unconcealed satisfaction; the conversation had evidently gone exactly
as he had intended it to go. He had made his phrase, and, repeating it
lovingly--"A discovery about _Discoveries_"--he smiled benignly at me,
enjoying my look of mystification--an expression which, I confess, I
had purposely exaggerated in order to give him pleasure. For Emberlin,
in many ways so childish, took an especial delight in puzzling and
nonplussing his acquaintances; and these small triumphs, these little
"scores" off people afforded him some of his keenest pleasures. I
always indulged his weakness when I could, for it was worth while
being on Emberlin's good books. To be allowed to listen to his
post-prandial conversation was a privilege indeed. Not only was he
himself a consummately good talker, but he had also the power of
stimulating others to talk well. He was like some subtle wine,
intoxicating just to the Meredithian level of tipsiness. In his
company you would find yourself lifted to the sphere of nimble and
mercurial conceptions; you would suddenly realize that some miracle
had occurred, that you were living no longer in a dull world of
jumbled things but somewhere above the hotch-potch in a glassily
perfect universe of ideas, where all was informed, consistent,
symmetrical. And it was Emberlin who, godlike, had the power of
creating this new and real world. He built it out of words, this
crystal Eden, where no belly-going snake, devourer of quotidian dirt,
might ever enter and disturb its harmonies. Since I first knew
Emberlin I have come to have a greatly enhanced respect for magic and
all the formules of its liturgy. If by words Emberlin can create a new
world for me, can make my spirit slough off completely the domination
of the old, why should not he or I or anyone, having found the
suitable phrases, exert by means of them an influence more vulgarly
miraculous upon the world of mere things? Indeed, when I compare
Emberlin and the common or garden black magician of commerce, it seems
to me that Emberlin is the greater thaumaturge. But let that pass; I
am straying from my purpose, which was to give some description of the
man who so confidentially whispered to me that he had made a discovery
about _Discoveries_.
In the best sense of the word, then, Emberlin was academic. For us who
knew him his rooms were an oasis of aloofness planted secretly in the
heart of the desert of London. He exhaled an atmosphere that combined
the fantastic speculativeness of the undergraduate with the more
mellowed oddity of incredibly wise and antique dons. He was immensely
erudite, but in a wholly unencyclopædic way--a mine of irrelevant
information, as his enemies said of him. He wrote a certain amount,
but, like Mallarmé, avoided publication, deeming it akin to "the
offence of exhibitionism." Once, however, in the folly of youth, some
dozen years ago, he had published a volume of verses. He spent a good
deal of time now in assiduously collecting copies of his book and
burning them. There can be but very few left in the world now. My
friend Cope had the fortune to pick one up the other day--a little
blue book, which he showed me very secretly. I am at a loss to
understand why Emberlin wishes to stamp out all trace of it. There is
nothing to be ashamed of in the book; some of the verses, indeed, are,
in their young ecstatic fashion, good. But they are certainly
conceived in a style that is unlike that of his present poems. Perhaps
it is that which makes him so implacable against them. What he writes
now for very private manuscript circulation is curious stuff. I
confess I prefer the earlier work; I do not like the stony, hard-edged
quality of this sort of thing--the only one I can remember of his
later productions. It is a sonnet on a porcelain figure of a woman,
dug up at Cnossus:
"Her eyes of bright unwinking glaze
All imperturbable do not
Even make pretences to regard
The jutting absence of her stays
Where many a Syrian gallipot
Excites desire with spilth of nard.
The bistred rims above the fard
Of cheeks as red as bergamot
Attest that no shamefaced delays
Will clog fulfilment nor retard
Full payment of the Cyprian's praise
Down to the last remorseful jot.
Hail priestess of we know not what
Strange cult of Mycenean days!"
Regrettably, I cannot remember any of Emberlin's French poems. His
peculiar muse expresses herself better, I think, in that language than
in her native tongue.
Such is Emberlin; such, I should rather say, _was_ he, for, as I
propose to show, he is not now the man that he was when he whispered
so confidentially to me, as I entered the room, that he had made a
discovery about _Discoveries_.
I waited patiently till he had finished his little game of
mystification and, when the moment seemed ripe, I asked him to explain
himself. Emberlin was ready to open out.
