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 maisonnettes, 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 summer-time, 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 larger 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 his 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 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.
To-night, however, he was not working; for always on Sunday evenings his
old friend Porteous came to dine and talk. Breaking in unexpectedly at
midnight, Gumbril Junior found them sitting in front of the gas fire in
his father’s study.
“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, I 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 every one 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 patienter’ (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 pessimma 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, may I ask?”
“I mean to begin by making some money.”
Gumbril Senior put his hands on his knees, bent 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, “we 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 do 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 mediæval survivals in schools! Chapel, indeed!”
“It came,” Gumbril Junior went on, “like an apocalypse, suddenly, like a
divine inspiration. A grand and luminous idea came to me—the idea of
Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.”
“And what are Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes?”
“A boon to those whose occupation is sedentary”; Gumbril Junior had
already composed his prospectus and his first advertisements: “a comfort
to all travellers, civilization’s substitute for steatopygism,
indispensable to first-nighters, the concert-goers’ friend, the....”
“Lectulus Dei floridus,” intoned Mr. Porteous.
“Gazophylacium Ecclesiæ,
Cithara benesonans Dei,
Cymbalum jubilationis Christi,
Promptuarium mysteriorum fidei, ora pro nobis.
Your small-clothes sound to me very like one of my old litanies,
Theodore.”
“We want scientific descriptions, not litanies,” said Gumbril Senior.
“What _are_ Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes?”
“Scientifically, then,” said Gumbril Junior, “my Patent Small-Clothes
may be described as trousers with a pneumatic seat, inflateable 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 on 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 any one 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 gardens 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 to-night,” 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 any one 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 sky-scrapers, 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 village of Chatsworths clustering, at
one end of a long table, round the dome of a vaster and austerer St.
Peter’s. “Look at this one, for example.” He picked his way nimbly
across the room, seized the little electric reading-lamp that stood
between a railway station and a baptistery on the mantelpiece, and was
back again in an instant, trailing behind him a long flex that, as it
tautened out, twitched one of the crowning pinnacles off the top of a
sky-scraper near the fireplace. “Look,” he repeated, “look.” He switched
on the current, and moving the lamp back and forth, up and down in front
of the miniature palace. “See the beauty of the light and shade,” he
said. “There, underneath the great, ponderous cornice, isn’t that fine?
And look how splendidly the pilasters carry up the vertical lines. And
then the solidity of it, the size, the immense, impending bleakness of
it!” He threw up his arms, he turned his eyes upwards as though standing
overwhelmed at the foot of some huge precipitous façade. The lights and
shadows vacillated wildly through all the city of palaces and domes as
he brandished the lamp in ecstasy above his head.
“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 England. It’s meant for a place where there’s
some sun—where you do your best to keep the light out, instead of
letting it in, as you have to do here. Windows are the curse of
architecture in this country. Your walls have to be like sieves, all
holes, it’s heart-breaking. If you wanted me to build you this house,
you’d have to live in Barbados or somewhere like that.”
“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 this 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 cataclysm.
“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 the 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 Palladio, 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.”