Lypiatt had a habit, which some of his friends found rather trying—and
not only friends, for Lypiatt was ready to let the merest acquaintances,
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 Soho restaurant because it was, notoriously, so
‘artistic,’ looked at one another significantly and nodded; they were
getting their money’s worth, this time. And Lypiatt, with a fine air of
rapt unconsciousness, went on with his recitation.
“Look down on Mexico, Conquistador”—that was the refrain.
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, Conquistador!
There on the valley’s broad green floor,
There lies the lake; the jewelled cities gleam;
Chalco and Tlacopan
Awaiting the coming Man.
Look down on Mexico, Conquistador,
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 Burgundy and he
felt good-humoured, obstinate and a little bellicose.
“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,
nineteen twenty-two.”
“But why?” Lypiatt repeated, with exasperation.
“Because it’s altogether _too_ late in the day,” declared precious Mr.
Mercaptan, rushing up to his emphasis with flutes and roaring, like a
true Conquistador, to fall back, however, at the end of the sentence
rather ignominiously into a breathless confusion. He was a sleek,
comfortable young man with smooth brown hair parted in the centre and
conducted in a pair of flowing curves across the temples, to be looped
in damp curls behind his ears. His face ought to have been rather more
exquisite, rather more refinedly _dix-huitième_ than it actually was. It
had a rather gross, snouty look, which was sadly out of harmony with Mr.
Mercaptan’s inimitably graceful style. For Mr. Mercaptan had a style and
used it, delightfully, in his middle articles for the literary weeklies.
His most precious work, however, was that little volume of essays, prose
poems, vignettes and paradoxes, in which he had so brilliantly
illustrated his favourite theme—the pettiness, the simian limitations,
the insignificance and the absurd pretentiousness of _Homo_ soi-disant
_Sapiens_. Those who met Mr. Mercaptan personally often came away with
the feeling that perhaps, after all, he was right in judging so severely
of humanity.
“_Too_ late in the day,” he repeated. “Times have changed. _Sunt lacrymæ
rerum, nos et mutamur in illis._” He laughed his own applause.
“_Quot homines, tot disputandum est_,” said Gumbril, taking another sip
of his Beaune Supérieure. At the moment, he was all for Mercaptan.
“But _why_ is it too late?” Lypiatt insisted.
Mr. Mercaptan made a delicate gesture. “_Ça se sent, mon cher ami_,” he
said, “_ça ne s’explique pas._” Satan, it is said, carries hell in his
heart; so it was with Mr. Mercaptan—wherever he was, it was Paris.
“Dreams in nineteen twenty-two....” He shrugged his shoulders.
“After you’ve accepted the war, swallowed the Russian famine,” said
Gumbril. “Dreams!”
“They belonged to the _Rostand_ epoch,” said Mr. Mercaptan, with a
little titter. “_Le Rève_—ah!”
Lypiatt dropped his knife and fork with a clatter and leaned forward,
eager for battle. “Now I have you,” he said, “now I have you on the hip.
You’ve given yourselves away. You’ve given away the secret of your
spiritual poverty, your weakness and pettiness and impotence....”
“Impotence? You malign me, sir,” said Gumbril.
Shearwater ponderously stirred. He had been silent all this 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 brown moustache his jaw moved slowly,
ruminatively, with a sideways motion, like a cow’s. He nudged Gumbril
with his elbow. “Ass,” he said, “be quiet.”
Lypiatt went on torrentially. “You’re afraid of ideals, that’s what it
is. You daren’t admit to having dreams. Oh, I call them dreams,” he
added parenthetically. “I don’t mind being thought a fool and
old-fashioned. The word’s shorter and more English. Besides, it rhymes
with gleams. Ha, ha!” And Lypiatt laughed his loud Titan’s laugh, the
laugh of cynicism which seems to belie, but which, for those who have
understanding, reveals the high, positive spirit within. “Ideals—they’re
not sufficiently genteel for you civilized young men. You’ve quite
outgrown that sort of thing. No dream, no religion, no morality.”
