and rickets; they preferred ugliness and pettiness and dirt; they
preferred the wretched human scale of the sickly body, not of the mind. Miserable fools! But I suppose,’ the old man continued,
shaking his head, ‘we can’t blame them.’
His hair had blown loose from its insecure anchorage; with a gesture of
resignation he brushed it back into place.
‘We can’t blame them. We should
have done the same in the circumstances – undoubtedly. People offer us reason and beauty; but we
will have none of them, because they don’t happen to square with the notions
that were grafted into our souls in youth, that have grown there and become a
part of us. Experientia docet – nothing falser, so far as most of us are
concerned, was ever said. You, no doubt,
my dear Theodore, have often in the past made a fool of yourself with women….’
Gumbril Junior made an embarrassed
gesture that half denied, half admitted the soft impeachment. Shearwater turned away, painfully reminded of
what, for a moment, he had half forgotten.
Gumbril Senior swept on.
‘Will that prevent you from making as
great a fool of yourself again tomorrow?
It will not. It will most
assuredly not.’ Gumbril Senior shook his
head. ‘The inconveniences and horrors of
the pox are perfectly well known to everyone; but still the disease flourishes
and spreads. Several million people were
killed in a recent war and half the world ruined; but we all busily go on in
courses that make another event of the same sort inevitable. Experientia
docet? Experientia doesn’t. And that is why we must not be too hard on
these honest citizens of London who, fully appreciating the inconveniences of
darkness, disorder and dirt, manfully resisted any attempt to alter conditions
which they had been taught from childhood onwards to consider as necessary,
right and belonging inevitably to the order of things. We must not be too hard. We are doing something even worse
ourselves. Knowing by a century of
experience how beautiful, how graceful, how soothing to the mind is an ordered
piece of town-planning, we pull down almost the only specimen of it we possess
and put up in its place a chaos of Portland stone that is an offence against
civilization. But let us forget about
these old citizens and the labyrinth of ugliness and inconvenience which we
have inherited from them, and which is called London. Let us forget the contemporaries who are
making it still worse than it was. Come
for a walk with me through this ideal city.
Look.’
And Gumbril Senior began expounding it to
them.
In the middle, there, of that great
elliptical Piazza at the eastern end of the new City, stands, four-square, the
Royal Exchange. Pierced only with small
dark windows, and built of rough ashlars of the silvery Portland stone, the
ground floor serves as a massy foundation for the huge pilasters that slide up,
between base and capital, past three tiers of pedimented windows. Upon them rest the cornice, the attic and the
balustrade, and on every pier of the balustrade a statue holds up its symbol
against the sky. Four great portals,
rich with allegory, admit to the courtyard with its double tier of coupled
columns, its cloister and its gallery.
The statue of Charles the Martyr rides triumphantly in the midst, and
within the windows one guesses the great rooms, rich with heavy garlands of
plaster, panelled with carved wood.
Ten streets give on to the Piazza, and at
either end of its ellipse the water of sumptuous fountains ceaselessly blows
aloft and falls. Commerce, in that to
the north of the Exchange, holds up her cornucopia, and from the midst of its
grapes and apples the master jet leaps up; from the teats of all the ten Useful
Arts, grouped with their symbols about the central figure, there spouts a score
of fine subsidiary streams. The
dolphins, the seahorses and the Tritons sport in the basin below. To the south, the ten principal cities of the
Kingdom stand in a family round the Mother London, who pours from her urn an
inexhaustible Thames.
Ranged round the Piazza are the
Goldsmiths’ Hall, the Office of Excise, the Mint, the Post Office. Their flanks are curved to curve of the
ellipse. Between pilasters, their
windows look out on to the Exchange, and the sister statues on the balustrades
beckon to one another across the intervening space.
Two master roads of ninety feet from wall
to wall run westwards from the Exchange.
Newgate ends the more northern vista with an Arch of Triumph, whose
three openings are deep, shadowy and solemn as the entries of caverns. The Guildhall and the halls of the twelve
City Companies in their livery of rose-red brick, with their lacings of white
stone at the coigns and round the windows, lend to the street and air of
domestic and comfortable splendour. And
every two or three hundred paces the line of the houses is broken, and in the
indentation of a square recess there rises, conspicuous and insular, the
fantastic tower of a parish church.
Spire out of dome; octagon on octagon diminishing upwards; cylinder on
cylinder; round lanterns, lanterns of many sides; towers with airy pinnacles;
clusters of pillars linked by incurving cornices, and above them, four more
clusters and above once more; square towers pierced with pointed windows;
spires uplifted on flying buttresses; spires bulbous at the base – the
multitude of them beckons, familiar and friendly, on the sky. From the other shore, or sliding along the
quiet river, you see them all, you tell over their names; and the great dome
swells up in the midst overtopping them all.
The dome of St Paul’s.
The other master street that goes
westward from the Piazza of the Exchange slants down towards it. The houses are of brick, plain-faced and
square, arcaded at the base, so that the shops stand back from the street and
the pedestrian walks dry-shod under the harmonious succession of the vaultings. And there at the end of the street, at the
base of a triangular space formed by the coming together of this with another
master street that runs eastwards to Tower Hill, there stands the
Cathedral. To the north of it is the
Deanery and under the arcades are the booksellers’ shops.
From St Paul’s the main road slopes down
under the swaggering Italianate arches of Ludgate, past the wide lime-planted boulevards that run
north and south within and without the city wall, to the edge of the Fleet
Ditch – widened now into a noble canal, on whose paved banks the barges unload
their freights of country stuff – leaps it on a single flying arch to climb
again to round circus, a little to the east of Temple Bar, from which, in a
pair of diagonally superimposed crosses, either roads radiate: three northwards
towards Holborn, three from the opposite are towards the river, one eastward to
the City, and one past Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the west. The piazza is all of brick and the houses
that compose it are continuous above the ground-floor level; for the roads lead
out under archways. To one who stands in
the centre at the foot of the obelisk that commemorates the victory over the
Dutch, it seems a smooth well of brickwork pierced by eight arched conduits at
the base and diversified above by the three tiers of plain, unornamented
windows.
Who shall describe all the fountains in
the open places, all the statues and ornaments?
In the circus north of London Bridge, where the four roads come
together, stands a pyramid of nymphs and Tritons – river goddesses of Polyolbion,
sea-gods of the island beaches – bathing in a ceaseless tumble of white
water. And here the city griffon spouts
from its beak, the royal lion from between its jaws. St George at the foot of the Cathedral rides
down a dragon whose nostrils spout, not fire, but the clear water of the New
River. In front of the India House, four
elephants of black marble, endorsed with towers of white, blow through their
upturned trunks the copious symbol of Eastern wealth. In the gardens of the Tower sits Charles the
Second, enthroned among a troop of Muses, Cardinal Virtues, Graces, and
Hours. The tower of the Customs-House is
a pharos. A great water-gate, the symbol
of naval triumph, spans the Fleet at its junction with the Thames. The river is embanked from Blackfriars to the
Tower, and at every twenty paces a grave stone angel looks out from the piers
of the balustrade across the water….
Gumbril Senior expounded his city with
passion. He pointed to the model on the
ground, he lifted his arms and turned up his eyes to suggest the size and
splendour of his edifice. His hair blew
wispily loose and fell into his eyes, and had to be brushed impatiently back
again. He pulled at his beard; his
spectacles flashed, as though they were living eyes. Looking at him, Gumbril Junior could imagine
that he saw before him the passionate and gesticulating silhouette of one of
those old shepherds who stand at the base of Piranesi’s ruins demonstrating
obscurely the prodigious grandeur and the abjection of the human race.
CHAPTER XII
‘YOU? Is it you?’
She seemed doubtful.
Gumbril nodded. ‘It’s me,’ he reassured her. ‘I’ve shaved; that’s all.’ He had left his beard in the top right-hand
drawer of the chest of drawers, among the ties and the collars.
Emily looked at him judicially. ‘I like you better without it,’ she decided
at last. ‘You look nicer. Oh no, I don’t mean to say you weren’t nice
before,’ she hastened to add. ‘But – you
know – gentler …’ She hesitated. ‘It’s a
silly word,’ she said, ‘but there it is: sweeter.’
That was the unkindest cut of all. ‘Milder and more melancholy?’ he suggested.
‘Well, if you like to put it like that,’
Emily agreed.
He took her hand and raised it to his
lips. ‘I forgive you,’ he said.
He could forgive her anything for the
sake of those candid eyes, anything for the grave, serious mouth, anything for
the short brown hair that curled – oh, but never seriously, never gravely –
with such a hilarious extravagance round her head. He had met her, or rather the Complete Man,
flushed with his commercial triumphs as he returned from his victory over Mr
Boldero, had met her at the National Gallery.
‘Old Masters, young mistresses’; Coleman had recommended the National
Gallery. He was walking up the Venetian
Room, feeling as full of swaggering vitality as the largest composition of
Veronese, when he heard, gigglingly whispered just behind him, his Open Sesame
to new adventure, ‘Beaver’. He spun
round on his tracks and found himself face to face with two rather startled
young women. He frowned ferociously: he
demanded satisfaction for the impertinence.
They were both, he noticed, of gratifyingly pleasing appearance and both
extremely young. One of them, the elder
it seemed, and the more charming, as he had decided from the first, of the two,
was dreadfully taken aback; blushed to the eyes, stammered apologetically. But the other, who had obviously pronounced
the word, only laughed. It was she who
made easy the forming of an acquaintance which ripened, half an hour later,
over the tea-cups and to the strains of the most classy music on the fifth
floor of Lyons’ Strand Corner House.
Their names were Emily and Molly. Emily, it seemed, was married. It was Molly who let that out, and the other
had been angry with her for what was evidently an indiscretion. The bald fact that Emily was married had at
once been veiled with mysteries, surrounded and protected by silences; whenever
the Complete Man asked a question about it, Emily did not answer and Molly only
giggled. But if Emily was married and
the elder of the two, Molly was decidedly the more knowledgeable about life; Mr
Mercaptan would certainly have set her down as the more civilized. Emily didn’t live in London; she didn’t seem
to live anywhere in particular. At the
moment she was staying with Molly’s family at Kew.
He had seen them the next day, and the
day after, and the day after that; once at lunch, to desert them precipitately
for his afternoon with Rosie; once at tea in Kew Gardens; once at dinner, with
a theatre to follow and an extravagant taxi back to Kew at midnight. The tame decoy allays the fears of the shy
wild birds; Molly, who was tame, who was frankly a flirting little wanton, had
served the Complete Man as a decoy for the ensnaring of Emily. When Molly went away to stay with friends in
the country, Emily was already inured and accustomed to the hunter’s presence;
she accepted the playful attitude of gallantry, which the Complete Man, at the
invitation of Molly’s rolling eyes and provocative giggle, had adopted from the
first, as natural and belonging to the established order of things. With giggling Molly to giver her a lead, she
had gone in three days much further along the path of intimacy than, by
herself, she would have advanced in ten times the number of meetings.
‘It seems funny,’ she had said the first
time they met after Molly’s departure, ‘it seems funny to be seeing you without
Molly.’
‘It seemed funnier with Molly,’ said the
Complete Man. ‘It wasn’t Molly I wanted
to see.’
‘Molly’s a very nice, dear girl,’ she
declared loyally. ‘Besides, she’s
amusing and can talk. And I can’t; I’m
not a bit amusing.’
It was difficult to retort to that sort
of thing; but Emily didn’t believe in compliments; oh, quite genuinely not.
He set out to make the exploration of
her; and now that she was inured to him, no longer too frightened to let him
approach, now, moreover, that he had abandoned the jocular insolences of the
Complete Man in favour of a more native mildness, which he felt instinctively
was more suitable in this particular case, she laid no difficulties in his
way. She was lonely, and he seemed to
understand everything so well; in the unknown country of her spirit and her
history she was soon going eagerly before him as his guide.
She was an orphan. Her mother she hardly remembered. Her father had died of influenza when she was
fifteen. One of his business friends
used to come and see her at school, take her out for treats and give her
chocolates. She used to call him Uncle
Stanley. He was a leather merchant, fat
and jolly with a rather red face, very white teeth and a bald head that was
beautifully shiny. When she was
seventeen and a half he asked her to marry him, and she had said yes.
‘But why?’ Gumbril asked. ‘Why on earth?’ he repeated.
‘He said he’d take me round the world; it
was just when the war had come to an end.
Round the world, you know; and I didn’t like school. I didn’t know anything about it and he was
very nice to me; he was very pressing. I
didn’t know what marriage meant.’
‘Didn’t know?’
She shook her head; it was quite
true. ‘But not in the least.’
And she had been born within the
twentieth century. It seemed a case for
the textbooks of sexual psychology. ‘Mrs
Emily X, born in 1901, was found to be in a state of perfect innocence and
ignorance at the time of the Armistice, 11th November 1918,’ etc.
‘And so you married him?’
She had nodded.
‘And then?’
She had covered her face with her hands,
she had shuddered. The amateur uncle,
now professionally a husband, had come to claim his rights – drunk. She had fought him, she had eluded him, had
run away and locked herself into another room.
On the second night of her honeymoon he gave her a bruise on the
forehead and a bite on the left breast which had gone on septically festering
for weeks. On the fourth, more
determined than ever, he seized her so violently by the throat, that a
blood-vessel broke and she began coughing bring blood over the bedclothes. The amateur uncle had been reduced to send
for a doctor and Emily had spent the next for weeks in a nursing home. That was four years ago; her husband had
tried to induce her to come back, but Emily had refused. She had a little money of her own; she was
able to refuse. The amateur uncle had
consoled himself with other and more docile nieces.
‘And has nobody tried to make love to you
since then?’ he asked.
‘Oh, lots of them have tried.’
‘And not succeeded?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t like men,’ she said. ‘They’re hateful, most of them. They’re brutes.’
‘Anch’
io?’
‘What?’ she asked, puzzled.
‘Am I a brute too?’ And behind his beard, suddenly, he felt
rather like a brute.
‘No,’ said Emily, after a little
hesitation, ‘you’re different. At least
I think you are; though sometimes,’ she added candidly, ‘sometimes you do and
say things which make me wonder if you really are different.’
The Complete Man laughed.
‘Don’t laugh like that,’ she said. ‘It’s rather stupid.’
‘You’re perfectly right,’ said
Gumbril. ‘It is.’
And how did she spend her time? He continued the exploration.
Well, she read a lot of books; but most
of the novels she got from Boots’ seemed to her rather silly.
‘Too much about the same thing. Always love.’
The Complete Man gave a shrug. ‘Such is life.’
‘Well, it oughtn’t to be,’ said Emily.
And then, when she was in the country –
and she was often in the country, taking lodgings here and there in little
villages, weeks and months at a time – she went for long walks. Molly couldn’t understand why she liked the
country; but she did. She was very fond
of flowers. She liked them more than
people, she thought.
‘I wish I could paint,’ she said. ‘If I could, I’d be happy for ever, just
painting flowers. But I can’t
paint.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve tried so often. Such dirty, ugly smudges come out on the
paper; and it’s all so lovely in my head, so lovely out in the fields.’
Gumbril began talking with erudition
about the flora of West Surrey: where you could find butterfly orchids and
green man and the bee, the wood where there was actually wild columbine
growing, the best localities for butcher’s broom, the outcrops of clay where
you get wild daffodils. All this odd
knowledge came spouting up into his mind from some underground source of
memory. Flowers – he never thought about
flowers nowadays from one year’s end to the other. But his mother had liked flowers. Every spring and summer they used to go down
to stay at their cottage in the country.
All their walks, all their drives in the governess cart had been hunts
for flowers. And naturally the child had
hunted with all his mother’s ardour. He
had kept books of pressed flowers, he had mummified them in hot sand, he had
drawn maps of the country and coloured them elaborately with different coloured
inks to show where the different flowers grew.
How long ago all that was!
Horribly long ago! Many seeds had
fallen in the stony places of his spirit, to spring luxuriantly up into stalky
plants and wither again because they had no deepness of earth; many had been
sown there and had died, since his mother scattered the seeds of the wild
flowers.
‘And if you want sundew,’ he wound up,
‘you’ll find it in the Punch Bowl, under Hindhead. Or round about Frensham. The Little Pond, you know, not the Big.’
‘But you know all about them,’ Emily
exclaimed in delight. ‘I’m ashamed of my
poor little knowledge. And you must
really love them as much as I do.’
Gumbril did not deny it; they were linked
henceforth by a chain of flowers.
But what else did she do?
Oh, of course she played the piano a
great deal. Very badly; but at any rate
it gave her pleasure. Beethoven: she
liked Beethoven best. More or less, she
knew all the sonatas, though she could never keep up anything like the right
speed in the difficult parts.
Gumbril had again shown himself
wonderfully at home. ‘Aha!’ he
said. ‘I bet you can’t shake that low B
in the last variation but one of Op. 106 so that it doesn’t sound ridiculous.’
And of course she couldn’t, and of course
she was glad that he knew all about it and how impossible it was.
In the cab, as they drove back to Kew
that evening, the Complete Man had decided it was time to do something
decisive. The parting kiss – more of a
playful sonorous buss than a serious embracement that was already in the protocol, as signed
and sealed before her departure by giggling Molly. It was time, the Complete Man considered,
that this salute should take on a character less formal and less playful. One, two, three and, decisively, as they
passed through Hammersmith Broadway, he risked the gesture. Emily burst into tears. He was not prepared for that, though perhaps
he should have been. It was only by
imploring, only by almost weeping himself, that Gumbril persuaded her to revoke
her decision never, never to see him again.
‘I had thought you were different,’ she
sobbed. ‘And now, now …’
‘Please, please,’ he entreated. He was on the point of tearing off his beard
and confessing everything there and then.
But that, on second thoughts, would probably only make things worse.
‘Please, I promise.’
In the end, she had consented to see him
once again, provisionally, in Kew Gardens, on the following day. They were to meet at the little temple that
stands on the hillock above the valley of the heathers.
And now, duly, they had met. The Complete Man had been left at home in the
top right-hand drawer, along with the ties and collars. She would prefer, he guessed, the Mild and
Melancholy one; he was quite right. She
had thought him ‘sweeter’ at a first glimpse.
‘I forgive you,’ he said, and kissed her
hand. ‘I forgive you.’
Hand in hand they walked down towards the
valley of the heaths.
‘I don’t know why you should be forgiving
me,’ she said, laughing. ‘It seems to me
that I ought to be doing the forgiving.
After yesterday.’ She shook her
head at him. ‘You made me so wretched.’
‘Ah, but you’ve already done your
forgiving.’
‘You seem to take it very much for
granted,’ said Emily. ‘Don’t be too
sure.’
‘But I am sure,’ said Gumbril. ‘I can see …’
Emily laughed again. ‘I feel happy,’ she declared.
‘So do I.’
‘How green the grass is!’
Green, green – after three long damp
months it glowed in the sunlight, as though it were lighted from inside.
‘And the trees!’
The pale, high, clot-polled trees of the
English spring; the dark, symmetrical pine trees, islanded here and there on
the lawns, each with its own separate profile against the sky and its own
shadow, impenetrably dark or freckled with moving lights, on the grass at its
feet.
They walked on in silence. Gumbril took of his hat, breathed the soft
air that smelt of the greenness of the garden.
‘There are quiet places also in the
mind,’ he said meditatively. ‘But we
build bandstands and factories on them.
Deliberately – to put a stop to the quietness. We don’t like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in
my head – round and round, continually.’
He made a circular motion with his hand.
‘And the jazz bands, the music-hall songs, the boys shouting the
news. What’s it for? what’s it for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up
and disperse it, to pretend at any cost it isn’t there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of
everything, at the back of everything. Lying
awake at night, sometimes – not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep –
the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the
fragments of it we’ve been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet,
like this outward quiet of grass and trees.
It fills one, it grows – a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding
crystal. It grows, it becomes more
perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying, yes, terrifying as well as
beautiful. For one’s alone in the
crystal and there’s no support from outside, there’s nothing external and important,
nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or to stand on, superiorly,
contemptuously, so that one can look down.
There’s nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something
approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful
advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer.
And, oh, inexpressibly terrifying.
For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize and engulf you, you’d
die; all the regular, habitual, daily part of you would die. There would be an end of bandstands and
whizzing factories, and one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet,
arduously in some strange, unheard-of manner.
Nearer, nearer come the steps; but one can’t face the advancing
thing. One daren’t. It’s too terrifying, it’s too painful to die. Quickly, before it is too late, start the
factory wheels, bang the drum, blow up the saxophone. Think of the women you’d like to sleep with,
the schemes for making money, the gossip about your friends, the last outrage
of the politicians. Anything for a
diversion. Break the silence, smash the
crystal to pieces. There, it lies in
bits; it is easily broken, hard to build up and easy to break. And the steps? Ah, those have taken themselves off, double
quick. Double quick, they were gone at
the first flawing of the crystal. And by
this time the lovely and terrifying thing is three infinities away, at
least. And you lie tranquilly on your
bed, thinking of what you’d do if you had ten thousand pounds, and of all the
fornications you’ll never commit.’ He
thought of Rosie’s pink underclothes.
‘You make things very complicated,’ she
said, after a silence.
Gumbril spread out his greatcoat on a
green bank and they sat down. Leaning
back, his hands under his head, he watched her sitting there beside him. She had taken off her hat; there was a stir
of wind in those childish curls, and at the nape, at the temples, where the
hair had sleaved out thin and fine, the sunlight made little misty haloes of
gold. Her hands clasped round her knees,
she sat quite still, looking out across the green expanses, at the trees, at
the white clouds on the horizon. There
was quiet in her mind, he thought. She
was native to that crystal world; for her, the steps came comfortingly through
the silence and the lovely thing brought with it no terrors. It was all so easy for her and simple.
Ah, so simple, so simple; like the Hire Purchase
System on which Rosie had bought her pink bed.
And how simple it was, too, to puddle clear waters and unpetal every
flower! – every wild flower, by God! one ever passed in a governess cart at the
heels of a barrel-bellied pony. How
simple to spit on the floors of churches!
Si prega di non sputare. Simple to lick one’s legs and enjoy oneself –
dutifully – in pink underclothing.
Perfectly simple.
‘It’s like the Arietta, don’t you think?’
said Emily suddenly, ‘the Arietta of Op. 111.’
And she hummed the first bars of the air. ‘Don’t you feel like that?’
‘What’s like that?’
‘Everything,’ said Emily. ‘Today, I mean. You and me.
These gardens …’ And she went on humming.
Gumbril shook his head. ‘Too simple for me,’ he said.
