Mr. Barbecue-Smith was gone. The motor had whirled him away to the
station; a faint smell of burning oil commemorated his recent departure.
A considerable detachment had come into the courtyard to speed him on
his way; and now they were walking back, round the side of the house,
towards the terrace and the garden. They walked in silence; nobody had
yet ventured to comment on the departed guest.
“Well?” said Anne at last, turning with raised inquiring eyebrows to
Denis.
“Well?” It was time for someone to begin.
Denis declined the invitation; he passed it on to Mr Scogan. “Well?” he
said.
Mr. Scogan did not respond; he only repeated the question, “Well?”
It was left for Henry Wimbush to make a pronouncement. “A very agreeable
adjunct to the week-end,” he said. His tone was obituary.
They had descended, without paying much attention where they were going,
the steep yew-walk that went down, under the flank of the terrace, to
the pool. The house towered above them, immensely tall, with the whole
height of the built-up terrace added to its own seventy feet of
brick façade. The perpendicular lines of the three towers soared up,
uninterrupted, enhancing the impression of height until it became
overwhelming. They paused at the edge of the pool to look back.
“The man who built this house knew his business,” said Denis. “He was an
architect.”
“Was he?” said Henry Wimbush reflectively. “I doubt it. The builder of
this house was Sir Ferdinando Lapith, who flourished during the reign of
Elizabeth. He inherited the estate from his father, to whom it had been
granted at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries; for Crome was
originally a cloister of monks and this swimming-pool their fish-pond.
Sir Ferdinando was not content merely to adapt the old monastic
buildings to his own purposes; but using them as a stone quarry for his
barns and byres and outhouses, he built for himself a grand new house of
brick--the house you see now.”
He waved his hand in the direction of the house and was silent, severe,
imposing, almost menacing, Crome loomed down on them.
“The great thing about Crome,” said Mr. Scogan, seizing the opportunity
to speak, “is the fact that it’s so unmistakably and aggressively a work
of art. It makes no compromise with nature, but affronts it and
rebels against it. It has no likeness to Shelley’s tower, in the
‘Epipsychidion,’ which, if I remember rightly--“
“‘Seems not now a work of human art,
But as it were titanic, in the heart
Of earth having assumed its form and grown
Out of the mountain, from the living stone,
Lifting itself in caverns light and high.’
“No, no, there isn’t any nonsense of that sort about Crome. That the
hovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown out of
the earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, and
suitable. But the house of an intelligent, civilised, and sophisticated
man should never seem to have sprouted from the clods. It should rather
be an expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish
life. Since the days of William Morris that’s a fact which we in England
have been unable to comprehend. Civilised and sophisticated men have
solemnly played at being peasants. Hence quaintness, arts and crafts,
cottage architecture, and all the rest of it. In the suburbs of our
cities you may see, reduplicated in endless rows, studiedly quaint
imitations and adaptations of the village hovel. Poverty, ignorance,
and a limited range of materials produced the hovel, which possesses
undoubtedly, in suitable surroundings, its own ‘as it were titanic’
charm. We now employ our wealth, our technical knowledge, our rich
variety of materials for the purpose of building millions of imitation
hovels in totally unsuitable surroundings. Could imbecility go further?”
Henry Wimbush took up the thread of his interrupted discourse. “All that
you say, my dear Scogan,” he began, “is certainly very just, very true.
But whether Sir Ferdinando shared your views about architecture or if,
indeed, he had any views about architecture at all, I very much doubt.
In building this house, Sir Ferdinando was, as a matter of fact,
preoccupied by only one thought--the proper placing of his privies.
Sanitation was the one great interest of his life. In 1573 he even
published, on this subject, a little book--now extremely scarce--called,
‘Certaine Priuy Counsels’ by ‘One of Her Maiestie’s Most Honourable
Priuy Counsels, F.L. Knight’, in which the whole matter is treated with
great learning and elegance. His guiding principle in arranging the
sanitation of a house was to secure that the greatest possible distance
should separate the privy from the sewage arrangements. Hence it
followed inevitably that the privies were to be placed at the top of the
house, being connected by vertical shafts with pits or channels in the
ground. It must not be thought that Sir Ferdinando was moved only by
material and merely sanitary considerations; for the placing of his
privies in an exalted position he had also certain excellent spiritual
reasons. For, he argues in the third chapter of his ‘Priuy Counsels’,
the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying them
we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe.