"Well," he began, "these are the facts--a tedious introduction, I
fear, but necessary. Years ago, when I was first reading Ben Jonson's
_Discoveries_, that queer jotting of his, 'Eupompus gave splendour to
Art by Numbers,' tickled my curiosity. You yourself must have been
struck by the phrase, everybody must have noticed it; and everybody
must have noticed too that no commentator has a word to say on the
subject. That is the way of commentators--the obvious points fulsomely
explained and discussed, the hard passages, about which one might want
to know something passed over in the silence of sheer ignorance.
'Eupompus gave splendour to Art by Numbers'--the absurd phrase stuck
in my head. At one time it positively haunted me. I used to chant it
in my bath, set to music as an anthem. It went like this, so far as I
remember"--and he burst into song: "'Eupompus, Eu-u-pompus gave
sple-e-e-endour . . .'" and so on, through all the repetitions, the
dragged-out rises and falls of a parodied anthem.
"I sing you this," he said when he had finished, "just to show you
what a hold that dreadful sentence took upon my mind. For eight years,
off and on, its senselessness has besieged me. I have looked up
Eupompus in all the obvious books of reference, of course. He is there
all right--Alexandrian artist, eternized by some wretched little
author in some even wretcheder little anecdote, which at the moment I
entirely forget; it had nothing, at any rate, to do with the
embellishment of art by numbers. Long ago I gave up the search as
hopeless; Eupompus remained for me a shadowy figure of mystery, author
of some nameless outrage, bestower of some forgotten benefit upon the
art that he practised. His history seemed wrapt in an impenetrable
darkness. And then yesterday I discovered all about him and his art
and his numbers. A chance discovery, than which few things have given
me a greater pleasure.
"I happened upon it, as I say, yesterday when I was glancing through a
volume of Zuylerius. Not, of course, the Zuylerius one knows," he
added quickly, "otherwise one would have had the heart out of
Eupompus' secret years ago."
"Of course," I repeated, "not the familiar Zuylerius."
"Exactly," said Emberlin, taking seriously my flippancy, "not the
familiar John Zuylerius, Junior, but the elder Henricus Zuylerius, a
much less--though perhaps undeservedly so--renowned figure than his
son. But this is not the time to discuss their respective merits. At
any rate, I discovered in a volume of critical dialogues by the elder
Zuylerius, the reference, to which, without doubt, Jonson was
referring in his note. (It was of course a mere jotting, never meant
to be printed, but which Jonson's literary executors pitched into the
book with all the rest of the available posthumous materials.)
'Eupompus gave splendour to Art by Numbers'--Zuylerius gives a very
circumstantial account of the process. He must, I suppose, have found
the sources for it in some writer now lost to us."
Emberlin paused a moment to muse. The loss of the work of any ancient
writer gave him the keenest sorrow. I rather believe he had written a
version of the unrecovered books of Petronius. Some day I hope I shall
be permitted to see what conception Emberlin has of the _Satyricon_ as
a whole. He would, I am sure, do Petronius justice--almost too much,
perhaps.
"What was the story of Eupompus?" I asked. "I am all curiosity to
know."
Emberlin heaved a sigh and went on.
"Zuylerius' narrative," he said, "is very bald, but on the whole
lucid; and I think it gives one the main points of the story. I will
give it you in my own words; that is preferable to reading his Dutch
Latin. Eupompus, then, was one of the most fashionable
portrait-painters of Alexandria. His clientele was large, his business
immensely profitable. For a half-length in oils the great courtesans
would pay him a month's earnings. He would paint likenesses of the
merchant princes in exchange for the costliest of their outlandish
treasures. Coal-black potentates would come a thousand miles out of
Ethiopia to have a miniature limned on some specially choice panel of
ivory; and for payment there would be camel-loads of gold and spices.
Fame, riches, and honour came to him while he was yet young; an
unparalleled career seemed to lie before him. And then, quite
suddenly, he gave it all up--refused to paint another portrait. The
doors of his studio were closed. It was in vain that clients, however
rich, however distinguished, demanded admission; the slaves had their
order; Eupompus would see no one but his own intimates."
Emberlin made a pause in his narrative.
"What was Eupompus doing?" I asked.