Emily laughed. ‘Ah, but then think how impossible it gets a
little farther on.’ She agitated her
fingers wildly, as though she were trying to play the impossible passages. ‘It begins easily for the sake of poor
imbeciles like me; but it goes on, it goes on, more and more fully and subtly
and abstrusely and embracingly. But it’s
still the same movement.’
The shadows stretched farther and farther
across the lawns, and as the sun declined the level light picked out among the
grasses innumerable stripplings of shadow; and in the paths, that had seemed
under the more perpendicular rays as level as a table, a thousand little
shadowy depressions and sun-touched mountains were now apparent. Gumbril looked at his watch.
‘Good Lord!’ he said, ‘we must fly.’ He jumped up.
‘Quick, quick!’
‘But why?’
‘We shall be late.’ He wouldn’t tell her for what. ‘Wait and see’ was all that Emily could get
out of him by her questioning. They
hurried out of the gardens, and in spite of her protests he insisted on taking
a taxi into town. ‘I have such a lot of
unearned increment of get rid of,’ he explained. The Patent Small-Clothes seemed at the moment
remoter than the farthest stars.
CHAPTER
XIII
IN spite
of the taxi, in spite of the gobbled dinner, they were late. The concert had begun.
‘Never mind,’ said Gumbril. ‘We shall get in in time for the
minuetto. It’s then that the fun really
begins.’
‘Sour grapes,’ said Emily, putting her
ear to the door. ‘It sounds to me simply
too lovely.’
They stood outside, like beggars waiting
abjectly at the doors of a banqueting-hall – stood and listened to the snatches
of music that came out tantalizingly from within. A rattle of clapping announced at last that
the first movement was over; the doors were thrown open. Hungrily they rushed in. The Sclopis Quartet and a subsidiary viola
were bowing from the platform. There was
a chirrup of tuning, then preliminary silence.
Sclopis nodded and moved his bow.
The minuetto of Mozart’s G Minor Quintet broke out, phrase after phrase,
short and decisive, with every now and then a violent sforzando chord,
startling in its harsh and sudden emphasis.
Minuetto – all civilization, Mr Mercaptan
would have said, was implied in the delicious word, the delicate, pretty
thing. Ladies and precious gentlemen,
fresh from the wit and gallantry of Crebillon-haunted sofas, stepping
gracefully to a pattern of airy notes.
To this passion of one who cries out, to this obscure and angry argument
with fate, how would they, Gumbril wondered, how would they have tripped it?
How pure the passion, how unaffected,
clear and without clot or pretension the unhappiness of that slow movement
which followed! Blessed are the pure in
heart, for they shall see God. Pure and
unsullied; pure and unmixed, unadulterated.
‘Not passionate, thank God; only sensual and sentimental.’ In the name of earwig. Amen.
Pure, pure. Worshippers have
tried to rape the statues of the gods; the statuaries who made the images were
generally to blame. And how deliciously,
too, an artist can suffer! and, in the face of the whole Albert Hall, with what
an effective gesture and grimace! But
blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The instruments come together and part
again. Long silver threads hang aerially
over a murmur of waters; in the midst of muffled sobbing a cry. The fountains blow their architecture of
slender pillars, and from basin to basin the waters fall; from basin to basin,
and every fall makes somehow possible a higher leaping of the jet, and at the
last fall the mounting column springs up into the sunlight, and from water the
music has modulated up into a rainbow.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God; they shall make
God visible, too, to other eyes.
Blood beats in the ears. Beat, beat, beat. A slow drum in the darkness, beating in the
ears of one who lies wakeful with fever, with the sickness of too much
misery. It beats unceasingly, in the
ears, in the mind itself. Body and mind
are indivisible, and in the spirit blood painfully throbs. Sad thoughts droop through the mind. A small, pure light comes swaying down
through the darkness, comes to rest, resigning itself to the obscurity of its
misfortune. There is resignation, but
blood still beats in the ears. Blood
still painfully beats, though the mind has acquiesced. And then, suddenly, the mind exerts itself,
throws off the fever of too much suffering and, laughing, commands the body to
dance. The introduction to the last
movement comes to its suspended, throbbing close. There is an instant of expectation, and then,
with a series of mounting trochees and a downward hurrying, step after tiny
step, in triple time, the dance begins.
Irrelevant, irreverent, out of key with all that has gone before. But man’s greatest strength lies in his capacity
for irrelevance. In the midst of
pestilences, wars and famines, he builds cathedrals; and a slave, he can think
the irrelevant and unsuitable thoughts of a free man. The spirit is slave to fever and beating
blood, at the mercy of an obscure and tyrannous misfortune. But irrelevantly, it elects to dance in
triple measure – a mounting skip, a patter of descending feet.
The G minor Quintet is at an end; the
applause rattles out loudly. Enthusiasts
stand up and cry bravo. And the five men
on the platform rise and bow their acknowledgements. Great Sclopis himself receives his share of
the plaudits with a weary condescension; weary are his poached eyes, weary his
disillusioned smile. It is only his due
he knows; but he has had so much clapping, so many lovely women. He has a Roman nose, a colossal brow and,
though the tawny musical mane does much to conceal the fact, no back to his
head. Garofalo, the second fiddle, is black,
beady-eyed and pot-bellied. The convex
reflections of the electroliers slide back and forth over his polished bald
head, as he bends, again, again, in little military salutes. Peperkoek, two metres high, bows with a
sinuous politeness. His face, his hair
are all of the same greyish buff colour; he does not smile, his appearance is
monolithic and grim. Not so exuberant
Knoedler, who sweats and smiles and embraces his ‘cello and lays his hand to
his heart and bows almost to the ground as though all this hullabaloo were
directed only at him. As for poor little
Mr Jenkins, the subsidiary viola, he has slid away into the background, and
feeling that this is really the Sclopis’s show and that he, a mere intruder,
has no right to any of these demonstrations, he hardly bows at all, but only
smiles, vaguely and nervously, and from time to time makes a little spasmodic
twitch to show that he isn’t really ungrateful or haughty, as you might think,
but that he feels in the circumstances – the position is a little embarrassing
– it is hard to explain….
‘Strange,’ said Gumbril, ‘to think that
those ridiculous creatures could have produced what we’ve just been hearing.’
The poached eye of Sclopis lighted on
Emily, flushed and ardently applauding.
He gave her, all to herself, a weary smile. He would have a letter, he guessed, tomorrow
morning signed ‘Your little Admirer in the Third Row’. She looked a choice little piece. He smiled again to encourage her. Emily, alas! had not even noticed. She was applauding the music.
‘Did you enjoy it?’ he asked, as they
stepped out into a deserted Bond Street.
‘Did I …?’ Emily laughed
expressively. ‘No, I didn’t enjoy,’ she
said. ‘Enjoy isn’t the word. You enjoy eating ices. It made me happy. It’s unhappy music, but it made me happy.’
Gumbril hailed a cab and gave the address
of his rooms in Great Russell Street.
‘Happy,’ he repeated, as they sat there side by side in the
darkness. He, too, was happy.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘To my rooms,’ said Gumbril, ‘we shall be
quiet there.’ He was afraid she might
object to going there – after yesterday.
But she made no comment.
‘Some people think that it’s only
possible to be happy if one makes a noise,’ she said, after a pause. ‘I find it’s too delicate and melancholy for
noise. Being happy is rather melancholy
– like the most beautiful landscape, like those trees and the grass and the
clouds and the sunshine today.’
‘From the outside,’ said Gumbril, ‘it
even looks rather dull.’ They stumbled
up the dark staircase to his rooms.
Gumbril lit a pair of candles and put the kettle on the gas ring. They sat together on the divan sipping
tea. In the rich, soft light of the
candles she looked different, more beautiful.
They silk of her dress seemed wonderfully rich and glossy, like the
petals of a tulip, and on her face, on her bare arms and neck the light seemed
to spread an impalpable bright bloom. On
the wall behind them, their shadows ran up towards the ceiling, enormous and
profoundly black.
‘How unreal it is,’ Gumbril
whispered. ‘Not true. This remote secret room. These lights and shadows out of another
time. And you out of nowhere and I, out
of a past utterly remote from yours, sitting together here, together – and
being happy. That’s the strangest thing
of all. Being quite senselessly
happy. It’s unreal, unreal.’
‘But why,’ said Emily, ‘why? It’s here and happening now. It is
real.’
‘It all might vanish, at any moment,’ he
said.
Emily smiled rather sadly. ‘It’ll vanish in due time,’ she said. ‘Quite naturally, not by magic; it’ll vanish
the way everything else vanishes and changes.
But it’s here now.’
They gave themselves up to the
enchantment. The candles burned, two
shining eyes of flame, without a wink, minute after minute. But for them there were no longer any
minutes. Emily leaned against him, her
body held in the crook of his arm, her head resting on his shoulder. He caressed his cheek against her hair;
sometimes, very gently, he kissed her forehead or her closed eyes.
‘If I had known you years ago …’ she
sighed. ‘But I was a silly little idiot
then. I shouldn’t have noticed any
difference between you and anybody else.’
‘I shall be very jealous,’ Emily spoke
again after another timeless silence.
‘There must never be anybody else, never the shadow of anybody else.’
‘There never will be anybody else,’ said
Gumbril.
Emily smiled and opened her eyes, looked
up at him. ‘Ah, not here,’ she said,
‘not in this real unreal room. Not
during this eternity. But there will be
other rooms just as real as this.’
‘Not so real, not so real.’ He bent his face towards hers. She closed her eyes again, and the lids
fluttered with a sudden tremulous movement at the touch of his light kiss.
For them there were no more minutes. But time passed, time passed flowing in a
dark stream, stanchlessly, as though from some profound mysterious wound in the
world’s side, bleeding, bleeding for ever.
One of the candles had burned down to the socket and the long, smoky
flame wavered unsteadily. The flickering
light troubled their eyes; the shadows twitched and stirred uneasily. Emily looked up at him.
‘What’s the time?’ she said.
Gumbril looked at his watch. It was nearly one o’clock. ‘Too late for you to get back,’ he said.
‘Too late?’ Emily sat up.
Ah, the enchantment was breaking, was giving way, like a film of ice
beneath a weight, like a web before a thrust of the wind. They looked at one another. ‘What shall I do?’ she asked.
‘You could sleep here,’ Gumbril answered
in a voice that came from a long way away.
She sat for a long time in silence,
looking through half-closed eyes at the expiring candle flame. Gumbril watched her in an agony of
suspense. Was the ice to be broken, the
web-work finally and for ever torn? The
enchantment could still be prolonged, the eternity renewed. He felt his heart beating in his breast; he
held his breath. It would be terrible if
she were to go now, it would be a kind of death. The flame of the candle flickered more
violently, leaping up in a thin, long, smoky flare, sinking again almost to
darkness. Emily got up and blew out the candle. The other still burned calmly and steadily.
‘May I stay?’ she asked. ‘Will you allow me?’
He understood the meaning of her
question, and nodded. ‘Of course,’ he
said.
‘Of course? Is it as much of course as all that?’
‘When I say so.’ He smiled at her. The eternity had been renewed, the
enchantment prolonged. There was no need
to think of anything now but the moment.
The past was forgotten, the future abolished. There was only this secret room and the
candlelight and the unreal, impossible happiness of being two. Now that this peril of a disenchantment had
been averted, it would last for ever. He
got up from the couch, crossed the room, he took her hands and kissed them.
‘Shall we sleep now?’ she asked.
Gumbril nodded.
‘Do you mind if I blow out the
light?’ And without waiting for his
answer, Emily turned, gave a puff, and the room was in darkness. He heard the rustling of her undressing. Hastily he stripped off his own clothes,
pulled back the coverlet from the divan.
The bed was made and ready; he opened it and slipped between the
sheets. A dim greenish light from the
gas lamp in the street below came up between the parted curtains illuminating
faintly the farther end of the room.
Against this tempered darkness he could see her, silhouetted, standing
quite still, as if hesitating on some invisible brink.
‘Emily,’ he whispered.
‘I’m coming,’ Emily answered. She stood there, unmoving, a few seconds
longer, then overstepped the brink. She
came silently across the room, and sat down on the edge of the low couch. Gumbril lay perfectly still, without
speaking, waiting in the enchanted timeless darkness. Emily lifted her knees, slid her feet under
the sheet, then stretched herself out beside him, her body, in the narrow bed,
touching his. Gumbril felt that she was
trembling; trembling, a sharp involuntary start, a little shudder, another
start.
‘You’re cold,’ he said, and slipping one
arm beneath her shoulders he drew her, limp and unresisting, towards him. She lay there, pressed against him. Gradually the trembling ceased. Quite still, quite still in the calm of the
enchantment. The past is forgotten, the
future abolished; there is only this dark and everlasting moment. A drugged and intoxicated stupor of happiness
possessed his spirit; a numbness, warm and delicious, lay upon him. And yet through the stupor he knew with a
dreadful anxious certainty that the end would soon be there. Like a man on the night before his execution,
he looked forward through the endless present; he foresaw the end of his
eternity. And after? Everything was uncertain and unsafe.
Very gently, he began caressing her
shoulder, her long slender arm, drawing his fingertips lightly and slowly over
her smooth skin; slowly from her neck, over her shoulder, lingeringly round the
elbow to her hand. Again, again: he was
learning her arm. The form of it was
part of the knowledge, now, of his fingertips; his fingers knew it as they knew
a piece of music, as they knew Mozart’s Twelfth Sonata, for example. And the themes that crowd so quickly one
after another at the beginning of the first movement played themselves
aerially, glitteringly in his mind; they became a part of the enchantment.
Through the silk of her shift he learned
her curving side, her smooth straight back and the ridge of her spine. He stretched down, touched her feet, her
knees. Under the smock he learned her
warm body, lightly, slowly caressing. He
knew her, his fingers, he felt, could build her up, a warm and curving statue
in the darkness. He did not desire her;
to desire would have been to break the enchantment. He let himself sink deeper and deeper into
his dark stupor of happiness. She was
asleep in his arms; and soon he too was asleep.
CHAPTER XIV
MRS VIVEASH descended
the steps into King Street, and standing there on the pavement looked dubiously
first to the right and then to the left.
Little and loud, the taxis rolled by on their white wheels, the
long-snouted limousines passed with a sigh.
The air smelt of watered dust, tempered in Mrs Viveash’s immediate
neighbourhood by those memories of Italian jasmines which were her
perfume. On the opposite pavement, in
the shade, two young men, looking very conscious in their grey top-hats,
marched gravely along.
Life, Mrs Viveash thought, looked a
little dim this morning, in spite of the fine weather. She glanced at her watch; it was one
o’clock. Soon one would have to eat some
lunch. But where, and with whom? Mrs Viveash had no engagements. All the world was before her, she was
absolutely free, all day long.
Yesterday, when she declined all those pressing invitations, the
prospects had seemed delightful.
Liberty, no complications, no contacts; a pre-Adamite empty world to do
what she liked in.
But today, when it came to the point, she
hated her liberty. To come out like this
at one o’clock into a vacuum – it was absurd, it was appalling. The prospect of immeasurable boredom opened
before her. Steppes after steppes of
ennui, horizon beyond horizon, for ever the same. She looked again to the right and again to
the left. Finally she decided to go to
the left. Slowly, walking along her
private knife-edge between her personal abysses, she walked towards the
left. She remembered suddenly one
shining day like this in the summer of 1917, when she had walked along this
same street, slowly, like this, on the sunny side, with Tony Lamb. All that day, that night, it had been one
long goodbye. He was going back the next
morning. Less than a week later he was
dead. Never again, never again: there
had been a time when she could make herself cry, simply by saying those two
words once or twice, under her breath.
Never again, never again. She
repeated them softly now. But she felt
no tears behind her eyes. Grief doesn’t
kill, love doesn’t kill; but time kills everything, kills desire, kills sorrow,
kills in the end the mind that feels them; wrinkles and softens the body while
it still lives, rots it like a medlar, kills it too at last. Never again, never again. Instead of crying, she laughed, laughed
aloud. The pigeon-breasted old gentleman
who had just passed her, twirling between his finger and thumb the ends of a
white military moustache, turned round startled. Could she be laughing at him?
‘Never again,’ murmured Mrs Viveash.
‘I beg your pardon?’ queried the martial
gentleman, in a rich, port-winey, cigary
voice.
Mrs Viveash looked at him with such
wide-eyed astonishment that the old gentleman was quite taken aback. ‘A thousand apologies, dear lady. Thought you were addressing … H’m,
ah’m.’ He replaced his hat, squared his
shoulders and went off smartly, left, right, bearing preciously before him his
pigeon breast. Poor thing, he thought,
poor young thing. Talking to
herself. Must be cracked, must be off
her head. Or perhaps she took
drugs. That was more likely: that was
much more likely. Most of them did
nowadays. Vicious young women. Lesbians, drug-fiends, nymphomaniacs, dipsos
– thoroughly vicious, nowadays, thoroughly vicious. He arrived at his club in an excellent
temper.
Never again, never, never again. Mrs Viveash would have liked to be able to
cry.
St James’s Square opened before her. Romantically under its trees the statue
pranced. The trees gave her an idea: she
might go down into the country for the afternoon, take a cab and drive out,
goodness only knew where! To the top of
a hill somewhere. Box Hill, Leith Hill,
Holmbury Hill, Ivinghoe Beacon – any hill where one could sit and look out over
plains. One might do worse than that with
one’s liberty.
But not much worse, she reflected.
Mrs Viveash had turned up towards the
northern side of the square and was almost at its north-western corner when,
with a thrill of genuine delight, with a sense of the most profound relief, she
saw a familiar figure, running down the steps of the London Library.
‘Theodore!’ she hallooed faintly but
penetratingly, from her inward deathbed.
‘Gumbril!’ She waved her parasol.
Gumbril halted, looked around, came
smiling to meet her. ‘How delightful,’
he said, ‘but how unfortunate.’
‘Why unfortunate?’ asked Mrs
Viveash. ‘Am I of evil omen?’
‘Unfortunate,’ Gumbril explained,
‘because I’ve got to catch a train and can’t profit by this meeting.’
‘Ah, no, Theodore,’ said Mrs Viveash,
‘you’re not going to catch a train.
You’re going to come and lunch with me.
Providence has decreed it. You
can’t say no to Providence.’
‘I must,’ Gumbril shook his head. ‘I’ve said yes to somebody else.’
‘To whom?’
‘Ah!’ said Gumbril, with a coy and saucy mysteriousness.
‘And where are you going in your famous
train?’
‘Ah again,’ Gumbril answered.
‘How intolerably tiresome and silly you
are!’ Mrs Viveash declared. ‘One would
think you were a sixteen-year-old schoolboy going out for his first assignation
with a shop girl. At your age,
Gumbril!’ She shook her head, smiled
agonizingly and with contempt. ‘Who is
she? What sordid pick-up?’
‘Not sordid in the least,’ protested
Gumbril.
‘But decidedly a pick-up. Eh?’ A
banana-skin was lying, like a bedraggled starfish, in the gutter, just in front
of where they were standing. Mrs Viveash
stepped forward and with the point of her parasol lifted it carefully up and
offered it to her companion.
‘Merci,’ Gumbril bowed.
She tossed the skin back again into the
gutter. ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘the
young lady can wait while we have luncheon.’
Gumbril shook his head. ‘I’ve made the arrangement,’ he said. Emily’s letter was in his pocket. She had taken the loveliest cottage just out
of Robertsbridge, in Sussex. Ah, but the
loveliest imaginable. For the whole
summer. He could come and see her
there. He had telegraphed that he would
come today, this afternoon, by the two o’clock from Charing Cross.
Mrs Viveash took him by the elbow. ‘Come along,’ she said. ‘There’s a post office in the passage going
from Jermyn Street to Piccadilly. You
can wire from there your infinite regrets.
These things always improve with a little keeping. There will be raptures when you do go tomorrow.’
Gumbril allowed himself to be led
along. ‘What an insufferable woman you
are,’ he said, laughing.
‘Instead of being grateful to me for
asking you to luncheon!’
‘Oh, I am grateful,’ said Gumbril. ‘And astonished.’
He looked at her. Mrs Viveash smiled and fixed him for a moment
with her pale, untroubled eyes…. She said nothing.
‘Still,’ Gumbril went on, ‘I must be at
Charing Cross by two, you know.’
‘But we’re lunching at Verrey’s.’
Gumbril shook his head.
They were at the corner of Jermyn
Street. Mrs Viveash halted and delivered
her ultimatum, the more impressive for being spoken in that expiring voice of
one who says in articulo the final
and supremely important things. ‘We
lunch at Verrey’s, Theodore, or I shall never, never speak to you again.’
‘But be reasonable, Myra,’ he
implored. If only he’d told her that he
had a business appointment…. Imbecile, to have dropped those stupid hints – in
that tone!
‘I prefer not to be,’ said Mrs Viveash.
Gumbril made a gesture of despair and was
silent. He thought of Emily in her
native quiet among the flowers; in a cottage altogether too cottagey, with
honeysuckles and red ramblers and hollyhocks – though, on second thoughts, none
of them would be blooming yet, would they? – happily, in white muslin, extracting
from the cottage piano the easier sections of the Arietta. A little absurd, perhaps, when you considered
her like that; but exquisite, but adorable, but pure of heart and flawless in
her bright pellucid integrity, complete as a crystal in its faceted
perfection. She would be waiting for
him, expecting him; and they would walk through the twiddly lanes – or perhaps
there would be a governess cart for hire, with a fat pony like a tub on legs to
pull it – they would look for flowers in the woods and perhaps he would still
remember what sort of noise a whitethroat makes; or even if he didn’t remember,
he could always magisterially say he did.
‘That’s a whitethroat, Emily. Do
you hear? The one that goes “Tweedly,
weedly, weedledy dee”.’
‘I’m waiting,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘Patiently, however.’
Gumbril looked at her and found her
smiling like a tragic mask. After all,
he reflected, Emily would still be there if he went down tomorrow. It would be stupid to quarrel with Myra about
something that was really, when he came to think of it, not of enormous
importance. It was stupid to quarrel
with anyone about anything; and with Myra and about this, particularly so. In this white dress patterned with flowing
arabesques of black she looked, he thought, more than ever enchanting. There had been times in the past…. The past
leads on to the present…. No; but in any case she was excellent company.
‘Well,’ he said, sighing decisively,
‘let’s go and send my wire.’
Mrs Viveash made no comment, and
traversing Jermyn Street they walked up the narrow passage under the lee of
Wren’s bald barn of St James’s, to the post office.
‘I shall pretext a catastrophe,’ said
Gumbril, as they entered; and going to the telegraph desk he wrote: ‘Slight
accident on way to station not serious at all but a little indisposed come same
train tomorrow.’ He addressed the form
and handed it in.
