Aldous Huxley�s
ANTIC HAY
___________
����������������������������������������������������������� My
men like satyrs grazing on the lawns
����������������������������������������������������������� Shall
with their goat-feet dance the Antic Hay
��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� MARLOWE
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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 pr�cis.��� And the pr�cis 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 Ecclesi�,
����������������������������� �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 H�l�ne
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
�t�aul�, like the rest of us, Mr Gumbril, it�ll be: �Pass Friend and Long Live
the Proletariat.�� Long live T�aul.�
������ �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-huiti�me 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 Sup�rieure.� At the moment, he was
all for Mercaptan.
������ �But why
is it too late?� Lypiatt insisted.
������ Mr Mercaptan made a delicate
gesture.� ��a se sent, mon cher ami,� he said, ��a 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 R�ve � 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, ��a pue� And as for Homo � la
H.G. Wells � �a 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 Terribilit�?� 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.� ��a
������ �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 � saut�s.�
Saut�s, 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 saut�s?� 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 f�tus 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 plut�t sales.� In a word, Zoe.� Qui no
comprend pas le fran�ais, qui me d�teste avec une passion �gale � 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 sch�ne
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 esp�rer?�
������ 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
�me bien-n�e,� 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 Abb� 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-huiti�me
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 l�, je dois
����������������������������� �� Vous averter, sans trop de honte,
����������������������������� �� Que je n��gale 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 �dipus 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 �sthetic
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 t�te-�-t�te,
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 Gr�newald 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 Barr�s 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 Fran�ois 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 R�camier.� 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 fianc�e 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 C�sar the things
which are C�sar�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 medi�val
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 enchantmen