"He was, of course," said Emberlin, "occupied in giving splendour to
Art by Numbers. And this, as far as I can gather from Zuylerius, is
how it all happened. He just suddenly fell in love with numbers--head
over ears, amorous of pure counting. Number seemed to him to be the
sole reality, the only thing about which the mind of man could be
certain. To count was the one thing worth doing, because it was the
one thing you could be sure of doing right. Thus, art, that it may
have any value at all, must ally itself with reality--must, that is,
possess a numerical foundation. He carried the idea into practice by
painting the first picture in his new style. It was a gigantic canvas,
covering several hundred square feet--I have no doubt that Eupompus
could have told you the exact area to an inch--and upon it was
represented an illimitable ocean covered, as far as the eye could
reach in every direction, with a multitude of black swans. There were
thirty-three thousand of these black swans, each, even though it might
be but a speck on the horizon, distinctly limned. In the middle of the
ocean was an island, upon which stood a more or less human figure
having three eyes, three arms and legs, three breasts and three
navels. In the leaden sky three suns were dimly expiring. There was
nothing more in the picture; Zuylerius describes it exactly. Eupompus
spent nine months of hard work in painting it. The privileged few who
were allowed to see it pronounced it, finished, a masterpiece. They
gathered round Eupompus in a little school, calling themselves the
Philarithmics. They would sit for hours in front of his great work,
contemplating the swans and counting them; according to the
Philarithmics, to count and to contemplate were the same thing.
"Eupompus' next picture, representing an orchard of identical trees
set in quincunxes, was regarded with less favour by the connoisseurs.
His studies of crowds were, however, more highly esteemed; in these
were portrayed masses of people arranged in groups that exactly
imitated the number and position of the stars making up various of the
more famous constellations. And then there was his famous picture of
the amphitheatre, which created a furore among the Philarithmics.
Zuylerius again gives us a detailed description. Tier upon tier of
seats are seen, all occupied by strange Cyclopean figures. Each tier
accommodates more people than the tier below, and the number rises in
a complicated but regular progression. All the figures seated in the
amphitheatre possess but a single eye, enormous and luminous, planted
in the middle of the forehead: and all these thousands of single eyes
are fixed, in a terrible and menacing scrutiny, upon a dwarf-like
creature cowering pitiably in the arena. . . . He alone of the
multitude possesses two eyes.
"I would give anything to see that picture," Emberlin added, after a
pause. "The colouring, you know; Zuylerius gives no hint, but I feel
somehow certain that the dominant tone must have been a fierce
brick-red--a red granite amphitheatre filled with a red-robed
assembly, sharply defined against an implacable blue sky."
"Their eyes would be green," I suggested.
Emberlin closed his eyes to visualize the scene and then nodded a slow
and rather dubious assent.
"Up to this point," Emberlin resumed at length, "Zuylerius' account is
very clear. But his descriptions of the later philarithmic art become
extremely obscure; I doubt whether he understood in the least what it
was all about. I will give you such meaning as I manage to extract
from his chaos. Eupompus seems to have grown tired of painting merely
numbers of objects. He wanted now to represent Number itself. And then
he conceived the plan of rendering visible the fundamental ideas of
life through the medium of those purely numerical terms into which,
according to him, they must ultimately resolve themselves. Zuylerius
speaks vaguely of a picture of Eros, which seems to have consisted of
a series of interlacing planes. Eupompus' fancy seems next to have
been taken by various of the Socratic dialogues upon the nature of
general ideas, and he made a series of illustrations for them in the
same arithmo-geometric style. Finally there is Zuylerius' wild
description of the last picture that Eupompus ever painted. I can make
very little of it. The subject of the work, at least, is clearly
stated; it was a representation of Pure Number, or God and the
Universe, or whatever you like to call that pleasingly inane
conception of totality. It was a picture of the cosmos seen, I take
it, through a rather Neoplatonic _camera obscura--_very clear and in
small. Zuylerius suggests a design of planes radiating out from a
single point of light. I dare say something of the kind came in.
Actually, I have no doubt, the work was a very adequate rendering in
visible form of the conception of the one and the many, with all the
intermediate stages of enlightenment between matter and the _Fons
Deitatis_. However, it's no use speculating what the picture may have
been going to look like. Poor old Eupompus went mad before he had
completely finished it and, after he had dispatched two of the
admiring Philarithmics with a hammer, he flung himself out of the
window and broke his neck. That was the end of him, and that was how
he gave splendour, regrettably transient, to Art by Numbers."
Emberlin stopped. We brooded over our pipes in silence; poor old
Eupompus!