‘A little what?’ asked the young lady
behind the bars, as she read it through, prodding each successive word with the
tip of her blunt pencil.
‘A little indisposed,’ said Gumbril, and
he felt suddenly very much ashamed of himself.
‘A little indisposed,’ – no, really, that was too much. He’d withdraw the telegram, he’d go after
all.
‘Ready?’ asked Mrs Viveash, coming up
from the other end of the counter where she had been buying stamps.
Gumbril pushed a florin under the bars.
‘A little indisposed,’ he said, hooting
with laughter, and he walked towards the door leaning heavily on his stick and
limping. ‘Slight accident,’ he
explained.
‘What is the meaning of this clownery?’
Mrs Viveash inquired.
‘What indeed?’ Gumbril had limped up to the door and stood
there, holding it open for her. He was
taking no responsibility for himself. It
was the clown’s doing, and the clown, poor creature, was non compos, not entirely there, and couldn’t be called to account
for his actions. He limped after her
towards Piccadilly.
‘Giudicato
guarabile in cinque giorni,’ Mrs Viveash laughed. ‘How charming that always is in the Italian
papers. The fickle lady, the jealous
lover, the stab, the colpo di rivoltella,
the mere Anglo-Saxon black eye – all judged by the house surgeon at the
Misericordia curable in five days. And
you, my poor Gumbril, are you curable in five days?’
‘That depends,’ said Gumbril. ‘There may be complications.’
Mrs Viveash waved her parasol; a taxi
came swerving to the pavement’s edge in front of them. ‘Meanwhile,’ she said, ‘you can’t be expected
to walk.’
At Verrey’s they lunched off the lobsters
and white wine. ‘Fish suppers,’ Gumbril
quoted jovially from the Restoration, ‘fish suppers will make a man hop like a
flea.’ Through the whole meal he clowned
away in the most inimitable style. The
ghost of a governess cart rolled along the twiddly lanes of Robertsbridge. But one can refuse to accept responsibility;
a clown cannot be held accountable. And
besides, when the future and the past are abolished, when it is only the
present instant, whether enchanted or unenchanted, that counts, when there are
no causes or motives, no future consequences to be considered, how can there be
responsibility, even for those who are not clowns? He drank a great deal of hock, and when the
clock struck two and the train had begun to snort out of Charing Cross, he
could not refrain from proposing the health of Viscount Lascelles. After that he began telling Mrs Viveash about
his adventures as a Complete Man.
‘You should have seen me,’ he said,
describing his beard.
‘I should have been bowled over.’
‘You shall see me, then,’ said Gumbril. ‘Ah, what a Don Giovanni. La ci
darem la mano, La mi dirai di si, Vieni, non e lontano, Partiam, ben mio, da
qui. And they came, they came. Without hesitation. No “vorrei
e non vorrei”, no “mi trema un poco
il cor.” Straight away.’
‘Felice, io so, sarei,’ Mrs Viveash sang very
faintly under her breath, from a remote bed of agony.
Ah, happiness, happiness; a little dull, someone had wisely
said, when you looked at it from outside.
An affair of duets at the cottage piano, of collecting specimens, hand
in hand, for the hortus siccus. A matter of integrity and quietness.
‘Ah, but the history of the young woman who was married four
years ago,’ exclaimed Gumbril with clownish rapture, ‘and remains to this day a
virgin – what an episode in my memoirs!’
In the enchanted darkness he had learned her young body. He looked at his fingers; her beauty was a
part of their knowledge. On the
tablecloth he drummed out the first bars of the Twelfth Sonata of Mozart. ‘And even after singing her duet with the
Don,’ he continued, ‘she is still virgin.
There are chaste pleasures, sublimated sensualities. More thrillingly voluptuous,’ with the
gesture of a restaurant-keeper who praises the speciality of the house, he blew
a treackly kiss, ‘than any of the grosser deliriums.’
‘What is all this about?’ asked Mrs Viveash.
Gumbril finished off his glass. ‘I am talking esoterically,’ he said, ‘for my
own pleasure, not yours.’
‘But tell me more about the beard,’ Mrs Viveash insisted. ‘I liked the beard so much.’
‘All right,’ said Gumbril, ‘let us try to be unworthy with
coherence.’
They sat for a long time over their cigarettes; it was
half-past three before Mrs Viveash suggested they should go.
‘Almost time,’ she said, looking at her watch, ‘to have
tea. One damned meal after another. And never anything new to eat. And every year one gets bored with another of
the old things. Lobster, for instance,
how I used to adore lobster once! But
today – well, really, it was only your conversation, Theodore, that made it
tolerable.’
Gumbril put his hand to his heart and bowed. He felt suddenly extremely depressed.
‘And wine: I used to think Orvieto so heavenly. But this spring, when I went to Italy, it was
just a bad muddy sort of Vouvray. And
those soft caramels they call Fiats; I used to eat those till I was sick. I was at the sick stage before I’d finished
one of them, this time in Rome.’ Mrs
Viveash shook her head. ‘Disillusion
after disillusion.’
They walked down the dark passage into the street.
‘We’ll go home,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘I really haven’t the spirit to do anything
else this afternoon.’ To the
commissionaire who opened the door of the cab she gave the address of her house
in St James’s.
‘Will one ever recapture the old thrills?’ she asked rather
fatiguedly as they drove slowly through the traffic of Regent Street.
‘Not by chasing after them,’ said Gumbril, in whom the clown
had quite evaporated. ‘If one sat still
enough they might perhaps come back of their own accord….’ There would be the faint sound as it were of
feet approaching through the quiet.
‘It isn’t only food,’ said Mrs Viveash, who had closed her
eyes and was leaning back in her corner.
‘So I can well believe.’
‘It’s everything.
Nothing’s the same now. I feel it
never will be.’
‘Never more,’ croaked Gumbril.
‘Never again,’ Mrs Viveash echoed. ‘Never again.’ There were still no tears behind her
eyes. ‘Did you ever know Tony Lamb?’ she
asked.
‘No,’ said Gumbril answered from his corner. ‘What about him?’
Mrs Viveash did not answer.
What, indeed, about him? She
thought of his very clear blue eyes and the fair, bright hair that had been
lighter than his brown face. Brown face
and neck, red-brown hands; and all the rest of his skin was as white as
milk. ‘I was very fond of him,’ she said
at last. ‘That’s all. He was killed in 1917, just about this time
of the year. It seems a very long time
ago, don’t you think?’
‘Does it?’ Gumbril
shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t
know. The past is abolished. Vivamus,
mea Lesbia. If I weren’t so horribly
depressed, I’d embrace you. That would
be some slight compensation for my’ – he tapped his foot with the end of his
walking-stick – ‘my accident.’
‘You’re depressed too?’
‘One should never drink at luncheon,’ said Gumbril. ‘It wrecks the afternoon. One should also never think of the past and
never for one moment consider the future.
These are treasures of ancient wisdom.
But perhaps after a little tea …’ He leaned forward to look at the
figures on the taximeter, for the cab had come to a standstill – ‘after a nip
of the tannin stimulant’ – he threw open the door – ‘we may feel rather
better.’
Mrs Viveash smiled excruciatingly. ‘For me,’ she said, as she stepped out on to
the pavement, ‘even tannin has lost its virtues now.’
Mrs Viveash’s drawing-room was tastefully in the
movement. The furniture was upholstered
in fabrics designed by Dufy – racehorses and roses, little tennis players
clustering in the midst of enormous flowers, printed in grey and ochre on a
white ground. There were a couple of
lampshades by Balla. On the pale
rose-stippled walls hung three portraits of herself by three different and
entirely incongruous painters, a selection of the usual oranges and lemons, and
a rather forbidding contemporary nude painted in two tones of green.
‘And how bored I am with this room and all these beastly
pictures!’ exclaimed Mrs Viveash as she entered. ‘She took off her hat and, standing in front
of the mirror above the mantelpiece, smoothed her coppery hair.
‘You should take a cottage in the country,’ said Gumbril, ‘but
a pony and a governess cart and drive along the twiddly lanes looking for
flowers. After tea you open the cottage
piano,’ and suiting his action to the words, Gumbril sat down at the
long-tailed Blüthner, ‘and you play, you play.’
Very slowly and with parodied expressiveness he played the opening theme
of the Arietta. ‘You wouldn’t be bored
then,’ he said, turning round to her, when he had finished.
‘Ah, wouldn’t I!’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘And with whom do you propose that I should
share my cottage?’
‘Anyone you like,’ said Gumbril. His fingers hung, as though meditating over
the keys.
‘But I don’t like anyone,’ cried Mrs Viveash with a terrible
vehemence from her deathbed…. Ah, now it had been said, the truth. It sounded like a joke. Tony had been dead five years now. Those bright blue eyes – ah, never
again. All rotted away to nothing.
‘Then you should try,’ said Gumbril, whose hands had begun to
creep softly forward into the Twelfth Sonata.
‘You should try.’
‘But I do try,’ said Mrs Viveash. Her elbows propped on the mantelpiece, her
chin resting on her clasped hands, she was looking fixedly at her own image in
the glass. Pale eyes looked unwaveringly
into pale eyes. The red mouth and its
reflection exchanged their smiles of pain.
She had tried; it revolted her now to think how often she had tried; she
had tried to like someone, anyone, as much as Tony. She had tried to recapture, to re-evoke, to
revivify. And there had never been
anything, really, but a disgust. ‘I
haven’t succeeded,’ she added, after a pause.
The music had shifted from F major to D minor; it mounted in
leaping anapæst to a suspended chord, ran down again, mounted once more,
modulating to C minor, then, through a passage of trembling notes to A flat
major, to the dominant of D flat, to the dominant of C, to C minor, and at
last, to a new clear theme in the major.
‘Then I’m sorry for you,’ said Gumbril, allowing his fingers
to play on by themselves. He felt sorry,
too, for the subjects of Mrs Viveash’s desperate experiments. She mightn’t have succeeded in liking them –
for their part, poor devils, they in general only too agonizingly liked her….
Only too … He remembered the cold, damp spots on his pillow, in the
darkness. Those hopeless, angry
tears. ‘You nearly killed me once,’ he
said.
‘Only time kills,’ said Mrs Viveash, still looking into her
own pale eyes. ‘I have never made anyone
happy,’ she added, after a pause. ‘Never
anyone,’ she thought, except Tony, and Tony they had killed, shot him through
the head. Even the bright eyes had
rotted, like any other carrion. She too
had been happy then. Never again.
A maid came in with the tea-things.
‘Ah, the tannin!’ exclaimed Gumbril with enthusiasm, and broke
off his playing. ‘The one hope of
salvation.’ He poured out two cups, and
picking up one of them he came over to the fireplace and stood behind her,
sipping slowly at the pale brewage and looking over her shoulder at their two
reflections in the mirror.
‘La ci darem,’ he
hummed. ‘If only I had my beard!’ He stroked his chin and with the tip of his
forefinger brushed up the drooping ends of his moustache. ‘You’d come trembling like Zerlina, in under
its golden shadow.’
Mrs Viveash smiled. ‘I
don’t ask for anything better,’ she said.
‘What more delightful part! Felice, io so, sarei: Batti, batti, o bel
Mazetto. Enviable Zerlina!’
The servant made another silent entry.
‘Tell him I’m not at home,’ said Mrs Viveash, without looking
round.
There was a silence.
With raised eyebrows Gumbril looked over Mrs Viveash’s shoulder at her
reflection. Her eyes were calm and
without expression, she did not smile or frown.
Gumbril still questioningly looked.
In the end he began to laugh.
CHAPTER XV
THEY were
playing that latest novelty from across the water ‘What’s he to Hecuba?’ Sweet, sweet and piercing, the saxophone
pierced into the very bowels of compassion and tenderness, pierced like a
revelation from heaven, pierced like the angel’s treacly dart into the holy
Teresa’s quivering and ecstasiated flank.
More ripely and roundly, with a kindly and less agonizing
voluptuousness, the ‘cello meditated those Mohammedan ecstasies that last,
under the green palms of Paradise, six hundred inenarrable years apiece. Into this charged atmosphere the violin
admitted refreshing draughts of fresh air, cool and thin like the breath from a
still damp squirt. And the piano hammered and rattled away unmindful of the
sensibilities of the other instruments, banged away all the time, reminding
everyone concerned, in a thoroughly business-like way, that this was a cabaret
where people came to dance the fox-trot; not a baroque church for female saints
to go into ecstasies in, not a mild, happy valley of tumbling houris.
At each recurrence of the refrain the four negroes of the
orchestra, or at least the three of them who played with their hands alone –
for the saxophonist always blew at this point with a redoubled sweetness,
enriching the passage with a warbling contrapuntal soliloquy that fairly wrung
the entrails and transported the pierced heart – broke into melancholy and
drawling song:
‘What’s
he to Hecuba?
Nothing at all.
That’s why there’ll be no wedding on Wednesday
week,
Way down in old Bengal.’
‘What unspeakable sadness,’ said Gumbril, as he stepped,
stepped through the intricacies of the trot.
‘Eternal passion, eternal pain. Les chants désespérés sont les chants les
plus beaux, Et j’en suis d’immortels qui sont de purs sanglots. Rum tiddle-um-tum, pom-pom. Amen.
What’s he to Hecuba? Nothing at
all. Nothing, mark you. Nothing, nothing.’
‘Nothing,’ repeated Mrs Viveash. ‘I know all about that.’ She sighed.
‘I am nothing to you,’ said Gumbril, gliding with skill
between the wall and the Charybdis of a couple dangerously experimenting with a
new step. ‘You are nothing to me. Thank God.
And yet here we are, two bodies with but a single thought, a beast with
two backs, a perfectly united centaur trotting, trotting.’ They trotted.
‘What’s he to Hecuba?’
The grinning blackamoors repeated the question, reiterated the answer on
a tone of frightful unhappiness. The
saxophone warbled on the verge of anguish.
The couples revolved, marked time, stepped and stepped with an habitual
precision, as though performing some ancient and profoundly significant
rite. Some were in fancy dress, for this
was a gala night at the cabaret. Young
women disguised as callipygous Florentine pages, blue-breeched Gondolies,
black-breeched Toreadors circulated, moon-like, round the hall, clasped
sometimes in the arms of Arabs, or white clowns, or more often of untravestied
partners. The faces reflected in the
mirrors were the sort of faces one feels one ought to know by sight; the cabaret
was ‘Artistic’.
‘What’s he to Hecuba?’
Mrs Viveash murmured the response, almost piously, as though
she were worshipping almighty and omnipresent Nil. ‘I adore this tune,’ she said, ‘this divine
tune.’ It filled up a space, it moved,
it jigged, it set things twitching in you, it occupied time, it gave you a
sense of being alive. ‘Divine tune,
divine tune,’ she repeated with emphasis, and she shut her eyes, trying to
abandon herself, trying to float, trying to give Nil the slip.
‘Ravishing little Toreador, that,’ said Gumbril, who had been
following the black-breeched travesty with affectionate interest.
Mrs Viveash opened her eyes.
Nil was unescapable. ‘With Piers
Cotton, you mean? Your tastes are a
little common, my dear Theodore.’
‘Green-eyed monster!’
Mrs Viveash laughed. ‘When
I was being “finished” in Paris,’ she said, ‘Mademoiselle always used to urge
me to take fencing lessons. C’est an exercise très gracious. Et puis,’ Mrs Viveash mimicked a
passionate earnestness, ‘et puis, ça
dévelope le basin. Your Toreador,
Gumbril, looks as though she must be a champion with the foils. Quel
basin!’
‘Hush,’ said Gumbril.
They were abreast of the Toreador and her partner. Piers Cotton turned his long greyhound’s nose
in their direction.
‘How are you?’ he asked across the music.
‘They nodded. ‘And
you?’
‘Ah, writing such a book,’ cried Piers Cotton, ‘such a
brilliant, brilliant, flashing book.’
The dance was carrying them apart.
‘Like a smile of false teeth,’ he shouted across the widening gulf, and
disappeared in the crowd.
‘What’s he to Hecuba?’
Lachrymosely, the hilarious blackamoors chanted their question,
mournfully pregnant with its foreknown reply.
Nil, omnipresent nil, world-soul, spiritual informer of all
matter. Nil in the shape of a
black-breeched moon-basined Toreador.
Nil, the man with the greyhound’s nose.
Nil, as four blackamoors. Nil in
the form of a divine tune. Nil, the
faces, the faces one ought to know by sight, reflected in the mirrors of the
hall. Nil this Gumbril whose arm is
round one’s waist, whose feet step in and out among one’s own. Nothing at all.
That’s why there’ll be no wedding. No wedding at St George’s, Hanover Square, -
oh, desperate experiment! – with Nil Viveash, that charming boy, that charming
nothing at all, engaged at the moment in hunting elephants, hunting fever and
carnivores among the Tikki-tikki pygmies.
That’s why there’ll be no wedding on Wednesday week. For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime. For the light strawy hair (not a lock left),
the brown face, the red-brown hands and the smooth boy’s body, milk-white,
milk-warm, are nothing at all, nothing, now, at all – nil these five years –
and the shining blue eyes as much nil as the rest.
‘Always the same people,’ complained Mrs Viveash, looking
round the room. ‘The old familiar
faces. Never anyone new. Where’s the younger generation, Gumbril? We’re old, Theodore. There are millions younger than we are. Where are they?’
‘I’m not responsible for them,’ said Gumbril. ‘I’m not even responsible for myself.’ He imagined a cottagey room, under a roof,
with a window near the floor and a sloping ceiling where you were always
bumping your head; and in the candlelight Emily’s candid eyes, her grave and
happy mouth; in the darkness, the curve, under his fingers, of her firm body.
‘Why don’t they come and sing for their supper?’ Mrs Viveash
went on petulantly. ‘It’s their business
to amuse us.’
‘They’re probably thinking of amusing themselves,’ Gumbril
suggested.
‘Well, then, they should do it where we can see them.’
‘What’s he to Hecuba?’
‘Nothing at all,’ Gumbril clownishly sang. The room, in the cottage, had nothing to do
with him. He breathed Mrs Viveash’s
memories of Italian jasmines, laid his cheek for a moment against her smooth
hair. ‘Nothing at all.’ Happy clown!
Way down in old Bengal, under the green Paradisiac palms,
among the ecstatic mystagogues and the saints who scream beneath the divine
caresses, the music came to an end. The
four negroes wiped their glistening faces.
The couples fell apart. Gumbril
and Mrs Viveash sat down and smoked a cigarette.
CHAPTER XVI
THE
blackamoors had left the platform at the end of the hall. The curtains looped up at either side had
slid down, cutting it off from the rest of the room – ‘making two worlds,’
Gumbril elegantly and allusively put it, ‘where only one grew before – and one
of them a better world,’ he added too philosophically, ‘because unreal.’ There was the theatrical silence, the
suspense. The curtains parted again.
On a narrow bed – on a bier perhaps – the corpse of a
woman. The husband kneels beside
it. At the foot stands the doctor,
putting away his instruments. In a
beribboned pink cradle reposes a monstrous baby.
THE
HUSBAND: Margaret! Margaret!
THE
DOCTOR: She is dead.
THE HUSBAND:
Margaret!
THE
DOCTOR: Of septicæmia, I tell you.
THE
HUSBAND: I wish that I too were dead!
THE
DOCTOR: But you won’t tomorrow.
THE
HUSBAND: Margaret! Margaret! Wait for me there; I shall not fail to meet you in
that hollow vale.
THE
DOCTOR: You will not be slow to survive her.
THE
HUSBAND: Christ have mercy upon us!
THE
DOCTOR: You would do better to think of the child.
THE
HUSBAND (rising and standing menacingly
over the cradle): Is that the monster?
THE
DOCTOR: No worse than others.
THE
HUSBAND: Begotten in a night of immaculate pleasure, monster, may you live
loveless, in dirty and impurity!
THE
DOCTOR: Conceived in lust and darkness, may your own impurity always seem
heavenly, monster, in your own eyes!
THE
HUSBAND: Murderer, slowly die all your life long!
THE
DOCTOR: The child must be fed.
THE
HUSBAND: Fed? With what?
THE
DOCTOR: With milk.
THE
HUSBAND: Her milk is cold in her breasts.
THE
DOCTOR: There are still cows.
THE
HUSBAND: Tubercular shorthorns. (Calling.)
Let Short-i’-the-horn be brought!
VOICES (off): Short-i’-the-horn!
Short-i’-the-horn! (Fadingly.)
Short-i’-the …
THE
DOCTOR: In nineteen hundred and twenty-one, twenty-seven thousand nine hundred
and thirteen women died in childbirth.
THE
HUSBAND: But none of them belonged to my harem.
THE
DOCTOR: Each of them was somebody’s wife.
THE
HUSBAND: Doubtless. But the people we
don’t know are only characters in the human comedy. We are the tragedians.
THE
DOCTOR: Not in the spectator’s eyes.
THE
HUSBAND: Do I think of the spectators? Ah, Margaret! Margaret!...
THE
DOCTOR: The twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and fourteenth.
THE
HUSBAND: The only one!
THE
DOCTOR: But here comes the cow.
(Short-i’-the-horn is led by a Yokel.)
THE
HUSBAND: Ah, good Short-i’-the-horn! (He
pats the animal.) She was tested last week, was she not?
THE YOKEL:
Ay, sir.
THE
HUSBAND: And found tubercular. No?
THE YOKEL:
Even in the udders, may it please you.
THE
HUSBAND: Excellent! Milk me the cow, sir, into this dirty wash-pot.
THE YOKEL:
I will, sir. (He milks the cow.)
THE
HUSBAND: Her milk – her milk is cold already.
All the woman in her chilled and curdled within her breasts. Ah, Jesus! what miraculous galactagogue will
make it flow again?
THE YOKEL:
The wash-pot is full, sir.
THE
HUSBAND: Then take the cow away.
THE YOKEL:
Come, Short-i’-the-horn; come up, good Short-i’-the-horn. (He goes out with the cow.)
THE
HUSBAND (pouring the milk into a
long-tubed feeding-bottle): Here’s for you, monster, to drink your own
health in. (He gives the bottle to the
child.)
CURTAIN
‘A little ponderous, perhaps,’ said Gumbril, as the curtain
came down.
‘But I liked the cow.’
Mrs Viveash opened her cigarette-case and found it empty. Gumbril offered her one of his. She shook her head. ‘I don’t want it in the least,’ she said.
‘Yes, the cow was in the best pantomime tradition,’ Gumbril
agreed. Ah! but it was a long time since
he had been to a Christmas pantomime.