To counteract these degrading effects he advised that the privy should
be in every house the room nearest to heaven, that it should be well
provided with windows commanding an extensive and noble prospect,
and that the walls of the chamber should be lined with bookshelves
containing all the ripest products of human wisdom, such as the Proverbs
of Solomon, Boethius’s ‘Consolations of Philosophy’, the apophthegms
of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the ‘Enchiridion’ of Erasmus, and all
other works, ancient or modern, which testify to the nobility of the
human soul. In Crome he was able to put his theories into practice. At
the top of each of the three projecting towers he placed a privy. From
these a shaft went down the whole height of the house, that is to
say, more than seventy feet, through the cellars, and into a series of
conduits provided with flowing water tunnelled in the ground on a level
with the base of the raised terrace. These conduits emptied themselves
into the stream several hundred yards below the fish-pond. The total
depth of the shafts from the top of the towers to their subterranean
conduits was a hundred and two feet. The eighteenth century, with
its passion for modernisation, swept away these monuments of sanitary
ingenuity. Were it not for tradition and the explicit account of them
left by Sir Ferdinando, we should be unaware that these noble privies
had ever existed. We should even suppose that Sir Ferdinando built
his house after this strange and splendid model for merely aesthetic
reasons.”
The contemplation of the glories of the past always evoked in Henry
Wimbush a certain enthusiasm. Under the grey bowler his face worked
and glowed as he spoke. The thought of these vanished privies moved
him profoundly. He ceased to speak; the light gradually died out of his
face, and it became once more the replica of the grave, polite hat which
shaded it. There was a long silence; the same gently melancholy thoughts
seemed to possess the mind of each of them. Permanence, transience--Sir
Ferdinando and his privies were gone, Crome still stood. How brightly
the sun shone and how inevitable was death! The ways of God were
strange; the ways of man were stranger still...
“It does one’s heart good,” exclaimed Mr. Scogan at last, “to hear of
these fantastic English aristocrats. To have a theory about privies
and to build an immense and splendid house in order to put it into
practise--it’s magnificent, beautiful! I like to think of them all: the
eccentric milords rolling across Europe in ponderous carriages, bound
on extraordinary errands. One is going to Venice to buy La Bianchi’s
larynx; he won’t get it till she’s dead, of course, but no matter; he’s
prepared to wait; he has a collection, pickled in glass bottles, of
the throats of famous opera singers. And the instruments of renowned
virtuosi--he goes in for them too; he will try to bribe Paganini to part
with his little Guarnerio, but he has small hope of success. Paganini
won’t sell his fiddle; but perhaps he might sacrifice one of his
guitars. Others are bound on crusades--one to die miserably among the
savage Greeks, another, in his white top hat, to lead Italians against
their oppressors. Others have no business at all; they are just giving
their oddity a continental airing. At home they cultivate themselves at
leisure and with greater elaboration. Beckford builds towers, Portland
digs holes in the ground, Cavendish, the millionaire, lives in a stable,
eats nothing but mutton, and amuses himself--oh, solely for his private
delectation--by anticipating the electrical discoveries of half a
century. Glorious eccentrics! Every age is enlivened by their presence.
Some day, my dear Denis,” said Mr Scogan, turning a beady bright regard
in his direction--“some day you must become their biographer--‘The Lives
of Queer Men.’ What a subject! I should like to undertake it myself.”
Mr. Scogan paused, looked up once more at the towering house, then
murmured the word “Eccentricity,” two or three times.
“Eccentricity...It’s the justification of all aristocracies. It
justifies leisured classes and inherited wealth and privilege and
endowments and all the other injustices of that sort. If you’re to do
anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who
are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not
compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the
name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can
think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have
a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in
which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That’s
the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric
itself--often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages
eccentricity in others. The eccentricities of the artist and the
new-fangled thinker don’t inspire it with that fear, loathing, and
disgust which the burgesses instinctively feel towards them. It is a
sort of Red Indian Reservation planted in the midst of a vast horde of
Poor Whites--colonials at that. Within its boundaries wild men disport
themselves--often, it must be admitted, a little grossly, a little too
flamboyantly; and when kindred spirits are born outside the pale it
offers them some sort of refuge from the hatred which the Poor Whites,
en bons bourgeois, lavish on anything that is wild or out of the
ordinary. After the social revolution there will be no Reservations;
the Redskins will be drowned in the great sea of Poor Whites. What then?
Will they suffer you to go on writing villanelles, my good Denis? Will
you, unhappy Henry, be allowed to live in this house of the splendid
privies, to continue your quiet delving in the mines of futile
knowledge? Will Anne...”
“And you,” said Anne, interrupting him, “will you be allowed to go on
talking?”
“You may rest assured,” Mr. Scogan replied, “that I shall not. I shall
have some Honest Work to do.”