* * * * *
That was four months ago, and to-day Emberlin is a confirmed and
apparently irreclaimable Philarithmic, a quite whole-hearted
Eupompian.
It was always Emberlin's way to take up the ideas that he finds in
books and to put them into practice. He was once, for example, a
working alchemist, and attained to considerable proficiency in the
Great Art. He studied mnemonics under Bruno and Raymond Lully, and
constructed for himself a model of the latter's syllogizing machine,
in hopes of gaining that universal knowledge which the Enlightened
Doctor guaranteed to its user. This time it is Eupompianism, and the
thing has taken hold of him. I have held up to him all the hideous
warnings that I can find in history. But it is no use.
There is the pitiable spectacle of Dr. Johnson under the tyranny of an
Eupompian ritual, counting the posts and the paving-stones of Fleet
Street. He himself knew best how nearly a madman he was.
And then I count as Eupompians all gamblers, all calculating boys, all
interpreters of the prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse; then too
the Elberfeld horses, most complete of all Eupompians.
And here was Emberlin joining himself to this sect, degrading himself
to the level of counting beasts and irrational children and men, more
or less insane. Dr. Johnson was at least born with a strain of the
Eupompian aberration in him; Emberlin is busily and consciously
acquiring it. My expostulations, the expostulations of all his
friends, are as yet unavailing. It is in vain that I tell Emberlin
that counting is the easiest thing in the world to do, that when I am
utterly exhausted, my brain, for lack of ability to perform any other
work, just counts and reckons, like a machine, like an Elberfeld
horse. It all falls on deaf ears; Emberlin merely smiles and shows me
some new numerical joke that he has discovered. Emberlin can never
enter a tiled bathroom now without counting how many courses of tiles
there are from floor to ceiling. He regards it as an interesting fact
that there are twenty-six rows of tiles in his bathroom and thirty-two
in mine, while all the public lavatories in Holborn have the same
number. He knows now how many paces it is from any one point in London
to any other. I have given up going for walks with him. I am always
made so distressingly conscious by his preoccupied look, that he is
counting his steps.
His evenings, too, have become profoundly melancholy; the
conversation, however well it may begin, always comes round to the
same nauseating subject. We can never escape numbers; Eupompus haunts
us. It is not as if we were mathematicians and could discuss problems
of any interest or value. No, none of us are mathematicians, least of
all Emberlin. Emberlin likes talking about such points as the
numerical significance of the Trinity, the immense importance of its
being three in one, not forgetting the even greater importance of its
being one in three. He likes giving us statistics about the speed of
light or the rate of growth in fingernails. He loves to speculate on
the nature of odd and even numbers. And he seems to be unconscious how
much he has changed for the worse. He is happy in an exclusively
absorbing interest. It is as though some mental leprosy had fallen
upon his intelligence.
In another year or so, I tell Emberlin, he may almost be able to
compete with the calculating horses on their own ground. He will have
lost all traces of his reason, but he will be able to extract cube
roots in his head. It occurs to me that the reason why Eupompus killed
himself was not that he was mad; on the contrary, it was because he
was, temporarily, sane. He had been mad for years, and then suddenly
the idiot's self-complacency was lit up by a flash of sanity. By its
momentary light he saw into what gulfs of imbecility he had plunged.
He saw and understood, and the full horror, the lamentable absurdity
of the situation made him desperate. He vindicated Eupompus against
Eupompianism, humanity against the Philarithmics. It gives me the
greatest pleasure to think that he disposed of two of that hideous
crew before he died himself.
HAPPY FAMILIES
THE scene is a conservatory. Luxuriant tropical plants are seen
looming through a greenish aquarium twilight, punctuated here and
there by the surprising pink of several Chinese lanterns hanging from
the roof or on the branches of trees, while a warm yellow radiance
streams out from the ball-room by a door on the left of the scene.
Through the glass of the conservatory, at the back of the stage, one
perceives a black-and-white landscape under the moon--expanses of
snow, lined and dotted with coal-black hedges and trees. Outside is
frost and death: but within the conservatory all is palpitating and
steaming with tropical life and heat. Enormous fantastic plants
encumber it; trees, creepers that writhe with serpentine life, orchids
of every kind. Everywhere dense vegetation; horrible flowers that look
like bottled spiders, like suppurating wounds; flowers with eyes and
tongues, with moving, sensitive tentacles, with breasts and teeth and
spotted skins.