Not since Dan Leno’s days. All
the little cousins, the uncles and aunts on both sides of the family, dozens
and dozens of them – every year they filled the best part of a row in the dress
circle at Drury Lane. And buns were
stickily passed from hand to hand, chocolates circulated; the grown-ups drank
tea. And the pantomime went on and on,
glory after glory, under the shining arch of the stage. Hours and hours; and the grown-ups always
wanted to go away before the harlequinade.
And the children felt sick from eating too much chocolate, or wanted
with such extreme urgency to go to the w.c. that they had to be led out,
trampling and stumbling over everybody else’s feet – and every stumble making
the need more agonizingly great – in the middle of the transformation
scene. And there was Dan Leno,
inimitable Dan Leno, dead now as poor Yorick, no more than a mere skull like
anybody else’s skull. And his mother, he
remembered, used to laugh at him sometimes till the tears ran down her
cheeks. She used to enjoy things
thoroughly, with a whole heart.
‘I wish they’d hurry up with the second scene,’ said Mrs
Viveash. ‘If there’s anything that bores
me, it’s entr’actes.’
‘Most of one’s life is an entr’acte,’
said Gumbril, whose present mood of hilarious depression seemed favourable to
the enunciation of apophthegms.
‘None of your cracker mottoes, please,’ protested Mrs
Viveash. All the same, she reflected,
what was she doing now but waiting for the curtain to go up again, waiting,
with what unspeakable weariness of spirit, for the curtain that had rung down,
ten centuries ago, on those blue eyes, that bright strawy hair and the
weathered face?
‘Thank God,’ she said with an expiring earnestness, ‘here’s
the second scene!’
The curtain went up. In
a bald room stood the Monster, grown now from an infant into a frail and bent
young man with bandy legs. At the back of
the stage a large window giving on to a street along which people pass.
THE
MONSTER [solus]: The young girls of
Sparta, they say, used to wrestle naked with naked Spartan boys. The sun caressed their skins till they were
brown and transparent like amber or a flash of olive oil. Their breasts were hard, their bellies
flat. They were pure with the chastity
of beautiful animals. Their thoughts
were clear, their minds cool and untroubled.
I spit blood into my handkerchief and sometimes I feel in my mouth
something slimy, soft and disgusting, like a slug – and I have coughed up a
shred of my lung. The rickets from which
I suffered in childhood have bent my bones and made them old and brittle. All my life I have lived in this huge town,
whose domes and spires are wrapped in a cloud of stink that hides the sun. The slug-dank tatters of lung that I spit out
are black with the soot I have been breathing all these years. I am now come of age. Long-expected one-and-twenty has made me a
fully privileged citizen of this great realm of which the owners of the Daily Mirror, the News of the World and the Daily
Express are noble peers. Somewhere,
I must logically infer, there must be other cities, built by men for men to
live in. Somewhere, in the past, in the
future, a very long way off…. But perhaps the only street improvement schemes
that ever really improve the streets are schemes in the minds of those who live
in them: schemes of love mostly. Ah!
here she comes.
[The YOUNG
LADY enters. She stands outside the window, in the street,
paying no attention to the MONSTER;
she seems to be waiting for somebody.]
She is like a pear tree in flower. When she smiles, it is as though there were
stars. Her hair is like the harvest in
an ecologue, her cheeks are all the fruits of summer. Her arms and thighs are as beautiful as the
soul of St Catherine of Siena. And her
eyes, her eyes are plumbless with thought and limpidly pure like the water of
the mountains.
THE YOUNG
LADY: If I wait till the summer sale, the crêpe
de Chine will be reduced by at least two shillings a yard, and on six
camisoles that will mean a lot of money.
But the question is: can I go from May till the end of July with the
underclothing I have now?
THE
MONSTER: If I knew her, I should know the universe!
THE YOUNG
LADY: My present ones are so dreadfully middle-class. And if Roger should … by any chance …
THE
MONSTER: Or, rather, I should be able to ignore it, having a private universe
of my own.
THE YOUNG
LADY: If – if he did – well, it might be rather humiliating with these I have …
like a servant’s almost….
THE
MONSTER: Love makes you accept the world; it puts an end to criticism.
THE YOUNG
LADY: His hand already …
THE
MONSTER: Dare I, dare I tell her how beautiful she is?
THE YOUNG
LADY: On the whole, I think I’d better get it now, though it will cost more.
THE
MONSTER [desperately advancing to the
window as though to assault a battery]: Beautiful! Beautiful!
THE YOUNG
LADY [looking at him]: Ha, ha, ha!
THE
MONSTER: But I love you, flowering pear tree; I love you, golden harvest; I
love you, fruitage of summer; I love you, body and limbs, with the shape of a
saint’s thought.
THE YOUNG
LADY [redoubles her laughter]: Ha,
ha, ha!
THE
MONSTER [taking her hand]: You cannot
be cruel! [He is seized with a violent
paroxysm of coughing which doubles him up, which shakes and torments him. The
handkerchief he holds to his mouth is spotted with blood.]
THE YOUNG
LADY: You disgust me! [She draws away her
skirts so that they shall not come in contact with him.]
THE
MONSTER: But I swear to you, I love you – I – [He is once more interrupted by his cough.]
THE
YOUNG LADY: Please go away. [In a
different voice.] Ah, Roger!
[She
advances to meet a snub-nosed lubber with curly hair and a face like a groom’s,
who passes along the street at this moment.]
ROGER:
I’ve got the motorbike waiting at the corner.
THE YOUNG
LADY: Let’s go, then.
ROGER [pointing to the MONSTER]: What’s that?
THE YOUNG
LADY: Oh, it’s nothing in particular.
[Both
roar with laughter. ROGER escorts her
out, patting her familiarly on the back as they walk along.]
THE
MONSTER [looking after her]: There is
a wound under my left pap. She has
deflowered all women. I cannot …
‘Lord!’ whispered Mrs Viveash, ‘how this young man bores me!’
‘I confess,’ replied Gumbril, ‘I have rather a taste for
moralities. There is a pleasant
uplifting vagueness about these symbolical generalized figures which pleases
me.’
‘You were always charmingly simple-minded,’ said Mrs
Viveash. ‘But who is this?’ As long as the young man isn’t left alone on
the stage, I don’t mind.’
Another female figure has appeared in the street beyond the
window. It is the Prostitute. Her face, painted in two tones of red, white,
green, blue and black, is the most tasteful of nature-mortes.
THE
PROSTITUTE: Hullo, duckie?
THE
MONSTER: Hullo!
THE
PROSTITUTE: Are you lonely?
THE
MONSTER: Yes.
THE
PROSTITUTE: Would you like me to come in to see you?
THE
MONSTER: Very well.
THE
PROSTITUTE: Shall we say thirty bob?
THE
MONSTER: Very well.
THE
PROSTITUTE: Come along then.
[She
climbs through the window and they go off together through the door on the left
of the stage. The curtains descend for a
moment, then rise again. The MONSTER and the PROSTITUTE are seen issuing from the door at which they went out.]
THE MONSTER
[taking out a cheque-book and a
fountain-pen]: Thirty shillings …
THE
PROSTITUTE: Thank you. Not a
cheque. I don’t want any cheques. How do I know it isn’t a dud one that they’ll
refuse payment for at the bank? Ready money
for me, thanks.
THE
MONSTER: But I haven’t got any cash on me at the moment.
THE
PROSTITUTE: Well, I won’t take a cheque.
Once bitten, twice shy, I can tell you.
THE
MONSTER: But I tell you I haven’t got any cash.
THE
PROSTITUTE: Well, all I can say is, here I stay till I get it. And, what’s more, if I don’t get it quick,
I’ll make a row.
THE
MONSTER: But this is absurd. I offer you
a perfectly good cheque …
THE
PROSTITUTE: And I won’t take it. So
there!
THE
MONSTER: Well then, take my watch. It’s
worth more than thirty bob. [He pulls out
his gold half-hunter.]
THE
PROSTITUTE: Thank you, and get myself arrested as soon as I take it to the
pop-shop! No, I want cash, I tell you.’
THE
MONSTER: But where the devil do you expect me to get it at this time of night?
THE
PROSTITUTE: I don’t know. But you’ve got
to get it pretty quick.
THE
MONSTER: You’re unreasonable.
THE
PROSTITUTE: Aren’t there any servants in this house?
THE
MONSTER: Yes.
THE
PROSTITUTE: Well, go and borrow it from one of them.
THE MONSTER:
But really, that would be too low, too humiliating.
THE
PROSTITUTE: All right, I’ll begin kicking up a noise. I’ll go to the window and yell till all the
neighbours are woken up and the police come to see what’s up. You can borrow it from the copper then.
THE
MONSTER: You really won’t take my cheque!
I swear to you it’s perfectly all right.
There’s plenty of money to meet it.
THE
PROSTITUTE: Oh, shut up! No more
dilly-dallying. Get me my money at once, or I’ll start the row. One, two, three … [She opens her mouth wide as if to yell.]
THE
MONSTER: All right. [He goes out.]
THE
PROSTITUTE: Nice state of things we’re coming to, when young rips try and
swindle us poor girls out of our money! Mean, stinking skunks! I’d like to slit
the throats of some of them.
THE MONSTER
[coming back again]: Here you are. [He hands her money.]
THE
PROSTITUTE [examining it]: Thank you,
dearie. Any other time you’re lonely …
THE
MONSTER: No, no!
THE
PROSTITUTE: Where did you get it finally?
THE
MONSTER: I woke the cook.
THE
PROSTITUTE [goes into a peal of laughter]:
Well, so long, duckie. [She goes out.]
THE MONSTER
[solus]: Somewhere there must be love
like music. Love harmonious and ordered: two spirits, two bodies moving contrapuntally
together. Somewhere, the stupid brutish act must be made to make sense, must be
enriched, must be made significant. Lust, like Diabelli’s waltz, a stupid air,
turned by genius into three-and-thirty fabulous variations. Somewhere …
‘Oh dear!’ sighed Mrs Viveash.
‘Charming!’ Gumbril protested.
… love like
sheets of silky flame; like landscapes brilliant in the sunlight against a
background of purple thunder; like the solution of a cosmic problem; like faith
…
‘Crikey!’ said Mrs Viveash.
…
Somewhere, somewhere. But in my veins creep the maggots of the pox …
‘Really, really!’ Mrs
Viveash shook her head. ‘Too medical!’
… crawling
towards the brain, crawling into the mouth, burrowing into the bones. Insatiably.
The Monster threw himself to the ground, and
the curtain came down.
‘And about time too!’ declared Mrs Viveash.
‘Charming!’ Gumbril
stuck to his guns. ‘Charming! charming!’
There was a disturbance near the door. Mrs Viveash looked round to see what was
happening. ‘And now on top of it all,’
she said, ‘here comes Coleman, raving, with an unknown drunk.’
‘Have we missed it?’ Coleman was shouting. ‘Have we missed all the lovely bloody farce?’
‘Lovely bloody!’ his companion repeated with drunken raptures,
and he went into fits of uncontrollable laughter. He was a very young boy with straight dark
hair and a face of Hellenic beauty, now distorted with tipsiness.
Coleman greeted his acquaintances in the hall, shouting a
jovial obscenity to each. ‘And
Bumbril-Gumbril,’ he exclaimed, catching sight of him at last in the front
row. ‘And Hetaira-Myra!’ He pushed his way through the crowd, followed
unsteadily by his young disciple. ‘So
you’re here,’ he said, standing over them and looking down with an enigmatic
malice in his bright blue eyes. ‘Where’s
the physiologue?’
‘Am I the physiologue’s keeper?’ asked Gumbril. ‘He’s with his glands and his hormones, I
suppose. Not to mention his wife.’ He smiled to himself.
‘Where the hormones, there moan I,’ said Coleman, skidding off
sideways along the slippery word. ‘I
hear, by the way, that there’s a lovely prostitute in this play.’
‘You’ve missed her,’ said Mrs Viveash.
‘What a misfortune,’ said Coleman. ‘We’ve missed the delicious trull,’ he said,
turning to the young man.
The young man only laughed.
‘Let me introduce, by the way,’ said Coleman. ‘This is Dante,’ he pointed to the
dark-haired boy; ‘and I am Virgil. We’re
making a round tour – or, rather, a descending spiral tour of hell. But we’re only at the first circle so
far. These, Alighieri, are two damned
souls, though not, as you might suppose, Paolo and Francesca.’
The boy continued to laugh, happily and uncomprehendingly.
Another of these interminable entr’actes,’ complained Mrs Viveash. ‘I was just saying to Theodore here that if
there’s one thing I dislike more than another, it’s a long entr’acte. Would hers ever
come to an end?
‘And if there’s one thing I
dislike more than another,’ said the boy, breaking silence for the first time,
with an air of the greatest earnestness, ‘it’s … it’s one thing more than
another.’
‘And you’re perfectly right in doing so,’ said Coleman. ‘Perfectly right.’
‘I know,’ the boy replied modestly.
When the curtain rose again it was on an aged Monster, with a
black patch over the left side of his nose, no hair, no teeth, and sitting
harmlessly behind the bars of an asylum.
THE
MONSTER: Asses, apes and dogs! Milton called them that; he should have
known. Somewhere there must be men,
however. The variations on Diabelli
prove it. Brunelleschi’s dome is more
than a magnifications of Cléo de Mérode’s breast. Somewhere there are men with
power, living reasonably. Like our mythical Greeks and Romans. Living cleanly.
The images of the gods are their portraits. They walk under their own
protection. [The MONSTER climbs on to a chair and stands in the
posture of a statue.] Jupiter, father of gods, a man, I bless myself, I
throw bolts at my own disobedience, I answer my own prayers, I pronounce
oracles to satisfy the questions I myself propound. I abolish all fetters,
poxes, blood-spitting, rotting of bones. With love I recreate the world from
within. Europa puts an end to squalor,
Leda does away with tyranny, Danæ tempers stupidity. After establishing these
reforms in the social sewer, I climb, I climb, up through the manhole, out of
the manhole, beyond humanity. For the
manhole, even the manhole, is dark; though not so dingy as the doghole it was
before I altered it. Up through the manhole, towards the air. Up, up! [And the MONSTER, suiting the action to his words, climbs up the runged back of his
chair and stands, by a miraculous feat of acrobacy, on the topmost bar.] I
begin to see the stars through other eyes than my own. More than dog already, I
become more than man. I begin to have inklings of the shape and sense of
things. Upwards, upwards I strain, I peer, I reach aloft. [The balanced MONSTER reaches, strains and peers.] And I
seize, I seize! [As he shouts these
words, the MONSTER falls heavily,
head foremost, to the floor. He lies there quite still. After a little time the
door opens and the DOCTOR of the
first scene enters with a WARDER.]
THE
WARDER: I heard a crash.
THE
DOCTOR [who has by this time become
immensely old and has a beard like Father Thames]: It looks as though you
were right. [He examines the MONSTER.]
THE
WARDER: He was forever climbing on to his chair.
THE
DOCTOR: Well, he won’t anymore. His neck’s broken.
THE
WARDER: You don’t say so?
THE
DOCTOR: I do.
THE
WARDER: Well, I never!
THE
DOCTOR: Have it carried down to the dissecting-room.
THE
WARDER: I’ll send for the porters at once.
[Exuent severally, and
CURTAIN.]
‘Well,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘I’m glad that’s over.’
The music struck up again, saxophone and ‘cello, with the thin
draught of the violin to cool their ecstasies and the thumping piano to remind
them of business. Gumbril and Mrs
Viveash slid out into the dancing crowd, revolving as though by force of habit.
‘These substitutes for the genuine copulative article,’ said Coleman
to his disciple, ‘are beneath the dignity of hell-hounds like you and me.’
Charmed, the young man laughed; he was attentive as though at
the feet of Socrates. Coleman had found
him in a nightclub, where he had gone in search of Zoe, found him very drunk in
the company of two formidable women fifteen or twenty years his senior, who
were looking after him, half maternally out of pure kindness of heart, half
professionally; for he seemed to be carrying a good deal of money. He was incapable of looking after
himself. Coleman had pounced on him at
once, claimed an old friendship which the youth was too tipsy to be able to
deny, and carried him off. There was
something, he always thought, peculiarly interesting about the spectacle of
children tobogganing down into the cesspools.
‘I like this place,’ said the young man.
‘Tastes differ!’
Coleman shrugged his shoulders.
‘The German professors have catalogued thousands of people whose whole
pleasure consists of eating dung.’
The young man smiled and nodded, rather vaguely. ‘Is there anything to drink here?’ he asked.
‘Too respectable,’ Coleman answered, shaking his head.
‘I think this is a bloody place,’ said the young man.
‘Ah! but some people like blood. And some like boots. And some like long gloves and corsets. And some like birch-rods. And some like sliding down slopes and can’t
look at Michelangelo’s “Night” on the Medici Tombs without dying the little
death, because the statue seems to be sliding.
And some …’
‘But I want something to drink,’ insisted the young man.
Coleman stamped his feet, waved his arms. ‘À boire! à boire!’ he shouted, like the newborn Gargantua. Nobody paid any attention.
The music came to an end.
Gumbril and Mrs Viveash reappeared.
‘Dante,’ said Coleman, ‘calls for drink. We must leave the building.’
‘Yes. Anything to get out of this,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘What’s the time?’
Gumbril looked at his watch.
‘Half-past one.’
Mrs Viveash sighed.
‘Can’t possibly go to bed,’ she said, ‘for another hour at least.’
They walked out into the street. The stars were large and brilliant
overhead. There was a little wind that
almost seemed to come from the country.
Gumbril thought so, at any rate; he thought of the country.
‘There question is, where?’ said Coleman. ‘You can come to my bordello, if you like;
but it’s a long way off and Zoe hates us all so much, she’ll probably set on us
with the meat-chopper. If she’s back
again, that is. Though she may be out
all night. Zoe mou, sas agapo. Shall we
risk it?’
‘To me it’s quite indifferent,’ said Mrs Viveash faintly, as
though wholly preoccupied with expiring.
‘Or there’s my place,’ Gumbril said abruptly, as though
shaking himself awake out of some dream.
‘But you live still farther, don’t you?’ said Coleman. ‘With venerable parents, and so forth. One foot in the grave and all that. Shall we mingle hornpipes with
funerals?’ He began to hum Chopin’s ‘Funeral
March’ at three times its proper speed, and seizing the young stranger in his
arms, two-stepped two or three times on the pavement, then released his hold
and let him go reeling against the area railings.
‘No, I don’t mean the family mansion,’ said Gumbril. ‘I mean my own rooms. They’re quite near. In Great Russell Street.’
‘I never knew you had any rooms, Theodore,’ said Mrs Viveash.
‘Nobody did.’ Why
should they know now? Because the wind
seemed almost a country wind? ‘There’s
drink there,’ he said.
‘Splendid!’ cried the young man. They were all splendid people.
‘There’s some gin,’ said Gumbril.
‘Capital aphrodisiac!’ Coleman commented.
‘Some light white wine.’
‘Diuretic.’
‘And some whisky.’
‘The great emetic,’ said Coleman. ‘Come on.’
And he struck up the March of the Fascisti. ‘Giovinezza,
giovinezza, primavera di bellezza….’
The noise went fading down the dark, empty streets.
The gin, the white wine, and even, for the sake of the young
stranger, who wanted to sample everything, the emetic whisky, were produced.
‘I like your rooms,’ said Mrs Viveash, looking round her. ‘And I resent your secrecy about them,
Theodore.’
‘Drink, puppy!’ Coleman
refilled the boy’s glass.
‘Here’s to secrecy,’ Gumbril proposed. Shut it tight, keep it dark, cover it
up. Be silent, prevaricate, lie
outright. He laughed and drank. ‘Do you remember,’ he went on, ‘those
instructive advertisements of Eno’s Fruit Salts they used to have when we were
young? There was one little anecdote
about a doctor who advised the hypochrondriacal patient who had come to consult
him, to go and see Grimaldi, the clown; and the patient answered, “I am
Grimaldi.” Do you remember?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Viveash.
‘And why do you?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Or
rather, I do know,’ Gumbril corrected himself, and laughed again.
The young man suddenly began to boast. ‘I lost two hundred pounds yesterday playing chemin de fer,’ he said, and looked
round for applause.
Coleman patted his curly head.
‘Delicious child!’ he said.
‘You’re positively Hogarthian.’
Angrily, the boy pushed him away. ‘What are you doing?’ he shouted; then turned
and addressed himself once more to the others.
‘I couldn’t afford it, you know – not a bloody penny of it. Not my money, either.’ He seemed to find it exquisitely
humorous. ‘And that two hundred wasn’t
all,’ he added, almost expiring with mirth.
‘Tell Coleman how you borrowed his beard, Theodore.’
Gumbril was looking intently into his glass, as though he
hoped to see in its pale mixture of gin and Sauterne visions, as in a crystal,
of the future. Mrs Viveash touched him
on the arm and repeated her injunction.
‘Oh, that!’ said Gumbril rather irritably. ‘No. It isn’t an interesting story.’
‘Oh yes, it is! I insist,’ said Mrs Viveash, commanding
peremptorily from her deathbed.
Gumbril drank his gin and Sauterne. ‘Very well then,’ he said reluctantly, and
began.
‘I don’t know what my governor will say,’ the young man put in
once or twice. But nobody paid any
attention to him. He relapsed into a
sulky and, it seemed to him, very dignified silence. Under the warm, jolly tipsiness he felt a
chill of foreboding. He poured out some
more whisky.
Gumbril warmed to his anecdote. Expiringly Mrs Viveash laughed from time to
time, or smiled her agonizing smile.
Coleman whooped like a redskin.
‘And after the concert to these rooms,’ said Gumbril.
Well, let everything go.
Into the mud. Leave it there, and
let the dogs lift their hind legs over it as they pass.
‘Ah! the genuine platonic fumblers,’ commented Coleman.
‘I am Grimaldi,’ Gumbril laughed. Further than this it was difficult to see
where the joke could go. There, on the
divan, where Mrs Viveash and Coleman were now sitting, she had lain sleeping in
his arms.
‘Towsing, in Elizabethan,’ said Coleman.
Unreal eternal in the secret darkness. A night that was an eternal parenthesis among
the other nights and days.
‘I feel I’m going to be sick,’ said the young man
suddenly. He had wanted to go on
silently and haughtily sulking; but his stomach declined to take part in the
dignified game.
‘Good Lord!’ said Gumbril, and jumped up. But before he could do anything effective,
the young man had fulfilled his own prophecy.
‘The real charm about debauchery,’ said Coleman
philosophically, ‘is its total pointlessness, futility, and above all its
incredible tediousness. If it really
were all roses and exhilaration as these poor children seem to imagine, it
would be no better than going to church or studying the higher
mathematics. I should never touch a drop
of wine or another harlot again. It
would be against my principles. I told
you it was emetic,’ he called to the young man.