“I glory in the name of earwig,” said Gumbril. He was pleased with that
little invention. It was felicitous; it was well chosen. “One’s an
earwig in sheer self-protection,” he explained.
But Mr. Mercaptan refused to accept the name of earwig at any price.
“_What_ there is to be ashamed of in being civilized, I _really_ don’t
know,” he said, in a voice that was now the bull’s, now the piping
robin’s. “No, if I glory in anything, it’s in my little rococo boudoir,
and the conversations across the polished mahogany, and the delicate,
lascivious, _witty_ little flirtations on ample sofas inhabited by the
soul of Crebillon Fils. We needn’t _all_ be Russians, I hope. These
revolting Dostoievskys.” Mr. Mercaptan spoke with a profound feeling.
“Nor all Utopians. Homo _au naturel_——” Mr. Mercaptan applied his thumb
and forefinger to his, alas! too snout-like nose, “_ça pue_. And as for
Homo à la H. G. Wells—_ça ne pue pas assez_. What I glory in is the
civilized, middle way between stink and asepsis. Give me a little musk,
a little intoxicating feminine exhalation, the bouquet of old wine and
strawberries, a lavender bag under every pillow and pot-pourri 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
wider 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 Terribiltà?_” he asked; and, taking off his
preposterous bowler hat, he bowed profoundly to Lypiatt. “How I
recognize my Buonarotti!” 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 in 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 hear some one
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 never 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—not 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
little prod in the stomach. “_Ça marche—les tripes_? Hein?” He turned
back to Shearwater. “Not even those?” he asked.
“Never,” said Shearwater. “I have more serious things to think about
than newspapers.”
“And what serious thing, 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 ferrule 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 Buonarotti 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 runions, while I myself
actually eat them—_sautés_. _Sautés_, mark my words.”
Laying his hat and stick on the floor beside him, he sat down at the end
of the table, between Lypiatt and Shearwater.
“Two believers,” he said, laying his hand for a moment on Lypiatt’s arm,
“and three black-hearted unbelievers—confronted. Eh, Buonarotti? 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 a 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;
Buonarotti 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 sole of his
feet were like the sole of a calf’s foot.’ But the viscera, you must
tell us something about the viscera. Mustn’t he, Buonarotti? And where
are my _rognons sautés_?” he shouted at the waiter.
“You revolt me,” said Lypiatt.
“Not mortually, I ’ope?” Coleman turned with solicitude to his
neighbour; then shook his head. “Mortually I fear. Kiss me ’Ardy, and I
die happy.” He blew a kiss into the air. “But why is the physiologue so
slow? Up, pachyderm, up! Answer. You hold the key to everything. The
key, I tell you, the key. I remember, when I used to hang about the
biological laboratories at school, eviscerating frogs—crucified with
pins, they were, belly upwards, like little green Christs—I remember
once, when I was sitting there, quietly poring over the entrails, in
came the laboratory boy and said to the stinks usher: ‘Please, sir, may
I have the key of the Absolute?’ And, would you believe it, that usher
calmly put his hand in his trouser pocket and fished out a small Yale
key and gave it him without a word. What a gesture! The key of the
Absolute. But it was only the absolute alcohol the urchin wanted—to
pickle some loathsome fœtus in, I suppose. God rot his soul in peace!
And now, Castor Fiber, out with your key. Tell us about the Archetypal
Man, tell us about the primordial Adam. Tell us all 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 any one 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 to-night! 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. _La compagne de mes nuits blanches et de mes jours plutôt
sales._ In a word, Zoe. _Qui ne comprend pas le français, qui me déteste
avec une passion égale à la mienne, et qui mangera, ma foi, des rognons
pour faire honneur au physiologue._”
“Have some Burgundy?” Gumbril proffered the bottle.
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? Newton and Boehme and Michelangelo—what
are they doing but expressing, in different ways, different aspects of
the same thing?”
“Alberti, I beg you,” said Gumbril. “I assure you he was the better
architect.”
“_Fi donc!_” said Mr. Mercaptan. “San Carlo alle Quatro 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, _barbaridad,
barbaridad_!” 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! Bloody 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 Buonarotti 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 it 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.