The strains of a waltz float in through the ball-room door, and to
that slow, soft music there enter, in parallel processions, the two
families which are respectively Mr. Aston J. Tyrrell and Miss Topsy
Garrick.
The doyen of the Tyrrell family is a young and perhaps too cultured
literary man with rather long, dark brown hair, a face well cut and
sensitive, if a trifle weak about the lower jaw, and a voice whose
exquisite modulations could only be the product of education at one of
the two Great Universities. We will call him plain Aston. Miss Topsy,
the head of the Garrick family, is a young woman of not quite twenty,
with sleek, yellow hair hanging, like a page's, short and thick about
her ears; boyish, too, in her slenderness and length of leg--boyish,
but feminine and attractive to the last degree. Miss Topsy paints
charmingly, sings in a small, pure voice that twists the heart and
makes the bowels yearn in the hearing of it, is well educated, and has
read, or at least heard of, most of the best books in three languages,
knows something, too, of economics and the doctrines of Freud.
They enter arm in arm, fresh from the dance, trailing behind them with
their disengaged hands two absurd ventriloquist's dummies of
themselves. They sit down on a bench placed in the middle of the stage
under a kind of arbour festooned with fabulous flowers. The other
members of the two families lurk in the tropical twilight of the
background.
Aston advances his dummy and makes it speak, moving its mouth and
limbs appropriately by means of the secret levers which his hand
controls.
ASTON'S DUMMY.
What a perfect floor it is to-night!
TOPSY'S DUMMY.
Yes, it's like ice, isn't it? And such a good band.
ASTON'S DUMMY.
Oh yes, a very good band.
TOPSY'S DUMMY.
They play at dinner-time at the Necropole, you know.
ASTON'S DUMMY.
Really! (_A long, uncomfortable silence._)
(_From under a lofty twangum tree emerges the figure of CAIN
WASHINGTON TYRRELL, ASTON'S negro brother--for the TYRRELLS, I regret
to say, have a lick of the tar-brush in them and CAIN is a Mendelian
throwback to the pure Jamaican type. CAIN is stout and his black face
shines with grease. The whites of his eyes are like enamel, his smile
is chryselephantine. He is dressed in faultless evening dress and a
ribbon of seals tinkles on his stomach. He walks with legs wide apart,
the upper part of his body thrown back and his belly projecting, as
though he were supporting the weight of an Aristophanic actor's
costume. He struts up and down in front of the couple on the seat,
grinning and slapping himself on the waistcoat._)
CAIN.
What hair, nyum nyum! and the nape of her neck; and her body--how
slender! and what lovely movements, nyum nyum! (_Approaching ASTON and
speaking into his ear._) Eh? eh? eh?
ASTON.
Go away, you pig. Go away. (_He holds up his dummy as a shield: CAIN
retires discomfited._)
ASTON'S DUMMY.
Have you read any amusing novels lately?
TOPSY.
(_Speaking over the head of her dummy._) No; I never read novels. They
are mostly so frightful, aren't they?
ASTON.
(_Enthusiastically._) How splendid! Neither do I. I only write them
sometimes, that's all. (_They abandon their dummies, which fall limply
into one another's arms and collapse on to the floor with an expiring
sigh._)
TOPSY.
You write them? I didn't know. . . .
ASTON.
Oh, I'd very much rather you didn't know. I shouldn't like you ever to
read one of them. They're all awful: still, they keep the pot boiling,
you know. But tell me, what do you read?
TOPSY.
Mostly history, and philosophy, and a little criticism and psychology,
and lots of poetry.
ASTON.
My dear young lady! how wonderful, how altogether unexpectedly
splendid. (_CAIN emerges with the third brother, SIR JASPER, who is a
paler, thinner, more sinister and aristocratic ASTON._)
CAIN.
Nyum nyum nyum. . . .
SIR JASPER.
What a perfect sentence that was of yours, Aston: quite Henry
Jamesian! "My dear young lady"--as though you were forty years her
senior; and the rare old-worldliness of that "altogether unexpectedly
splendid"! Admirable. I don't remember your ever employing quite
exactly this opening gambit before: but of course there were things
very like it. (_To CAIN._) What a nasty spectacle you are, Cain,
gnashing your teeth like that!
CAIN.
Nyum nyum nyum.