‘And what are your principles?’ asked Mrs Viveash.
‘Oh, strictly ethical,’ said Coleman.
‘You’re responsible for this creature,’ said Gumbril, pointing
to the young man, who was sitting on the floor near the fireplace, cooling his
forehead against the marble of the mantelpiece.
‘You must take him away. Really,
what a bore!’ His nose and mouth were
all wrinkled up with disgust.
‘I’m sorry,’ the young man whispered. He kept his eyes shut and his face was exceedingly
pale.
‘But with pleasure,’ said Coleman. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked the young man,
‘and where do you live?’
‘My name is Porteous,’ murmured the young man.
‘Good lord!’ cried Gumbril, letting himself fall on to the
divan beside Mrs Viveash. ‘That’s the
last straw!’
CHAPTER XVII
THE two
o’clock snorted out of Charing Cross, but no healths were drunk, this time, to
Viscount Lascelles. A desiccating
sobriety made arid the corner of the third-class carriage in which Gumbril was
sitting. His thoughts were an
interminable desert of sand, with not a palm in sight, not so much as a
comforting mirage. Once again he fumbled
in his breast-pocket, brought out and unfolded the flimsy paper. Once more he read. How many times had he read it before?
‘Your telegram made me very unhappy. Not merely because of the accident – though
it made me shudder to think that something terrible might have happened, poor
darling – but also, selfishly, my own disappointment. I had looked forward so much. I had made a picture of it all so
clearly. I should have met you at the
station with the horse and trap from the Chequers, and we’d have driven back to
the cottage – and you’d have loved the cottage.
We’d have had tea and I’d have made you eat an egg with it after your
journey. Then we’d have gone for a walk;
through the most heavenly wood I found yesterday to a place where there’s a
wonderful view – miles and miles of it.
And we’d have wandered on and on, and sat down under the trees, and the
sun would have set, and the twilight would slowly have come to an end, and we’d
have gone home again and found the lamps lighted and supper ready – not very
grand, I’m afraid, for Mrs Vole isn’t the best of cooks. And then the piano; for there is a piano, and
I had the tuner come specially from Hastings yesterday, so that it isn’t so bad now. And you’d have played; and perhaps I would
have made my noises on it. And at last
it would have been time for candles and bed.
When I heard you were coming, Theodore, I told Mrs Vole a lie about
you. I said you were my husband, because
she’s fearfully respectable, of course; and it would dreadfully disturb her if
you weren’t. But I told myself that,
too. I meant that you should be. You see, I tell you everything. I’m not ashamed. I wanted to give you everything I could, and
then we should always be together, loving one another. And I should have been your slave, I should
have been your property and lived inside your life. But you would always have had to love me.
‘And then, just as I was getting ready to go and call at the
Chequers for the horse and trap, your telegram came. I saw the word “accident”, and I imagined you
all bleeding and smashed – oh, dreadful, dreadful. But then, when you seemed to make rather a
joke of it – why did you say “a little indisposed”? that seemed somehow so
stupid, I thought – and said you were coming tomorrow, it wasn’t that which
upset me; it was the dreadful, dreadful disappointment. It was like a stab, that disappointment; it
hurt so terribly, so unreasonably much.
It made me cry and cry, so that I thought I should never be able to
stop. And then, gradually, I began to
see that the pain of the disappointment wasn’t unreasonably great. It wasn’t merely a question of your coming
being put off for a day; it was a question of its being put off for ever, of my
never seeing you again. I saw that the
accident had been something really arranged by Providence. It was meant to warm me and show me what I
ought to do. I saw how hopelessly
impractical the happiness I had been imagining really was. I saw that you didn’t, you couldn’t love me
in anything like the same way as I loved you.
I was only a curious adventure, a new experience, a means to some other
end. Mind, I’m not blaming you in the
least. I’m only telling you what is
true, what I gradually came to realize as true.
If you’d come - what then? I’d have given you everything, my body, my
mind, my soul, my whole life. I’d have
twisted myself into the threads of your life.
And then, when in due course you wanted to make an end to this curious
little adventure, you would have had to cut the tangle and it would have killed
me; it would also have hurt you. At
least I think it would. In the end, I
thanked God for the accident which had prevented you coming. In this way, Providence lets us off very
lightly – you with a bruise or two (for I do hope it really is nothing, my
precious darling), and me with a bruise inside, round the heart. But both will get well quite soon. And all our lives, we shall have an afternoon
under the trees, an evening of music and in the darkness, a night, an eternity
of happiness, to look back on. I shall
go away from Robertsbridge at once.
Goodbye, Theodore. What a long
letter! The last you’ll ever get from
me. The last – what a dreadful hurting
word that is. I shall take it to post at
once, for fear, if I leave it, I may be weak enough to change my mind and let
you come tomorrow. I shall take it at
once, then I shall come home again and pack up and tell some new fib to Mrs
Vole. And after that, perhaps I shall
allow myself to cry again. Goodbye.’
Aridly, the desert of sand stretched out with not a tree and
not even a mirage, except perhaps the vague and desperate hope that he might
get there before she started, that she might conceivably have changed her
mind. Ah, if only he’d read the letter a
little earlier! But he hadn’t woken up
before eleven, he hadn’t been down before half-past. Sitting at the breakfast-table, he had read
the letter through.
The eggs and bacon had grown still colder, if that was
possible, than they were. He had read it
through, he had rushed to the A.B.C.
There was no practicable train before the two o’clock.
If he had taken the seven-twenty-seven he would certainly have
got there before she started. Ah, if
only he had woken up a little earlier!
But then he would have had to go to bed a little earlier. And in order to go to bed earlier, he would
have had to abandon Mrs Viveash before she had bored herself to that ultimate
point of fatigue at which she did at last feel ready for repose. And to abandon Mrs Viveash – ah, that was
really impossible, she wouldn’t allow herself to be left alone. If only he hadn’t gone to the London Library
yesterday! A wanton, unnecessary visit
it had been. For after all, the journey
was short; he didn’t need a book for the train.
And the Life of Beckford, for
which he had asked, proved, of course, to be out – and he had been utterly
incapable of thinking of any other book, among the two or three hundred
thousand on the shelves, that he wanted to read. And, in any case, what the devil did he want
with a Life of Beckford? Hadn’t he his own life, the life of Gumbril,
to attend to? Wasn’t one life enough,
without making superfluous visits to the London Library in search of other
lives? And then what a stroke of bad
luck to have run into Mrs Viveash at that very moment! What an abject weakness to have let himself
be bullied into sending that telegram.
‘A little indisposed …’ Oh, my God!
Gumbril shut his eyes and ground his teeth together; he felt himself
blushing with a retrospective shame.
And of course it was quite useless taking the train, like
this, to Robertsbridge. She’d be gone,
of course. Still, there was always the
desperate hope. There was the mirage
across the desiccated plains, the mirage one knew to be deceptive and which, on
a second glance, proved not even to be a mirage, but merely a few lively spots
behind the eyes. Still, it was amply
worth doing – as a penance, and to satisfy the conscience and to deceive
oneself with an illusion of action. And
then the fact that he was to have spent the afternoon with Rosie and had put
her off – that too was highly satisfying.
And not merely put her off, but – ultimate clownery in the worst of
deliriously bad taste – played a joke on her.
‘Impossible come to you, meet me 213 Sloan Street, second floor, a
little indisposed.’ He wondered how
she’d get on with Mr Mercaptan; for it was to his rococo boudoir and
Crébillon-souled sofa that he had on the spur of the clownish moment, as he
dashed into the post office on the way to the station, sent her.
Aridly, the desiccated waste extended. Had she been right in her letter? Would it really have lasted no more than a
little while and ended as she prophesied, with an agonizing cutting of the
tangle? Or could it be that she had held
out the one hope of happiness? Wasn’t
she perhaps the one unique being with whom he might have learnt to await in
quietness the final coming of that lovely terrible thing, from before the sound
of whose secret footsteps more than once and oh! Ignobly he had fled? He could not decide, it was impossible to
decide until he had seen her again, till he had possessed her, mingled his life
with hers. And now she had eluded him;
for he knew very well that he would not find her. He sighed and looked out of the window.
The train pulled up at a small suburban station. Suburban, for although London was already
some way behind, the little sham half-timbered houses near the station, the
newer tile and roughcast dwellings farther out on the slope of the hill
proclaimed with emphasis the presence of the businessman, the holder of the
season ticket. Gumbril looked at them
with a pensive disgust which must have expressed itself on his features; for
the gentleman sitting in the corner of the carriage facing his, suddenly leaned
forward, tapped him on the knee, and said, ‘I see you agree with me, sir, that
there are too many people in the world.’
Gumbril, who up till now had merely been aware that somebody
was sitting opposite him, now looked with more attention at the stranger. He was a large, square old gentleman of robust
and flourishing appearance, with a face of wrinkled brown parchment and a white
moustache that merged, in a handsome curve, with a pair of side whiskers, in a
manner which reminded one of the photographs of the Emperor Francis Joseph.
‘I perfectly agree with you, sir,’ Gumbril answered. If he had been wearing his beard, he would
have gone on to suggest that loquacious old gentlemen in trains are among the
supernumeraries of the planet. As it
was, however, he spoke with courtesy, and smiled in his most engaging fashion.
‘When I look at all these revolting houses,’ the old gentleman
continued, shaking his fist at the snuggeries of the season-ticket holders, ‘I
am filled with indignation. I feel my
spleen ready to burst, sir, ready to burst.’
‘I can sympathize with you,’ said Gumbril. ‘The architecture is certainly not very
soothing.’
‘It’s not the architecture I mind so much,’ retorted the old
gentleman, ‘that’s merely a question of art, and all nonsense so far as I’m
concerned. What disgusts me is the
people inside the architecture, the number of them, sir. And the way they breed. Like maggots, sir, like maggots. Millions of them, creeping about the face of
the country, spreading blight and dirt wherever they go; ruining
everything. It’s the people I object
to.’
‘Ah well,’ said Gumbril, ‘if you will have sanitary conditions
that don’t allow plagues to flourish properly; if you will tell mothers how to
bring up their children, instead of allowing nature to kill them off in her
natural way; if you will import unlimited supplies of corn and meat: what can
you expect? Of course the numbers go
up.’
The old gentleman waved all this away. ‘I don’t care what the causes are,’ he
said. ‘That’s all one to me. What I do object to, sir, is the effects. Why sir, I am old enough to remember walking
through the delicious meadows beyond Swiss Cottage, I remember seeing the cows
milked in West Hampstead, sir. And now,
what do I see now, when I go there?
Hideous red cities pullulating with Jews, sir. Pullulating with prosperous Jews. Am I right in being indignant, sir? Do I do well, like the prophet Jonah, to be
angry?’
‘You do, sir,’ said Gumbril, with growing enthusiasm, ‘and the
more so since this frightful increase in population is the world’s most
formidable danger at the present time.
With populations that in Europe alone expand by millions every year, no
political foresight is possible. A few
years of this mere bestial propagation will suffice to make nonsense of the
wisest schemes of today – or would suffice,’ he hastened to correct himself,
‘if any wise schemes were being matured at the present.’
‘Very possibly, sir,’ said the old gentleman, ‘but what I
object to is seeing good cornland being turned into streets, and meadows, where
cows used to graze, covered with houses full of useless and disgusting human
beings. I resent seeing the country
parcelled out into back gardens.’
‘And is there any prospect,’ Gumbril earnestly asked, ‘of our
ever being able in the future to support the whole of our population? Will unemployment ever decrease?’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ the old gentleman replied. ‘But the families of the unemployed will
certainly increase.’
‘You are right, sir,’ said Gumbril, ‘they will. And the families of the employed and the prosperous
will as steadily grow smaller. It is
regrettable that birth control should have begun at the wrong end of the
scale. There seems to be a level of
poverty below which it doesn’t seem worthwhile practising birth control, and a
level of education below which birth control is regarded as morally wrong. Strange, how long it has taken for the ideas
of love and procreation to dissociate themselves in the human mind. In the majority of minds they are still, even
in this so-called twentieth century, indivisibly wedded. Still,’ he continued hopefully, ‘progress is
being made, progress is certainly, though slowly, being made. It is gratifying to find, for example, in the
latest statistics, that the clergy, as a class, are now remarkable for the
smallness of their families. The old
jest is out of date. Is it too much to
hope that these gentlemen may bring themselves in time to preach what they
already practise?’
‘It is too much to
hope, sir,’ the old gentleman answered with decision.
‘You are probably right,’ said Gumbril.
‘If we were all to preach al the things we all practise,’
continued the old gentleman, ‘the world would soon be a pretty sort of
bear-garden, I can tell you. Yes, and a
monkey-house. And a wart-hoggery. As it is, sir, it is merely a place where
there are too many human beings. Vice
must pay its tribute to virtue, or else we are all undone.’
‘I admire your wisdom, sir,’ said Gumbril.
The old gentleman was delighted. ‘And I have been much impressed by your philosophical reflections,’ he
said. ‘Tell me, are you at all
interested in old brandy?’
‘Well, not philosophically,’ said Gumbril. ‘As a mere empiric only.’
‘As a mere empiric!’
The old gentleman laughed. ‘Then
let me beg you to accept a case. I have
a cellar which I shall never drink dry, alas! before I die. My only wish is that what remains of it shall
be distributed among those who can really appreciate it. In you, sir, I see a fitting recipient of a
case of brandy.’
‘You overwhelm me,’ said Gumbril. ‘You are too kind, and, I may add, too
flattering.’ The train, which was a
mortally slow one, came grinding for what seemed the hundredth time to a halt.
‘Not at all,’ said the old gentleman. ‘If you have a card, sir.’
Gumbril searched in his pockets. ‘I have come without one.’
‘Never mind,’ said the old gentleman. ‘I think I have a pencil. If you will give me your name and address, I
will have the case sent to you at once.’
Leisurely, he hunted for the pencil, he took out a
notebook. The train gave a jerk forward.
‘Now, sir,’ he said.
Gumbril began dictating.
‘Theodore,’ he said slowly.
‘The – o – dore,’ the old gentleman repeated, syllable by
syllable.
The train crept on, with slowly gathering momentum, through
the station. Happening to look out of
the window at this moment, Gumbril saw the name of the place painted across a
lamp. It was Robertsbridge. He made a loud, inarticulate noise, flung
open the door of the compartment, stepped out on to the footboard and
jumped. He landed safely on the platform,
staggered forward a few paces with his acquired momentum and came at last to a
halt. A hand reached out and closed the
swinging door of his compartment and, an instant afterwards, through the
window, a face that, at a distance, looked more than ever like the face of the
Emperor Francis Joseph, looked back towards the receding platform. The mouth opened and shut; no words were
audible. Standing on the platform,
Gumbril made a complicated pantomime, signifying his regret by shrugging his
shoulders and placing his hand on his heart; urging in excuse for his abrupt
departure the necessity under which he laboured of alighting at this particular
station – which he did by pointing at the name on the boards and lamps, then at
himself, then at the village across the fields.
The old gentleman waved his hand, which still held, Gumbril noticed, the
notebook in which he had been writing.
Then the train carried him out of sight.
There went the only case of old brandy he was ever likely to possess,
thought Gumbril sadly, as he turned away.
Suddenly, he remembered Emily again; for a long time he had quite
forgotten her.
The cottage, when at last he found it, proved to be fully as
picturesque as he had imagined. And Emily,
of course, had gone, leaving, as might have been expected, no address. He took the evening train back to
London. The aridity was now complete,
and even the hope of a mirage had vanished.
There was no old gentleman to make a diversion. The size of clergymen’s families, even the
fate of Europe, seemed unimportant now, were indeed perfectly indifferent to
him.
CHAPTER XVIII
TWO
hundred and thirteen Sloane Street. The
address, Rosie reflected, as she vaporized synthetic lilies of the valley over all
her sinuous person, was decidedly a good one.
It argued a reasonable prosperity, attested a certain distinction. The knowledge of his address confirmed her
already high opinion of the bearded stranger who had so surprisingly entered
her life, as though in fulfilment of all the fortune-tellers’ prophecies that
ever were made; had entered, yes, and intimately made himself at home. She had been delighted, when the telegram
came that morning, to think that at last she was going to find out something
more about this man of mystery. For dark
and mysterious he had remained, remote even in the midst of the most intimate
contacts. Why, she didn’t even know his
name. ‘Call me Toto,’ he had suggested,
when she asked him what it was. And Toto
she had had to call him, for lack of anything more definite or committal. But today he was letting her further into his
secret. Rosie was delighted. Her pink underclothing, she decided, as she
looked in the long glass, was really ravishing.
She examined herself, turning first one way, then the other, looking
over her shoulder to see the effect from behind. She pointed a toe, bent and straightened a
knee, applauding the length of her legs (‘Most women,’ Toto had said, ‘are like
daschunds’), their slenderness and plump suavity of form. In their white stockings of Milanese silk
they looked delicious; and how marvellously, by the way, those Selfridge people
had mended those stockings by their new patent process! Absolutely like new, and only charged four
shillings. Well, it was time to
dress. Goodbye, then, to the pink
underclothing and the long white legs.
She opened the wardrobe door. The
moving glass reflected, as it swung through its half-circle, pink bed,
rose-wreathed walls, little friends of her own age, and the dying saint at his
last communion. Rosie selected the frock
she had bought the other day at one of those little shops in Soho, where they
sell such smart things so cheaply to a clientage of minor actresses and cocottes. Toto hadn’t seen it yet. She looked extremely distinguished in
it. The little hat, with its inch of
veil hanging like a mask, unconcealing and inviting, from the brim, suited her
to perfection. One last dab of powder,
one last squirt of synthetic lilies of the valley, and she was ready. She closed the door behind her. St Jerome was left to communicate in the
untenanted pinkness.
Mr Mercaptan sat at his writing-table – an exquisitely amusing
affair in papier mâché, inlaid with floral decorations in mother-of-pearl and
painted with views of Windsor Castle and Tintern Abbey in the romantic manner
of Prince Albert’s later days – polishing to its final and gem-like perfection
one of his middle articles. It was on a
splendid subject – the ‘Jus Primæ Noctis, or Droit du Seigneur’ – ‘that delicious
droit,’ wrote Mr Mercaptan, ‘on
which, one likes to think, the Sovereigns of England insist so firmly in their
motto, Dieu et mon Droit – de Seigneur.’ That was charming, Mr Mercaptan thought, as
he read it through. And he liked that
bit which began elegiacally: ‘But, alas! the Right of the First Night belongs
to a Middle Age as mythical, albeit happily different, as those dismal epochs
invented by Morris or by Chesterton. The
Lord’s right, as we prettily imagine it, is a figment of the baroque imagination
of the seventeenth century. It never
existed. Or at least it did exist, but
as something deplorably different from what we love to picture it.’ And he went on, eruditely, to refer to that
Council of Carthage which, in 398, demanded of the faithful that they should be
continent on their wedding-night. It was
the Lord’s right – the droit of a
heavenly Seigneur. On this text of fact,
Mr Mercaptan went on to preach a brilliant sermon on that melancholy sexual
perversion known as continence. How much
happier we all should be if the real historical droit du Seigneur had in fact been the mythical right of our
‘pretty prurient imaginations’! He
looked forward to a golden age when all should be seigneurs possessing rights
that should have broadened down into universal liberty. And so on.
Mr Mercaptan read through his creation with a smile of satisfaction on
his face. Every here and there he made a
careful correction in red ink. Over
‘pretty prurient imaginations’ his pen hung for a full minute in conscientious
hesitation. Wasn’t it perhaps a little
too strongly alliterative, a shade, perhaps, cheap? Perhaps ‘pretty lascivious’ or ‘delicately
prurient’ would be better. He repeated
the alternatives several times, rolling the sound of them round his tongue,
judicially, like a tea-taster. In the
end, he decided that ‘pretty prurient’ was right. ‘Pretty prurient’ – they were the mots justes, decidedly, without a
question.
Mr Mercaptan had just come to this decision and his poised pen
was moving farther down the page, when he was disturbed by the sound of arguing
voices in the corridor, outside his room.
‘What is it, Mrs Goldie?’ he called irritably, for it was not
difficult to distinguish his housekeeper’s loud and querulous tones. He had given orders that he was not to be
disturbed. In these critical moments of
correction one needed such absolute tranquillity.
But Mr Mercaptan was to have no tranquillity this
afternoon. The door of his sacred
boudoir was thrown rudely open, and there strode in, like a Goth into the
elegant marble vomitorium of Petronius Arbiter, a haggard and dishevelled
person whom Mr Mercaptan recognized, with a certain sense of discomfort, as
Casimir Lypiatt.
‘To what do I owe the pleasure
of this unexpected …?’ Mr Mercaptan began with an essay in offensive courtesy.
But Lypiatt, who had no feeling for the finer shades, coarsely
interrupted him. ‘Look here, Mercaptan,’
he said. ‘I want to have a talk with
you.’
‘Delighted, I’m sure,’ Mr Mercaptan replied. ‘And what,
may I ask, about?’ He knew, of course,
perfectly well; and the prospect of the talk disturbed him.
‘About this,’ said Lypiatt; and he held out what looked like a
roll of paper.
Mr Mercaptan took the roll and opened it out. It was a copy of the Weekly World. ‘Ah!’ said Mr
Mercaptan, in a tone of delighted surprise.
‘The World. You have read my little article?’
‘That was what I wanted to talk to you about,’ said Lypiatt.
Mr Mercaptan modestly laughed.
‘It hardly deserves it,’ he said.
Preserving a calm of expression which was quite unnatural to
him, and speaking in a studiedly quiet voice, Lypiatt pronounced with careful
deliberation: ‘It is a disgusting, malicious, ignoble attack on me,’ he said.
‘Come, come!’
protested Mr Mercaptan. ‘A critic must
be allowed to criticize.’
‘But there are limits,’ said Lypiatt.
‘Oh, I quite agree,’
Mr Mercaptan eagerly conceded. ‘But,
after all, Lypiatt, you can’t pretend that I have come anywhere near those
limits. If I had called you a murderer, or even an adulterer – then, I admit, you would
have some cause to complain. But I
haven’t. There’s nothing like a
personality in the whole thing.’
Lypiatt laughed derisively, and his face went all to pieces,
like a pool of water into which a stone is suddenly dropped.
‘You’ve merely said I was insincere, an actor, a mountebank, a
quack, raving fustian, spouting mock heroics.
That’s all.’
Mr Mercaptan put on the expression of one who feels himself
injured and misunderstood. He shut his
eyes, he flapped deprecatingly with his hand.
‘I merely suggested,’ he said,
‘that you protest too much. You defeat your own ends; you lose emphasis
by trying to be over-emphatic. All this folie de grandeur, all that hankering
after terribiltà …’ sagely Mr
Mercaptan shook his head, ‘it’s lead so many
people astray. And, in any case, you
can’t really expect me to find it very sympathetic.’ Mr Mercaptan uttered a little laugh and
looked affectionately round his boudoir, his retired and perfumed poutery
within whose walls so much civilization had finely flowered. He looked at his magnificent sofa, gilded and
carved, upholstered in white satin, and so deep – for it was a great square
piece of furniture, almost as broad as it was long – that when you sat right
back, you had of necessity to lift your feet from the floor and recline at
length. It was under the white satin
that Crébillon’s spirit found, in these late degenerate days, a sympathetic
home. He looked at his exquisite Condor
fans over the mantelpiece; his lovely Marie Laurencin of two young girls,
pale-skinned and berry-eyed, walking embraced in a shallow myopic landscape
amid a troop of bounding heraldic dogs.
He looked at his cabinet of bibelots
in the corner where the nigger mask and the superb Chinese phallus in sculptured
rock crystal contrasted so amusingly with the Chelsea china, the little ivory
Madonna, which might be a fake, but in any case was quite as good as any
mediæval French original, and the Italian medals. He looked at his comical writing-desk in
shining black papier mâché and mother-of-pearl; he looked at his article on the
‘Jus Primæ Noctis’, black and neat on the page, with the red corrections
attesting his tireless search for, and his, he flattered himself, almost
invariably discovery of, the inevitable word.
No, really, one couldn’t expect him
to find Lypiatt’s notions very sympathetic.
‘But I don’t expect you to,’ said Lypiatt, ‘and, good God! I
don’t want you to. But you call me
insincere. That’s what I can’t and won’t
stand. How dare you do that?’ His voice was growing louder.
Once more, Mr Mercaptan deprecatingly flapped. ‘At the most,’ he corrected, ‘I said that
there was a certain look of insincerity about some of the pictures. Hardly avoidable, indeed, in work of this
kind.’
Quite suddenly, Lypiatt lost his self-control. All the accumulated anger and bitterness of
the last days burst out. His show had
been a hopeless failure. Not a picture
sold, a press that was mostly bad, or, when good, that had praised for the
wrong, the insulting reasons. ‘Bright
and effective work,’ ‘Mr Lypiatt would make an excellent stage designer.’ Damn them! damn them! And then, when the
dailies had all had their yelp, here was Mercaptan in the Weekly World taking him as a text for what was practically an essay
on insincerity on art. ‘How dare you?’
he furiously shouted. ‘You – how dare
you talk about sincerity? What can you
know about sincerity you disgusting little bug!’ And avenging himself on the
person of Mr Mercaptan against the world that had neglected him, against the
fate that had denied him his rightful share of talent, Lypiatt sprang up and,
seizing the author of the ‘Jus Primæ Noctis’ by the shoulders, he shook him, he
bumped him up and down in his chair, he cuffed him over the head. ‘How can you have the impudence,’ he asked,
letting go of his victim, but still standing menacingly over him, ‘to touch
anything that even attempts to be decent and big?’ All these years, these wretched years of
poverty and struggle and courageous hope and failure and repeated
disappointment; and now this last failure, more complete than all. He was trembling with anger; at least one
forgot unhappiness while one was angry.
Mr Mercaptan had recovered from his first terrified
surprise. ‘Really, really,’ he repeated, ‘too
barbarous. Scuffling like hobbledehoys.’
‘If you knew,’ Lypiatt began; but he checked himself. If you knew, he was going to say, what those
things had cost me, what they meant, what thought, what passion – But how could
Mercaptan understand? And it would sound
as though he were appealing to this creature’s sympathy. ‘Bug!’ he shouted instead, ‘bug!’ And he struck out again with the flat of his
hand. Mr Mercaptan put up his hands and
ducked away from the slaps, blinking.
‘Really,’ he protested, ‘really….’
Insincere? Perhaps it
was half true. Lypiatt seized his man
more furiously than before and shook him, shook him. ‘And then that vile insult about the vermouth
advertisement,’ he cried out. That had
rankled. Those flaring, vulgar
posters! ‘You thought you could mock me
and spit at me with impunity, did you?
I’ve stood it so long, you thought I’d always stand it? Was that it?
But you’re mistaken.’ He lifted
his fist. Mr Mercaptan cowered away,
raising his arm to protect his head.
‘Vile bug of a coward,’ said Lypiatt, ‘why don’t you defend yourself
like a man? You can only be dangerous
with words. Very witty and spiteful and
cutting about these vermouth posters, wasn’t it? But you wouldn’t dare to fight me if I
challenged you.’
‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Mr Mercaptan, peering up
from under his defences, ‘I didn’t invent that
particular piece of criticism. I
borrowed the apéritif.’ He laughed feebly, more canary than bull.
‘You borrowed it, did you?’ Lypiatt contemptuously
repeated. ‘And who from, may I
ask?’ Not that it interested him in the
least to know.
‘Well, if you really want
to know,’ said Mr Mercaptan, ‘it was from our friend Myra Viveash.’
Lypiatt stood for a moment without speaking, then putting his
menacing hand in his pocket, he turned away.
‘Oh!’ he said non-committally, and was silent again.
Relieved, Mr Mercaptan sat up in his chair; with the palm of
his right hand he smoothed his dishevelled head.
Airily, outside in the sunshine, Rosie walked down Sloane
Street, looking at the numbers of the doors of the houses. A hundred and ninety-nine, two hundred, two
hundred and one – she was getting near now.
Perhaps all the people who passed, strolling so easily and elegantly and
disengagedly along, perhaps they all of them carried behind their eyes a
secret, as delightful and amusing as hers.
Rosie liked to think so; it made life more exciting. How nonchalantly distinguished, Rosie
reflected, she herself must look. Would
anyone who saw her now, sauntering along like this, would anyone guess that,
ten houses farther down the street, a young poet, or at least very nearly a
young poet, was waiting, on the second floor, eagerly for her arrival? Of course they wouldn’t and couldn’t
guess! That was the fun and the enormous
excitement of the whole thing.
Formidable in her light-hearted detachment, formidable in the passion
which at will she could give rein to and check again, the great lady swam
beautifully along through the sunlight to satisfy her caprice. Like Diana, she stooped over the shepherd
boy. Eagerly the starving young poet
waited, waited in his garret. Two
hundred and twelve, two hundred and thirteen.
Rosie looked at the entrance and was reminded that the garret couldn’t
after all be very sordid, nor the young poet absolutely strarving. She stepped in and, standing in the hall,
looked at the board with the names.
Ground floor: Mrs Budge. First
floor: F. de M. Rowbotham. Second Floor:
P. Mercaptan.
P. Mercaptan…. But it was a charming name, a romantic name, a
real young poet’s name! Mercaptan – she
felt more than ever pleased with her selection.
The fastidious lady could not have had a happier caprice. Mercaptan … Mercaptan…. She wondered what the
P. stood for. Peter, Philip, Patrick,
Pendennis even? She could hardly have
guessed that Mr Mercaptan’s father, the eminent bacteriologist, had insisted,
thirty-four years ago, on calling his first-born ‘Pasteur’.
A little tremulous, under her outward elegant calm, Rosie
mounted the stairs. Twenty-five steps to
the first floor – one flight of thirteen, which was rather disagreeably
ominous, and one of twelve. Then two
flights of eleven, and she was on the second landing, facing a front door, a
bell-push like a round eye, a brass nameplate.
For a great lady thoroughly accustomed to this sort of thing, she felt
her heart beating rather unpleasantly fast.
It was those stairs, no doubt.
She halted a moment, took two deep breaths, then pushed the bell.
The door was opened by an aged servant of the most
forbiddingly respectable appearance.
‘Mr Mercaptan at home?’
The person at the door burst at once into a long, rambling,
angry complaint, but precisely about what Rosie could not for certain make
out. Mr Mercaptan had left orders, she
gathered, that he wasn’t to be disturbed.
But someone had come and disturbed him, ‘fairly shoved his way in, so
rude and inconsiderate,’ all the same.
And now he’d been once disturbed, she didn’t see why he shouldn’t be
disturbed again. But she didn’t know what
things were coming to if people fairly shoved their way in like that. Bolshevism, she called it.
Rosie murmured her sympathies, and was admitted into a dark
hall, Still querulously denouncing the
Bolsheviks who came shoving in, the person led the way down a corridor and,
throwing open a door, announced, in a tone of grievance: ‘A lady to see you,
Master Paster’ – for Mrs Goldie was an old family retainer, and one of the few
who knew the secret of Mr Mercaptan’s Christian name, one of the fewer still
who were privileged to employ it. Then,
as soon as Rosie had stepped across the threshold, she cut off her retreat with
a bang and went off, muttering all the time, towards her kitchen.
It certainly wasn’t a garret.
Half a glance, the first whiff of potpourri, the feel of the carpet
beneath her feet, had been enough to prove that. But it was not the room which occupied
Rosie’s attention, it was its occupants.
One of them, thin, sharp-featured and, in Rosie’s very young eyes, quite
old, was standing with an elbow on the mantelpiece. The other, sleeker and more genial in
appearance, was sitting in front of a writing-desk near the window. And neither of them – Rosie glanced desperately
from one to the other, hoping vainly that she might have overlooked a blond
beard – neither of them was Toto.
The sleek man at the writing-desk got up, advanced to meet
her.
‘An unexpected pleasure,’ he said, in a voice that alternately
boomed and fluted. ‘Too delightful! But to what
do I owe - ? Who, may I ask?’
He had held out his hand; automatically Rosie proffered
hers. The sleek man shook it with
cordiality, almost with tenderness.
‘I … I think I must have made a mistake,’ she said. ‘Mr Mercaptan …?’
The sleek man smiled.
‘I am Mr Mercaptan.’
‘You live on the second floor?’
‘I never laid claims to being a mathematician,’ said the sleek
man, smiling as though to applaud himself, ‘but I have always calculated that
…’ he hesitated … ‘enfin, que ma demeure
se trouve, en effet, on the second floor.
Lypiatt will bear me out, I’m sure.’
He turned to the thin man, who had not moved from the fireplace, but had
stood all the time motionlessly, his elbow on the mantelpiece, looking gloomily
at the ground.
Lypiatt looked up. ‘I
must be going,’ he said abruptly. And he
walked towards the door. Like vermouth
posters, like vermouth posters! – so that was Myra’s piece of mockery! All his anger had sunk like a quenched flame. He was altogether quenched, put out with
unhappiness.
Politely Mr Mercaptan hurried across the room and opened the
door for him. ‘Goodbye, then,’ he said airily.
Lypiatt did not speak, but walked out into the hall. The front door banged behind him.
‘Well, well,’ said Mr
Mercaptan, coming back across the room to where Rosie was still irresolutely
standing. ‘Talk about the furor poeticus! But do
sit down, I beg you. On Crébillon,’ he
explained, ‘because the soul of that great writer undoubtedly tenants it, undoubtedly. You know his book, of course? You know Le
Sopha?’
Sinking into Crébillon’s soft lap, Rosie had to admit that she
didn’t know Le Sopha. She had begun to recover her
self-possession. If this wasn’t the young poet, it was certainly a young poet. And a very peculiar one, too. As a great lady she laughingly accepted the
odd situation.
‘Not know Le Sopha?’
exclaimed Mr Mercaptan. ‘Oh! but, my
dear and mysterious young lady, let me lend you a copy of it at once. No
education can be called complete without
a knowledge of that divine book.’ He
darted to the bookshelf and came back with a small volume bound in white
vellum. ‘The hero’s soul,’ he explained,
handing her the volume, ‘passes, by the laws of metempsychosis, into a
sofa. He is doomed to remain a sofa
until such time as two persons consummate upon his bosom their reciprocal and
equal loves. The book is the record of
the poor sofa’s hopes and disappointments.’
‘Dear me!’ said Rosie, looking at the title-page.
‘But now,’ said Mr Mercaptan, sitting down beside her on the
edge of Crébillon, ‘won’t you please explain?
To what happy quidproquo do I owe this sudden and altogether delightful
invasion of my privacy?’
‘Well,’ said Rosie, and hesitated. It was really rather difficult to explain. ‘I was to meet a friend of mine.’
‘Quite so,’ said Mr Mercaptan encouragingly.
‘Who sent me a telegram,’ Rosie went on.
‘He sent you a telegram!’ Mr Mercaptan echoed.
‘Changing the – the place we had fixed and telling me to meet
him here at this address.’
‘Here?’
Rosie nodded. ‘On the
s-second floor,’ she made it more precise.
‘But I live on the
second floor,’ said Mr Mercaptan. ‘You
don’t mean to say your friend is also called Mercaptan and lives here too?’
Rosie smiled. ‘I don’t
know what he’s called,’ she said with a cool ironical carelessness that was
genuinely grande dame.
‘You don’t know his name?’
Mr Mercaptan gave a roar and a squeal of delighted laughter. ‘But that’s too good,’ he said.
‘S-second floor,’ he wrote in the telegram.’ Rosie was now perfectly at her ease. When I saw your name, I thought it was his
name. I must say,’ she added, looking
sideways at Mr Mercaptan and at once dropping the magnolia petals of her
eyelids, ‘it seemed to me a very charming name.’
‘You overwhelm me,’ said Mr Mercaptan, smiling all over his
cheerful, snouty face. ‘As for your name – I am too discreet a galantuomo to ask. And, in and case, what does it matter? A rose by
any other name …’
‘But, as a matter of fact,’ she said, raising and lowering
once again her smooth, white lids, ‘my name does happen to be Rose; or, at any
rate, Rosie.’
‘So you are sweet by right!’ exclaimed Mr Mercaptan, with a
pretty gallantry which he was the first to appreciate. ‘Let’s order tea on the strength of it.’ He jumped up and rang the bell. ‘How I congratulate myself on this
astonishing piece of good fortune!’
Rosie said nothing.
This Mr Mercaptan, she thought, seemed to be even more a man of the
great artistic world than Toto.
‘What puzzles me,’ he went on, ‘is why your anonymous friend
should have chosen my address out of all the millions of others. He must know me, or, at any rate, know about
me.’
‘I should imagine,’ said Rosie, ‘that you have a lot of
friends.’
Mr Mercaptan laughed – the whole orchestra, from bassoon to
piccolo. ‘Des amis, des amies – with and without the mute “e”,’ he declared.
The aged and forbidding servant appeared at the door.
‘Tea for two, Mrs Goldie.’
Mrs Goldie looked round the room suspiciously. ‘The other gentleman’s gone, has he?’ she
asked. And having assured herself of his
absence, she renewed her complaint.
‘Shoving in like that,’ she said.
‘Bolshevism, that’s what I …’
‘All right, all right, Mrs Goldie. Let’s have our tea as quickly as
possible.’ Mr Mercaptan held up his
hand, authoritatively, with the gesture of a policeman controlling the traffic.
‘Very well, Master Paster.’
Mrs Goldie spoke with resignation and departed.
‘But tell me,’ Mr Mercaptan went on, ‘if it isn’t indiscreet – what does your friend
look like?’
‘W-well,’ Rosie answered, ‘he’s fair, and though he’s quite
young he wears a beard.’ With her two
hands she indicated on her own unemphatic bosom the contours of Toto’s broad
blond fan.
‘A beard! But, good, heavens,’ Mr Mercaptan slapped his thigh,
‘it’s Coleman, it’s obviously and undoubtedly Coleman!’
‘Well, whoever it was,’ said Rosie severely, ‘he played a very
stupid sort of joke.’
‘For which I thank him.
De tout on cœur.’
Rosie smiled and looked sideways. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘I shall give him a
piece of my mind.’
Poor Aunt Aggie! Oh,
poor Aunt Aggie, indeed! In the light of
Mr Mercaptan’s boudoir her hammered copper and her leadless glaze certainly did
look a bit comical.
After tea Mr Mercaptan played cicerone in a tour of inspection
round the room. They visited the papier
mâché writing-desk, the Condor fans, the Marie Laurencin, the 1914 edition of Du Côté de chez Swann, the Madonna that
probably was a fake, the nigger mask, the Chelsea figures, the Chinese object
of art in sculptured crystal, the scale model of Queen Victoria in wax under a
glass bell. Toto, it became clear, had
been no more than a forerunner; the definitive revelation was Mr Mercaptan’s. Yes, poor Aunt Aggie! And indeed, when Mr Mercaptan began to read
her his little middle on the ‘Droit du Seigneur’, it was poor everybody. Poor mother, with her absurd, old-fashioned,
prudish views; poor, earnest father, with his Unitarianism, his Hibert Journal, his letters to the
papers about the necessity for a spiritual regeneration.
‘Bravo!’ she cried from the depths of Crébillon. She was leaning back in one corner, languid,
serpentine, and at ease, her feet in their mottled snake’s leather tucked up
under her. ‘Bravo!’ she cried as Mr
Mercaptan finished his reading and looked up for his applause.
Mr Mercaptan bowed.
‘You express so exquisitely what we …’ and waving her hand in
a comprehensive gesture, she pictured to herself all the other fastidious
ladies, all the marchionesses of fable, reclining, as she herself at this
moment reclined, on upholstery of white satin, ‘what we all only feel and
aren’t clever enough to say.’
Mr Mercaptan was charmed.
He got up from before his writing-desk, crossed the room and sat down
beside her on Crébillon. ‘Feeling,’ he said,
‘is the important thing.’
Rosie remembered that her father had once remarked, in blank
verse: ‘The things that matter happen in the heart.’
‘I quite agree,’ she said.
Like movable raisins in the suet of his snouty face, Mr
Mercaptan’s brown little eyes rolled amorous avowals. He took Rosie’s hand and kissed it. Crébillon creaked discreetly as he moved a
little nearer.
It was on the evening of the same day. Rosie lay on her sofa – a poor, high-purchase
thing indeed, compared with Mr Mercaptan’s grand affair in white satin and
carved and gilded wood, but still a sofa – lay with her feet on the arm of it
and her long suave legs exposed, by the slipping of the kimono, to the top of
her stretched stockings. She was reading
the little vellum-jacketed volume of Crébillon, which Mr Mercaptan had given
her when he said ‘goodbye’ (or rather, ‘À
bientôt, mon amie’); given, not lent, as he had less generously offered at
the beginning of their afternoon; given with the most graceful of allusive
dedications inscribed on the flyleaf:
TO
BY-NO-OTHER-NAME-AS-SWEET,
WITH GRATITUDE,
FROM
CRÉBILLON DELIVERED.
À bientôt –
she had promised to come again very soon.
She thought of the essay on the ‘Jus Primæ Noctus’ – ah! what we’ve all
been feeling and none of us clever enough to say. We on the sofas, ruthless, lovely and
fastidious….
‘I am proud to constitute myself’ – Mr Mercaptan had said of
it – ‘l’esprit d’escalier des dames
galantes.’
Rosie was not quite sure what he meant; but it certainly sounded
very witty indeed.
She read the book slowly.
Her French, indeed, wasn’t good enough to permit her to read it anyhow
else. She wished it were better. Perhaps if it were better she wouldn’t be
yawning like this. It was disgraceful:
she pulled herself together. Mr
Mercaptan had said that it was a masterpiece.
In his study, Shearwater was trying to write his paper on the
regulative functions of the kidneys. He
was not succeeding.
Why wouldn’t she see me yesterday? he kept wondering. With anguish he suspected other lovers;
desired her, in consequence, the more.
Gumbril had said something, he remembered, that night they had met her
by the coffee-stall. What was it? He wished now that he had listened more
attentively.
She’s bored with me.
Already. It was obvious.
Perhaps he was too rustic for her. Shearwater looked at his hands. Yes, the nails were dirty. He took an
orange stick out of his waistcoat pocket and began to clean them. He had bought a whole packet of orange sticks
that morning.
Determinedly he took up his pen. ‘The hydrogen ion concentration in the blood
…’ he began a new paragraph. But he got
no further than the first seven words.
If, he began thinking with a frightful confusion, if – if – if
– Past conditionals, hopelessly past. He
might have been brought up more elegantly; his father, for example, might have
been a barrister instead of a barrister’s clerk. He mightn’t have had to work so hard when he
was young; might have been about more, danced more, seen more young women. If he had met her years ago – during the war,
should one say, dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant in the Guards….
He had pretended that he wasn’t interested in women; that they
had no effect on him; that, in fact, he was above that sort of thing. Imbecile!
He might as well have said that he was above having a pair of
kidneys. He had only consented to admit,
graciously, that they were a physiological necessity.
O God, what a fool he had been!
And then, what about Rosie?
What sort of a life had she been having while he was being above that
sort of thing? Now he came to think of
it, he really knew nothing about her, except that she had been quite incapable
of learning correctly, even by heart, the simplest facts about the physiology
of frogs. Having found that out, he had
really given up exploring further. How
could he have been so stupid?
Rosie had been in love with him, he supposed. Had he been in love with her? No. He
had taken care not to be. On
principle. He had married her as a measure
of intimate hygiene; out of protective affection, too, certainly out of
affection; and a little for amusement, as one might buy a puppy.
Mrs Viveash had opened his eyes; seeing her, he had also begun
to notice Rosie. It seemed to him that
he had been a loutish cad as well as an imbecile.
What should he do about it?
He sat for a long time wondering.
In the end he decided that the best thing would be to go and
tell Rosie all about it, all about everything.
About Mrs Viveash too?
Yes, about Mrs Viveash too. He
would get over Mrs Viveash more easily and more rapidly if he did. And he would begin to try and find out about
Rosie. He would explore her. He would discover all the other things
besides an incapacity to learn physiology that were in her. He would discover her, he would quicken his
affection for her into something livelier and more urgent. And they would begin again; more
satisfactorily this time; with knowledge and understanding; wise from their
experience.
Shearwater got up from his chair before the writing-table,
lurched pensively towards the door, bumping into the revolving bookcase and the
armchair as he went, and walked down the passage to the drawing-room. Rosie did not turn her head as he came in,
but went on reading without changing her position, her slippered feet still
higher than her head, her legs still charmingly avowing themselves.
Shearwater came to a halt in front of the empty
fireplace. He stood there with his back
to it, as though warming himself before an imaginary flame. It was, he felt, the safest, the most
strategic point from which to talk.
‘What are you reading?’ he asked.
‘Le Sopha,’ said
Rosie.
‘What’s that?’
‘What’s that? Rosie scornfully echoed. ‘Why, it’s one of the great French classics.’
‘Who by?’
‘Crébillon the younger.’
‘Never heard of him,’ said Shearwater.
There was a silence.
Rosie went on reading.
‘It just occurred to me,’ Shearwater began again in his rather
ponderous, infelicitous way, ‘that you mightn’t be very happy, Rosie.’
‘Rosie looked up at him and laughed. ‘What put that into your head?’ she
asked. ‘I’m perfectly happy.’
Shearwater was left a little at a loss. ‘Well, I’m very glad to hear it,’ he
said. ‘I only thought … that perhaps you might think … that I rather neglected you.’
Rosie laughed again.
‘What is all this about?’ she said.
‘I have it rather on my conscience,’ said Shearwater. ‘I begin to see … something has made me see …
that I’ve not…. I don’t treat you very well.’
‘But I don’t n-notice it, I assure you,’ put in Rosie, still
smiling.
‘I leave you out too much,’ Shearwater went on with a kind of
desperation, running his fingers through his thick black hair. ‘We don’t share enough together. You’re too much outside my life.’
‘But after all,’ said Rosie, ‘we are a civ-vilized
couple. We don’t want to live in one
another’s pockets, do we?’
‘No, but we’re only really no more than strangers,’ said
Shearwater. ‘That isn’t right. And it’s my fault. I’ve never tried to get into touch with your
life. But you did your best to
understand mine … at the beginning of our marriage.’
‘Oh, then-n!’ said
Rosie, laughing. ‘You found out what a
little idiot I was.’
‘Don’t make a joke of it,’ said Shearwater. ‘It isn’t a joke. It’s very serious. I tell you, I’ve come to see how stupid and
inconsiderate and un-understanding I’ve been with you. I’ve come to see quite suddenly. The fact is,’ he went on with a rush, like an
uncorked fountain, ‘I’ve been seeing a woman recently whom I like very much,
and who doesn’t like me.’ Speaking of
Mrs Viveash, unconsciously he spoke her language. For Mrs Viveash people always euphemistically
‘liked’ one another rather a lot, even when it was a case of the most frightful
and excruciating passion, the most complete abandonments.’ And somehow that’s made me see a lot of
things which I’d been blind to before – blind deliberately, I suppose. It’s made me see, among other things, that
I’ve really been to blame towards you, Rosie.’
Rosie listened with an astonishment which she perfectly
disguised. So James was embarking on his
little affairs, was he? It seemed
incredible, and also, as she looked at her husband’s face – the face, behind
its bristlingly manly mask, of a harassed baby – also rather pathetically
absurd. She wondered who it could
be. But she displayed no curiosity. She would find out soon enough.
‘I’m sorry you should have been unhappy about it,’ she said.
‘It’s finished now.’
Shearwater made a decided little gesture.
‘Ah, no!’ said Rosie.
‘You should persevere.’ She
looked at him, smiling.
Shearwater was taken aback by this display of easy
detachment. He had imagined the
conversation so very differently, as something so serious, so painful and, at
the same time, so healing and soothing, that he did not know how to go on. ‘But I thought,’ he said hesitatingly, ‘that
you … that we … after this experience … I would try to get closer to you …’
(Oh, it sounded ridiculous!) … ‘We might start again, from a different place,
so to speak.’
‘But, cher ami,’
protested Rosie, with the inflection and in the preferred tongue of Mr
Mercaptan, ‘you can’t seriously expect us to do the Darby and Joan business,
can you? You’re distressing yourself
quite unnecessarily on my account. I
don’t find you neglect me or anything like it.
You have your life – naturally.
And I have mine. We don’t get in
one another’s way.’
‘But do you think that’s the ideal sort of married life?’
asked Shearwater.
‘It’s obviously the most civ-vilized,’ Rosie answered,
laughing.
Confronted by Rosie’s civilization, Shearwater felt helpless.
‘Well, if you don’t want,’ he said. ‘I’d hoped … I’d thought …’
He went back to his study to think things over. The more he thought them over, the more he
blamed himself. And incessantly the
memory of Mrs Viveash tormented him.
CHAPTER XIX
AFTER
leaving Mr Mercaptan, Lypiatt had gone straight home. The bright day seemed to deride him. With its shining red omnibuses, its parasols,
its muslin girls, its young-leaved trees, its bands at the street corners, it
was too much of a garden party to be tolerable.
He wanted to be alone. He took a
cab back to the studio. He couldn’t
afford it, of course; but what did that matter, what did that matter now?
The cab drove slowly and as though with reluctance down the
dirty mews. He paid it off, opened his
little door between the wide stable doors, climbed the steep ladder of his
stairs and was at home. He sat down and
tried to think.
‘Death, death, death, death,’ he kept repeating to himself,
moving his lips as though he were praying.
If he said the word often enough, if he accustomed himself completely to
the idea, death would come almost by itself; he would know it already, while he
was still alive, he would pass almost without noticing out of life into
death. Into death, he thought, into
death. Death like a well. The stone falls, falls, second after second;
and at last there is a sound, a far-off, horrible sound of death and then
nothing more. The well at Carisbrooke,
with a donkey to wind the wheel that pulls up the bucket of water, of icy water
… He thought for a long time of the well of death.
Outside in the mews a barrel-organ struck up the tune of
‘Where do flies go in the winter-time?’
Lypiatt lifted his head to listen.
He smiled to himself. Where do flies go?’ The question asked itself with a dramatic, a
tragical appositeness. At the end of
everything – the last ludicrous touch.
He saw it all from outside. He
pictured himself sitting there alone, broken.
He looked at his hand lying limp on the table in front of him. It needed only the stigma of the nail to make
it the hand of a dead Christ.
There, he was making literature of it again. Even now.
He buried his face in his hands.
His mind was full of twisted darkness, of an unspeakable, painful
confusion. It was too difficult, too
difficult.
The inkpot, he found when he wanted to begin writing,
contained nothing but a parched black sediment.
He had been meaning for days past to get some more ink; and he had
always forgotten. He would have to write
in pencil.
‘Do you remember,’ he wrote, ‘do you remember, Myra, that time
we went down into the country – you remember – under the Hog’s Back at that
little inn they were trying to make pretentious? “Hotel Bull” – do you remember? How we laughed over the Hotel Bull! And how we liked the country outside its
doors! All the world in a few square
miles. Chalkpits and blue butterflies on
the Hog’s Back. And at the foot of the
hill, suddenly, the sand; the hard, yellow sand with those queer caves, dug
when and by what remote villains at the edge of the Pilgrims’ Way? the fine
grey sand on which the heather of Puttenham Common grows. And the flagstaff and the inscription marking
the place where Queen Victoria stood to look at the view. And the enormous sloping meadows round
Compton and the thick, dark woods. And
the lakes, the heaths, the Scotch firs at Cutt Mill. The forests of Shackleford. There was everything. Do you remember how we enjoyed it all! I did, in any case. I was happy during those three days. And I loved you, Myra. And I thought you might, you might perhaps,
some day, love me. You didn’t. And my love has only brought me
unhappiness. Perhaps it has been my
fault. Perhaps I ought to have known how
to make you give me happiness. You
remember that wonderful sonnet of Michelangelo’s, where he says that the loved
woman is like a block of marble from which the artist knows how to cut the
perfect statue of his dreams. If the
statue turns out a bad one, if it’s death instead of love that the lover gets –
why, the fault lies in the artist and in the lover, not in the marble, not in
the beloved.
Amor
dunque no ha, nè tua beltate,
O
fortuna, o durezza, o gran disdegno,
Del
mio mal colpa, o mio destino, o sorte,
Se
dentro del tuo cor morte è pietate
Porti
in un tempo, e ch’l mio basso ingegno
Non
sepia ardendo trarne altro che morte.
Yes, it was my basso ingegno: my low genius which did
not know how to draw love from you, nor beauty from the materials of which art
is made. Ah, now you’ll smile to
yourself and say: Poor Casimir, he has come to admit that at last? Yes, yes, I have come to admit everything. That I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t write, I
couldn’t make music. That I was a
charlatan and a quack. That I was a
ridiculous actor of heroic parts who deserved to be laughed at – and was laughed at. But then every man is ludicrous if you look
at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart
and mind. You could turn Hamlet into an
epigrammatic farce with an inimitable scene when he takes is adored mother in
adultery. You could make the wittiest
Guy de Maupassant short story out of the life of Christ, by contrasting the mad
rabbi’s pretensions with his abject fate.
It’s a question of the point of view.
Everyone’s a walking farce and a walking tragedy at the same time. The man who slips on a banana-skin and
fractures his skull describes against the sky, as he falls, the most richly
comical arabesque. And you, Myra – what
do you suppose the unsympathetic gossips say of you? What sort of a farce of the Boulevards is
your life in their eyes? For me, Myra,
you seem to move all the time through some nameless and incomprehensible
tragedy. For them you are what? Merely any sort of a wanton, with amusing
adventures. And what am I? A charlatan, a quack, a pretentious,
boasting, rhodomontading imbecile, incapable of painting anything but vermouth
posters. (Why did that hurt so terribly? I don’t know. There was no reason why
you shouldn’t think so if you wanted to.) I was all that – and grotesquely
laughable. And very likely your laughter
was justified, your judgement was true.
I don’t know. I can’t tell. Perhaps I am a charlatan. Perhaps I’m insincere; boasting to others,
deceiving myself. I don’t know, I tell
you. Everything is confusion in my mind
now. The whole fabric seems to have
tumbled to pieces; it lies in a horrible chaos.
I can make no order within myself.
Have I lied to myself? have I acted and postured the Great Man to
persuade myself that I am one? have I something in me, or nothing? have I ever
achieved anything of worth, anything that rhymed with my conceptions, my dreams
(for those were fine; of that, I am
certain)? I look into the chaos that is
my soul and, I tell you, I don’t know, I don’t know. But what I do know is that I’ve spent nearly
twenty years now playing the charlatan at whom you all laugh. That I’ve suffered, in mind and in body too –
almost from hunger, sometimes – in order to play it. That I’ve struggled, that I’ve exultantly
climbed to the attack, that I’ve been thrown down – ah, many times! – that I’ve
picked myself up and started again.
Well, I suppose all that’s ludicrous, if you like to think of it that
way. It is ludicrous that a man should
put himself to prolonged inconvenience for the sake of something which doesn’t
really exist at all. It’s exquisitely
comic, I can see. I can see it in the
abstract, so to speak. But in this
particular case, you must remember I’m not a dispassionate observer. And if I am overcome now, it is not with
laughter. It is with an indescribable
unhappiness, with the bitterness of death itself. Death, death, death. I repeat the word to myself, again and
again. I think of death, I try to
imagine it, I hang over it, looking down, where the stones fall and fall and
there is one horrible noise, and then silence again; looking down into the well
of death. It is so deep that there is no
glittering eye of water to be seen at the bottom. I have no candle to send down. It is horrible, but I do not want to go on
living. Living would be worse than …’
Lypiatt was reaching out for another sheet of paper when he
was startled to hear the sound of feet on the stairs. He turned towards the door. His heart beat with violence. He was filled with a strange sense of
apprehension. In terror he awaited the
approach of some unknown and terrible being.
The feet of the angel of death were on the stairs. Up, up, up.
Lypiatt felt himself trembling as the sound came nearer. He knew for certain that in a few seconds he
was going to die. The hangmen had
already pinioned him; the soldiers of the firing squad had already raised their
rifles. One, two, … he thought of Mrs
Viveash standing, bare-headed, the wind blowing in her hair, at the foot of the
flagstaff from the site of which Queen Victoria had admired the distant view of
Selborne; he thought of her dolorously smiling; he remembered that once she had
taken his head between her two hands and kissed him: ‘Because you’re such a
golden ass,’ she had said, laughing.
Three … There was a little tap at the door. Lypiatt pressed his hand over his heart. The door opened.
A small, bird-like man with a long, sharp nose and eyes as
round and black and shining as buttons stepped into the room.
‘My Lydgate, I presume?’ he began. Then looked at a card on which a name and
address were evidently written.
‘Lypiatt, I mean. A thousand
pardons. Mr Lypiatt, I presume?’
Lypiatt leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. His face was as white as paper. He breathed hard and his temples were wet
with sweat, as though he had been running.
‘I found the door down below open, so I came straight up. I hope you’ll excuse …’ The stranger smiled
apologetically.
‘Who are you?’ Lypiatt asked, reopening his eyes. His heart was still beating hard; after the
storm it calmed itself slowly. He drew
back from the brink of the fearful well; the time had not yet come to plunge.
‘My name,’ said the stranger, ‘is Boldero, Herbert
Boldero. Out mutual friend Mr Gumbril,
Mr Theodore Gumbril, junior,’ he made it more precise, ‘suggested that I might
come and see you about a little matter in which he and I are interested and in which
perhaps you, too, might be interested.’
Lypiatt nodded, without saying anything.
Mr Boldero, meanwhile, was turning his bright, bird-like eyes
about the studio. Mrs Viveash’s
portrait, all but finished now, was clamped to the easel. He approached it, a connoisseur.
‘It reminds me very much,’ he said, ‘of Bacosso. Very much indeed, if I may say so. Also a little of …’ he hesitated, trying to
think of the name of that other fellow Gumbril had talked about. But being unable to remember the unimpressive
syllables of Derain he played for safety and said – ‘of Orpen.’ Mr Boldero looked inquiringly at Lypiatt to
see if that was right.
Lypiatt still spoke no word and seemed, indeed, not to have
heard what had been said.
Mr Boldero saw that it wasn’t much good talking about modern
art. This chap, he thought, looked as
though something were wrong with him. He
hoped he hadn’t got influenza. There was
a lot of the disease about. ‘This little
affair I was speaking of,’ he pursued, in another tone, ‘is a little business
proposition that Mr Gumbril and I have gone into together. A matter of pneumatic trousers,’ he waved his
hand airily.
Lypiatt suddenly burst out laughing, an embittered Titan. Where do flies go? Where do souls go? The barrel-organ, and now pneumatic trousers! Then, as suddenly, he was silent again. More literature? Another piece of acting? ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Mr Boldero indulgently. ‘I know the idea does seem a little humorous,
if I may say so, at first. But I assure
you, there’s money in it, Mr Lydgate – Mr Lypiatt. Money!’
Mr Boldero paused a moment dramatically.
‘Well,’ he went on, ‘our idea was to launch the new product with a good
swingeing publicity campaign. Spend a
few thousands in the papers and then get it good and strong into the
Underground and on the hoardings, along with Owbridge’s and John Bull and the
Golden Ballot. Now, for that, Mr
Lypiatt, we shall need, as you can well imagine, a few good striking pictures. Mr Gumbril mentioned your name and suggested
I should come and see you to find out if you would perhaps be agreeable to
lending us your talent for this work.
And I may add, Mr Lypiatt,’ he spoke with real warmth, ‘that having seen
this example of your work’ – he pointed to the portrait of Mrs Viveash – “I
feel that you would be eminently capable of …’
He did not finish the sentence; for at that moment Lypiatt
leapt up from his chair and, making a shrill, inarticulate, animal noise,
rushed on the financier, seized him with both hands by the throat, shook him,
threw him to the floor, then picked him up again by the coat collar and pushed
him towards the door, kicking him as he went.
A final kick sent Mr Boldero tobogganing down the steep stairs. Lypiatt ran down after him; but Mr Boldero
had picked himself up, had opened the front door, slipped out, slammed it
behind him, and was running up the mews before Lypiatt could get to the bottom
of the stairs.
Lypiatt opened the door and looked out. Mr Boldero was already far away, almost at
the Piranesian arch. He watched him till
he was out of sight, then went upstairs again and threw himself face downwards
on his bed.
CHAPTER XX
ZOE ended
the discussion by driving half an inch of penknife into Coleman’s left arm and
running out of the flat, slamming the door behind her. Coleman was used to this sort of thing; this
sort of thing, indeed, was what he was there for. Carefully he pulled out the penknife which
had remained sticking in his arm. He
looked at the blade and was relieved to see that it wasn’t so dirty as might
have been expected. He found some cotton
wool, mopped up the blood as it oozed out, and dabbed the wound with
iodine. Then he set himself to bandage
it up. But to tie a bandage round one’s
own left arm is not easy. Coleman found
it impossible to keep the lint in place, impossible to get the bandage right
enough. At the end of a quarter of an
hour he had only succeeded in smearing himself very copiously with blood, and
the wound was still unbound. He gave up
the attempt and contented himself with swabbing up the blood as it came out.
‘And forthwith came there out blood and water,’ he said aloud,
and looked at the red stain on the cotton wool.
He repeated the words again and again, and at the fiftieth repetition
burst out laughing.
The bell in the kitchen suddenly buzzed. Who could it be? He went to the front door and opened it. On the landing outside stood a tall slender
young woman with slanting Chinese eyes and a wide mouth, elegantly dressed in a
black frock piped with white. Keeping
the cotton wool still pressed to his bleeding arm, Coleman bowed as gracefully
as he could.
‘Do come in,’ he said.
‘You are just in the nick of time.
I am on the point of bleeding to death.
And forthwith came there out blood and water. Enter, enter,’ he added, seeing the young
woman still standing irresolutely on the threshold.
‘But I wanted to see Mr Coleman,’ she said, stammering a
little and showing her embarrassment by blushing.
‘I am Mr Coleman.’ He
took the cotton wool for a moment from his arm and looked with the air of a
connoisseur at the blood on it. ‘But I
shall very soon cease to be that individual unless you come and tie up my
wounds.’
‘But you’re not the Mr Coleman I thought you were,’ said the
young lady, still more embarrassed. ‘You
have a beard, it is true; but …’
‘Then I must resign myself to quit this life, must I?’ He made a gesture of despair, throwing out
both hands. ‘Out, out, brief
Coleman. Out, damned sport,’ and he made
as though to close the door.
The young lady checked him.
‘If you really need tying up,’ she said, ‘I’ll do it, of course. I passed my First-Aid Exam in the war.’
Coleman reopened the door.
‘Saved!’ he said. ‘Come in.’
It had been Rosie’s original intention yesterday to go
straight on from Mr Mercaptan’s to Toto’s.
She would see him at once, she would ask him what he meant by playing
that stupid trick on her. She would give
him a good talking to. She would even
tell him that she would never see him again.
But, of course, if he showed himself sufficiently contrite and
reasonably explanatory, she would consent – oh, very reluctantly – to take him
back into favour. In the free,
unprejudiced circles in which she now moved, this sort of joke, she imagined,
was a mere trifle. It would be absurd to
quarrel seriously about it. But still,
she was determined to give Toto a lesson.
When, however, she did finally leave Mr Mercaptan’s delicious
boudoir, it was too late to think of going all the way to Pimlico, to the
address which Mr Mercaptan had given her.
She decided to put it off till the next day.
And so the next day, duly, she had set out for Pimlico – to
Pimlico, and to see a man called Coleman!
It seemed rather dull and second-rate after Sloane Street and Mr
Mercaptan. Poor Toto! – the sparkle of
Mr Mercaptan had made him look rather tarnished. That essay on the ‘Jus Primæ Noctis’ – ah!
Walking through the unsavoury mazes of Pimlico, she thought of it, and,
thinking of it, smiled. Poor Toto! And also, she mustn’t forget, stupid, malicious,
idiotic Toto! She had made up her mind
exactly what she should say to him; she had even made up her mind what Toto
would say to her. And when the scene was
over they would go and dine at the Café Royal – upstairs, where she had never
been. And she would make him rather
jealous by telling him how much she had liked Mr Mercaptan; but not too
jealous. Silence is golden, as her
father used to say when she used to fly into tempers and wanted to say nasty
things to everybody within range.
Silence, about some things, is certainly golden.
In the rather gloomy little turning off Lupus Street to which
she had been directed, Rosie found the number, found, in the row of bells and
cards, the name. Quickly and decidedly
she mounted the stairs.
‘Well,’ she was going to say as soon as she saw him, ‘I
thought you were a civilized being.’ Mr
Mercaptan had dropped a hint that Coleman wasn’t really civilized; a hint was
enough for Rosie. ‘But I see,’ she would
go on, ‘that I was mistaken. I don’t
like to associate with boors.’ The
fastidious lady had selected him as a young poet, not as a ploughboy.
Well rehearsed, Rosie rang the bell. And then the door had opened on this huge
bearded Cossack of a man, who smiled, who looked at her with bright, dangerous eyes,
who quoted the Bible and who was bleeding like a pig. There was blood on his shirt, blood on his
trousers, blood on his hands, bloody fingermarks on his face; even the blond
fringe of his beard, she noticed, was dabbled here and there with blood. It was too much, at first, even for her
aristocratic equanimity.
In the end, however, she followed him across a little
vestibule into a bright, whitewashed room empty of all furniture but a table, a
few chairs and a large boxspring and mattress, which stood like an island in
the middle of the floor and served as bed or sofa as occasion required. Over the mantelpiece was pinned a large
photographic reproduction of Leonardo’s study of the anatomy of love. There were no other pictures on the walls.
‘All the apparatus is here,’ said Coleman, and he pointed to
the table. ‘Lint, bandages, cotton wool,
iodine, gauze, oiled silk. I have them
all ready in preparation for these little accidents.’
‘But do you often manage to cut yourself in the arm?’ asked
Rosie. She took off her gloves and began
to undo a fresh packet of lint.
‘One gets cut,’ Coleman explained. ‘Little differences of opinion, you
know. If your eye offend you, pluck it
out; love your neighbour as yourself.
Argal: if his eye offend you – you see?
We live on Christian principles here.’
‘But who are “we”?’ asked Rosie, giving the cut a last
dressing of iodine and laying a big square of lint over it.
‘Merely myself and – how shall I put it? – my helpmate,’
Coleman answered. ‘Ah! you’re wonderfully
skilful at this business,’ he went on.
‘You’re the real hospital-nurse type; all maternal instincts. When pain and anguish wring the brow, an
interesting mangle thou, as we used to say in the good old days when the pun
and the Spoonerismus were in fashion.’
Rosie laughed. ‘Oh, I
don’t spend all my time tying up wounds,’ she said, and turned her eyes for an
instant from the bandage. After the
first surprise she was feeling her cool self again.
‘Brava!’ cried Coleman.
‘You make them too, do you? Make
them first and cure them afterwards in the grand old homœopathic way. Delightful!
You see what Leonardo has to say about it.’ With his free hand he pointed to the
photograph over the mantelpiece.
Rosie, who had noticed the picture when she came into the
room, preferred not to look at it too closely a second time. ‘I think it’s rather revolting,’ she said,
and was very busy with the bandage.
‘Ah! but that’s the point, that’s the whole point,’ said
Coleman, and his clear blue eyes were alive with dancing lights. ‘That’s the beauty of the grand passion. It is
revolting. You read what the Fathers of
the Church have to say about love.
They’re the men. It was Odo of
Cluny, wasn’t it, who called woman a saccus
stercoris, a bag of muck. Si quis enim considerat quæ intra nares et
quæ intra fauces et quæ intra ventrem lateant, sordes ubique reperiet.’ The Latin rumbled like eloquent thunder in
Coleman’s mouth. ‘Et si nec extremis digitis flegma vel stercus tangere patimur, quomodo
ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desideramus.’ He smacked his lips. ‘Magnificent!’ he said.
‘I don’t understand Latin,’ said Rosie, ‘and I’m glad of
it. And your bandage is finished. Look.’
‘Interesting mangle!’
Coleman smiled his thanks. ‘But
Bishop Odo, I fear, wouldn’t even have spared you; not even for your good
works. Still less for your good looks,
which would only have provoked him to dwell with the more insistency on the
visceral secrets which they conceal.’
‘Really,’ Rosie protested.
She would have liked to get up and go away, but the Cossack’s blue eyes
glittered at her with such a strange expression and he smiled so enigmatically,
that she found herself still sitting where she was, listening with a disgusted
pleasure to his quick talk, his screams of deliberate and appalling laughter.
‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, throwing up his hands, ‘what sensualists
these old fellows were! What a real
voluptuous feeling they had for dirt and gloom and sordidness and boredom, and
all the horrors of vice. They pretended
they were trying to dissuade people from vice by enumerating its horrors. But they were really only making it more
spicy by telling the truth about it. O esca vermium, O massa pulveris! What nauseating embracements! To conjugate the copulative verb, boringly,
with a sack of tripes – what could be more exquisitely and piercingly and
deliriously vile?’ And he threw back his
head and laughed; the blood-dabbled tips of his blond beard shook. Rosie looked at them, fascinated with
disgust.
‘There’s blood on your beard,’ she felt compelled to say.
‘What of it? Why shouldn’t there be?’ Coleman asked.
Confused, Rosie felt herself blushing. ‘Only because it’s rather unpl-leasant. I don’t know why. But it is.’
‘What a reason for immediately falling into my arms!’ said
Coleman. ‘To be kissed by a beard is bad
enough at any time. But by a bloody
beard – imagine!’
Rosie shuddered.
‘After all,’ he said, ‘what interest or amusement is there in
doing the ordinary things in the obvious way?
Life au naturel.’ He shook his head. ‘You must have garlic and saffron. Do you believe in God?’
‘Not m-much,’ said Rosie, smiling.
‘I pity you. You must
find existence dreadfully dull. As soon
as you do, everything becomes a thousand times life-size. Phallic symbols five hundred feet high,’ he
lifted his hand. ‘A row of grinning
teeth you could run the hundred yards on.’
He grinned at her through his beard.
‘Wounds big enough to let a coach-and-six drive into their purulent
recesses. Every slightest act eternally
significant. It’s only when you believe
in God, and especially in hell, that you can really begin enjoying life. For instance, when in a few moments you
surrender yourself to the importunities of my bloody beard, how prodigiously
much more you’d enjoy it if you could believe you were committing the sin
against the Holy Ghost – if you kept thinking calmly and dispassionately all
the time the affair was going on: All this is not only a horrible sin, it is
also ugly, grotesque, a mere defecation, a …’
Rosie held up her hand.
‘You’re really horrible,’ she said.
Coleman smiled at her. Still, she
did not go.
‘He who is not with me is against me,’ said Coleman. ‘If you can’t make up your mind to be with,
it’s surely better to be positively against than merely negatively
indifferent.’
‘Nonsense!’ exclaimed Rosie feebly.
‘When I call my lover a nymphomaniacal dog, she runs the
penknife into my arm.’
‘Well, do you enjoy it?’ asked Rosie.
‘Piercingly,’ he answered.
‘It is at once sordid to the last and lowest degree and infinitely and
eternally significant.’
Coleman was silent and Rosie too said nothing. Futilely she wished it had been Toto instead of this horrible, dangerous Cossack. Mr Mercaptan ought to have warned her. But then, of course, he supposed that she
already knew the creature. She looked up
at him and found his bright eyes fixed upon her; he was silently laughing.
‘Don’t you want to know who I am?’ she asked. ‘And how I got here?’
Coleman blandly shook his head. ‘Not in the very least,’ he said.
Rosie felt more helpless, somehow, than ever. ‘Why not?’ she asked as bravely and
impertinently as she could.
Coleman answered with another question. ‘Why should I?’
‘It would be natural curiosity.’
‘But I know all I want to know,’ he said. ‘You are a woman or, at any rate, you have
all the female stigmata. Not too
sumptuously well-developed, let me add.
You have no wooden legs. You have
eyelids that flutter up and down over your eyes like a moving shutter in front
of a signalling lamp, spelling out in a familiar code the letters: A.M.O.R.,
and not, unless I am very much mistaken, those others: C.A.S.T.I.T.A.S. You have a mouth that looks as though it knew
how to taste and how to bite. You …’
Rosie jumped up. ‘I’m
going away,’ she said.
Coleman leaned back in his chair and hallooed with
laughter. ‘Bite, bite, bite,’ he
said. ‘Thirty-two times.’ And he opened and shut his mouth as fast as
he could, so that his teeth clicked against one another with a little dry, bony
noise. ‘Every mouthful thirty-two
times. That’s what Mr Gladstone
said. And surely Mr Gladstone’ – he
rattled his sharp, white teeth again –
‘surely Mr Gladstone should know.’
‘Goodbye,’ said Rosie from the door.
‘Goodbye,’ Coleman called back; and immediately afterwards
jumped to his feet and made a dash across the room towards her.
Rosie uttered a cry, slipped through the door and, slamming it
behind her, ran across the vestibule and began fumbling with the latches of the
outer door. It wouldn’t open, it
wouldn’t open. She was trembling; fear
made her feel sick. There was a rattling
at the door behind her. There was a
whoop of laughter, and then the Cossack’s hands were on her arms, his face came
peering over her shoulder, and the blond beard dabbled with blood prickled
against her neck and face.
‘Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t!’ she implored, turning away her
head. Then all at once she began
violently crying.
‘Tears!’ exclaimed Coleman in rapture, ‘genuine tears!’ He bent eagerly forward to kiss them away, to
drink them as they fell. ‘What an
intoxication,’ he said, looking up to the ceiling like a chicken that has taken
a sip of water; he smacked his lips.
Sobbing uncontrollably, Rosie had never in all her life felt
less like a great, fastidious lady.
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 Myra.’ Gumbril
pulled up a chair to the sofa and sat there like a doctor at his patient’s
bedside. ‘But before and after what?’ he
asked, almost professionally.
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 Paris first,’ said Gumbril. ‘After that, I don’t know. I shall go wherever I think people will buy
pneumatic trousers. I’m travelling on
business.’
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 Victoria,
feeling thankful to get out of England.’
‘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 Indian Ocean. Given a total of sixteen arms, how many
permutations and combinations of caresses?
And in the middle of each bunch of arms a mouth like the beak of a
macaw.
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 Regent Street and
Piccadilly run to as much as three or four pounds a square foot. Meanwhile, all the beauty imagined by Nash
has departed, and chaos and barbarism once more reign supreme, even in Regent
Street. The ghost of Gumbril Senior
stalked across the room.
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.” … Darlington Echo. “Mr
Gumbril’s first cousin is St Francis Xavier, his second cousin is the Earl of
Rochester, his third cousin is the Man of Feeling, his fourth cousin is David
Hume.” … Court Journal.’ Gumbril was already tired of this joke. ‘When I consider how my light is spent,’ he
went on, ‘when I consider! … Herr Jesu, as Fraulein Nimmernein used to exclaim
at the critical moment. Consider, dear
cow, consider. This is not the time of
year for grass to grow. Consider, dear
cow, consider, consider.’ He got up from
his chair and tiptoed across the room to the writing-table. An Indian dagger lay next to the
blotting-pad; Mrs Viveash used it as a paperknife. Gumbril picked it up, executed several passes
with it. ‘Thumb on the blade,’ he said,
‘and strike upwards. On guard. Lunge.
To the hilt it penetrates.
Poniard at the tip’ – he ran the blade between his fingers – ‘caress by
the time it reaches the hilt.
Z-zip.’ He put down the knife
and, stopping for a moment to make a grimace at himself in the mirror over the
mantelpiece, he went back to his chair.
At seven o’clock Mrs Viveash woke up. She shook her head to feel if the pain were
still rolling about loose inside her skull.
‘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 London to the other.
Every time they passed through Piccadilly Circus Mrs Viveash leant out
of the window to look at the sky signs dancing their unceasing St Vitus’ dance
above the monument to the Earl of Shaftesbury.
‘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 Myra. The pile of scribbled sheets grew higher and higher. Towards evening he made an end; he had
written all that he wanted to write. He
ate the remains of yesterday’s loaf of bread and drank some water; for he
realized suddenly that he had been fasting the whole day. Then he composed himself to think; he
stretched himself out on the brink of the well and looked down into the eyeless
darkness.
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 Myra’s portrait
were now a single black silhouette against the window. Near and far were fused, become one and
continuous in the darkness, became a part of the darkness. Outside the window the pale twilight grew more
sombre. The children shouted shrilly,
playing their games under the green gas lamps.
The mirthless, ferocious laughter of young girls mocked and invited. Lypiatt stretched out his hand and fingered
the pistol.
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.
Myra’s voice he recognized at once; the other, he supposed, was
Gumbril’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 Piccadilly Circus.
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 Green Park remained solitary and remote under the
moon. ‘Wasted on us,’ said Gumbril, as
they passed. ‘One should be happily in
love to enjoy a summer night under the trees.’
He wondered where Emily could be now.
They sat in silence; the cab drove on.
Mr Mercaptan, it seemed, had left London. His housekeeper had a long story to
tell. A regular Bolshevik had come
yesterday, pushing in. And she had heard
him shouting at Mr Mercaptan in his own room.
And then, luckily, a lady had come and the Bolshevik had gone away
again. And this morning Mr Mercaptan had
decided, quite sudden like, to go away for two or three days. And it wouldn’t surprise her at all if it had
something to do with that horrible Bolshevik fellow. Though of course Master Paster hadn’t said
anything about it. Still, as she’d known
him when he was so high and seen him grow up like, she thought she could say
she knew him well enough to guess why he did things. It was only brutally that they contrived to
tear themselves away.
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 Piccadilly Circus again?’ she asked. ‘I should like to see the lights again. They give one temporarily the illusion of
being cheerful.’
‘No, no,’ said Gumbril, ‘we are going straight to Victoria.’
‘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 Bloxam Gardens. Even if James did
live in his books all the time … Anything in the world.
‘This time,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘we simply must go through
Piccadilly Circus.’
‘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 Edgware Road.
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 Edgware Road. What stories we shall be able to tell our
children!’
‘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 Niagara. And having
made these instruments very efficient, I use them in holding converse with
other beings having a mind. I let my
telepathetic faculty lie idle, preferring to employ an elaborate and cumbrous
arrangement of symbols in order to make my thought known to you through your
senses. In certain individuals, however,
the faculty is naturally so well-developed – like the musical, or the
mathematical, or the chess-playing faculties in other people – that they cannot
help entering into direct communication with other minds, whether they want to
or not. If we knew a good method of
educating and drawing out the latent faculty, most of us could make ourselves
moderately efficient telepaths; just as most of us can make ourselves into
moderate musicians, chess players and mathematicians. There would also be a few, no doubt, who
could never communicate directly. Just
as there are a few who cannot recognize “Rule Britannia” or Bach’s Concerto in
D minor for two violins, and a few who cannot comprehend the nature of an algebraical
symbol. Look at the general development
of the mathematical and musical faculties only within the last two hundred
years. By the twenty-first century, I
believe, we shall all be telepaths.
Meanwhile, these delightful birds have forestalled us. Not having the wit to invent a language or an
expressive pantomime, they contrive to communicate such simple thoughts as they
have, directly and instantaneously. They
all go to sleep at once, wake at once, say the same thing at once; they turn
all at once when they’re flying. Without
a leader, without a word of command, they do everything together, in complete
union. Sitting here in the evenings, I
sometimes fancy I can feel their thoughts striking against my own. It has happened to me once or twice: that I
have known a second before it actually happened, that the birds were going to
wake up and begin their half-minute of chatter in the dark. Wait! Hush.’
Gumbril Senior threw back his head, passed his hand over his mouth, as
though by commanding silence on himself he could command it on the whole
world. ‘I believe they’re going to wake
now. I feel it.’
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 Myra your model of London.
She’d adore it – except that it has no electric skysigns.’
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.
‘Golgotha Hospital, Southwark,’ said Gumbril to the driver and
followed her into the cab.
‘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.
CHAPTER XXII
SHEARWATER
sat on his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingly like a man in a nightmare. The pedals were geared to a little wheel
under the saddle and the rim of the wheel rubbed, as it revolved, against a
brake, carefully adjusted to make the work of the pedaller hard, but not
impossibly hard. From a pipe which came
up through the floor issued a little jet of water which played on the brake and
kept it cool. But no jet of water played
on Shearwater. It was his business to
get hot. He did get hot.
From time to time his dog-faced young friend, Lancing, came
and looked through the window of the experimenting chamber to see how he was
getting on. Inside that little wooden
house, which might have reminded Lancing, if he had had a literary turn of
mind, of the Box in which Gulliver left Brobdingnag, the scenes of intimate
life were the same every time he looked in.
Shearwater was always at his post on the saddle of the nightmare
bicycle, pedalling, pedalling. The water
trickled over the brake. And Shearwater
sweated. Great drops of sweat came
oozing out from under his hair, ran down over his forehead, hung beaded on his
eyebrows, ran into his eyes, down his nose, along his cheeks, fell like
raindrops. His thick bullneck was wet;
his whole naked body, his arms and legs streamed and shone. The sweat poured off him and was caught as it
rained down in a waterproof sheet, to trickle down its sloping folds into a
large glass receptacle which stood under a hole in the centre of the sheet at
the focal point where all its slopes converged.
The automatically controlled heating apparatus in the basement kept the
temperature in the box high and steady.
Peering through the damp-dimmed panes of the window, Lancing noticed
with satisfaction that the mercury stood unchangingly at twenty-seven point
five Centigrade. The ventilators at the side and top of the box were open;
Shearwater had air enough. Another time,
Lancing reflected, they’d make the box airtight and see the effect of a little
carbon dioxide poisoning on the top of excessive sweating. It might be very interesting, but today they
were concerned with sweating only. After
seeing that the thermometer was steady, that the ventilators were properly
open, the water was still trickling over the brake, Lancing would tap at the
window. And Shearwater, who kept his
eyes fixed straight before him, as he pedalled slowly and unremittingly along
his nightmare road, would turn his head at the sound.
‘All right?’ Lancing’s lips moved and his eyebrows went up
inquiringly.
Shearwater would nod his big, round head, and the sweatdrops,
suspended on his eyebrows and his moustache, would fall like little liquid
fruits shaken suddenly by the wind.
‘Good,’ and Lancing would go back to his thick German book
under the reading-lamp at the other end of the laboratory.
Constant as the thermometer Shearwater pedalled steadily and
slowly on. With a few brief halts for
food and rest, he had been pedalling ever since lunchtime. At eleven he would go to bed on a shakedown
in the laboratory and at nine tomorrow morning he would re-enter the box and
start pedalling again. He would go on
all tomorrow and the day after; and after that, as long as he could stand
it. One, two, three, four. Pedal, pedal, pedal … He must have travelled
the equivalent of sixty or seventy miles this afternoon. He would be getting on for Swindon. He would be nearly at Portsmouth. He would be past Cambridge, past Oxford. He would be nearly at Harwich, pedalling
through the green and golden valleys where Constable used to paint. He would be at Winchester by the bright
stream. He would have ridden through the
beechwoods of Arundel out into the sea …
In any case he was far away, he was escaping. And Mrs Viveash followed, walking swayingly
along on feet that seemed to tread between two abysses, at her leisure. Pedal, pedal.
The hydrogen ion concentration in the blood … Formidably, calmly, her
eyes regarded. The lids cut off an arc of
those pale circles. When she smiled, it
was a crucifixion. The coils of her hair
were copper serpents. Her small gestures
loosened enormous fragments of the universe and at the faint dying sound of her
voice they had fallen in ruins about him.
His world was no longer safe, it had ceased to stand on its foundations. Mrs Viveash walked among his ruins and did
not even notice them. He must build up
again. Pedal, pedal. He was not merely escaping; he was working a
building machine. It must be built with
proportion; with proportion, the old man had said. The old man appeared in the middle of the
nightmare road in front of him, clutching his beard. Proportion, proportion. There were first a lot of dirty rocks lying
about; then there was St Paul’s. These
bits of his life had to be built up proportionably.
There was work. And
there was talk about work and ideas. And
there were men who could talk about work and ideas. But so far as he had been concerned that was
about all they could do. He would have
to find out what else they did; it was interesting. And he would have to find out what other men
did; men who couldn’t talk about work and not much about ideas. They had as good kidneys as anyone else.
And then there were women.
On the nightmare road he remained stationary. The pedals went round and round under his
driving feet; the sweat ran off him. He
was escaping, and yet he was also drawing nearer. He would have to draw nearer. ‘Woman, what have I to do with you?’ Not enough; too much.
Not enough – he was building her in, a great pillar next to
the pillar of work.
Too much – he was escaping.
If he had not caged himself here in this hot box, he would have run out
after her, to throw himself – all in fragments, all dissipated and useless – in
front of her. And she wanted none of
him. But perhaps it would be worse,
perhaps it would be far, far worse if she did.
The old man stood in the road before him, clutching his beard,
crying out, ‘Proportion, proportion.’ He
trod and trod at his building machine, working up the pieces of his life,
steadily, unremittingly working them into a proportionable whole, into a dome
that should hang, light, spacious and high, as though by a miracle, on the
empty air. He trod and trod, escaping,
mile after mile into fatigue, into wisdom.
He was at Dover now, pedalling across the Channel. He was crossing a dividing gulf and there
would be safety on the other side; the cliffs of Dover were already behind
him. He turned his head as though to
look back at them; the drops of sweat were shaken from his eyebrows, from the
shaggy fringes of his moustache. He
turned his head from the blank wooden wall in front of him over his
shoulder. A face was looking through the
observation window behind him – a woman’s face.
It was the face of Mrs Viveash.
Shearwater uttered a cry and at once turned back again. He redoubled his pedalling. One, two, three, four – furiously he rushed
along the nightmare road. She was
haunting him now in hallunincations. She
was pursuing and she was gaining on him.
Will, wisdom, resolution and understanding were of no avail, then? But there was always fatigue. The sweat poured down his face, streamed down
the indented runnel of his spine, along the seam at the meeting-place of the
ribs. His loincloth was wringing wet. The drops pattered continuously on the
waterproof sheet. His calves and the
muscles of his thighs ached with pedalling.
One, two, three, four – he trod round a hundred times with either
foot. After that he ventured to turn his
head once more. He was relieved, and at
the same time he was disappointed, to see that there was now no face at the
window. He had exorcised the
hallucination. He settled down to a more
leisurely pedalling.
In the annexe of the laboratory the animals devoted to the
service of physiology were woken by the sudden opening of the door, the sudden
irruption of light. The albino
guinea-pigs peered through the meshes of their hutch and their red eyes were
like the rear-lights of bicycles. The
pregnant she-rabbits lolloped out and shook their ears and pointed their
tremulous noises towards the door. The
cock into which Shearwater had engrafted an ovary came out, not knowing whether
to crow or cluck.
‘When he’s with hens,’ Lancing explained to his visitors, ‘he
thinks he’s a cock. When he’s with a
cock, he’s convinced he’s a pullet.’
The rats who were being fed on milk from a London diary came
tumbling from their nest with an anxious hungry squeaking. They were getting thinner and thinner every
day; in a few days they would be dead.
But the old rat, whose diet was Grade A milk from the country, hardly
took the trouble to move. He was as fat
and sleek as a brown furry fruit, ripe to bursting. No skim and chalky water, no dried dung and
tubercle bacilli for him. He was in
clover. Next week, however, the fates
were plotting to give him diabetes artificially.
In their glass pagoda the little black axolotls crawled, the
heraldry of Mexico, among a scanty herbage.
The beetles, who had had their heads cut off and replaced by the heads
of other beetles, darted uncertainly about, some obeying their heads, some
their genital organs. A fifteen-year-old
monkey, rejuvenated by the Steinach process, was discovered by the light of
Lancing’s electric torch, shaking the bars that separated him from the
green-furred, bald-rumped, bearded young beauty in the next cage. He was gnashing his teeth with thwarted
passion.
Lancing expounded to the visitors all the secrets. The vast, unbelievable, fantastic world
opened out as he spoke. There were
tropics, there were cold seas busy with living beings, there were forests full
of horrible trees, silence and darkness.
There were ferments and infinitesimal poisons floating in the air. There were leviathans suckling their young,
there were flies and worms, there were men, living in cities, thinking, knowing
good and evil. And all were changing
continuously, moment by moment, and each remained all the time itself by virtue
of some unimaginable enchantment. They
were all alive. And on the other side of
the courtyard beyond the shed in which the animals slept or uneasily stirred,
in the huge hospital that went up sheer like a windowed cliff into the air, men
and women were ceasing to be themselves, or were struggling to remain
themselves. They were dying, they were
struggling to live. The other windows
looked on to the river. The lights of
London Bridge were on the right, of Blackfriars to the left. On the opposite shore, St Paul’s floated up
as though self-supported in the moonlight.
Like time the river flowed, silent and black. Gumbril and Mrs Viveash leaned their elbows
on the sill and looked out. Like time
the river flowed, staunchlessly, as though from a wound in the world’s
side. For a long time they were
silent. They looked out, without
speaking, across the flow of time, at the stars, at the human symbol hanging
miraculously in the moonlight. Lancing
had gone back to his German book; he had no time to waste looking out of
windows.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Gumbril at last, meditatively.
‘Tomorrow,’ Mrs Viveash interrupted him, ‘will be as awful as
today.’ She breathed it like a truth
from beyond the grave prematurely revealed, expiringly from her deathbed
within.
‘Come, come,’ protested Gumbril.
In his hot box Shearwater sweated and pedalled. He was across the Channel now; he felt
himself safe. Still he trod on; he would
be at Amiens by midnight if he went on at this rate. He was escaping, he had escaped. He was building up his strong light dome of
life. Proportion, cried the old man,
proportion! And it hung there,
proportioned and beautiful in the dark, confused horror of his desires, solid
and strong and durable among his broken thoughts. Time flowed darkly past.
‘And now,’ said Mrs Viveash, straightening herself up, and
giving herself a little shake, ‘now we’ll drive to Hampstead and have a look at
Piers Cotton.’
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