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 empest
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 schöne Nacht, oh stille mein tumpty-tum. Te, tum, Te
tum.... Delicious Offenbach. Ah, if only we could have a third Empire!
Another comic Napoleon! That would make Paris look like Paris again.
Tiddy, tumpty-ti-tum.”
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
chauffeurs’ 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 any one 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 out 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, utterly
faintly and breakingly from a death-bed—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.
Myra laughed and took another bite at her bread and butter.... She laid
the back of her hand—for she was still holding the butt end of her
hard-boiled egg—on Lypiatt’s arm. The Titan, who had been looking at the
sky, seemed to be surprised to find her standing there. “You?” he said,
smiling and wrinkling up his forehead interrogatively.
“It’s to-morrow 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 espérer?_”
Mrs. Viveash laughed expiringly from her inward death-bed 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,” Myra went on, “to go to that place at
Hampton Court, where you have dinner on an island and dance....”
“What is there about islands,” put in Mercaptan, in a deliciously
whimsical parenthesis, “that makes them so peculiarly voluptuous?
Cythera, Monkey Island, Capri. _Je me demande._”
“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
death-bed Mrs. Viveash cried out in unaffected horror. Everything tasted
as though it has 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 Thames even in the champagne. They had not been able to
eat so much as a crust of bread. Hungry and thirsty, they had
re-embarked in their antique taxi, and here, at last, they were, at the
first outpost of civilization, eating for dear life.
“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. Myra’s caprices were becoming
more and more impossible. That Hampton Court business had been bad
enough; but when it came to eating in the street, in the middle of a lot
of filthy workmen—well, really, that was rather too much.
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,” Myra
called expiringly. Shearwater looked up; Mrs. Viveash regarded him
intently through pale, unwavering eyes, smiling as she looked that
queer, downward-turning smile which gave to her face, through its mask
of laughter, a peculiar expression of agony. “You don’t seem to take
much interest in us,” she repeated.
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 worth while.”
“And we’re not worth while?”
“Not to me personally,” replied Shearwater with candour. “The Great Wall
of China, the political situation in Italy, the habits of Trematodes—all
these are most interesting in themselves. But they aren’t interesting to
me; I don’t permit them to be. I haven’t the leisure.”
“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 _memento
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.
“_Memento 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
midnight. Let’s get out of this.” He laid his hand on her shoulder and
made as if to draw her away. “We’d better be going. Goodness knows
what’s happening behind us.” He indicated with a little movement of the
head the loiterers round the coffee-stall. “Some disturbance among the
_canaille_.”
Mrs. Viveash looked round. The cab-drivers and the other consumers of
midnight coffee had gathered in an interested circle, curious and
sympathetic, round the figure of a woman who was sitting, like a limp
bundle tied up in black cotton and mackintosh, on the stall-keeper’s
high stool, leaning wearily against the wall of the booth. A man stood
beside her drinking tea out of a thick white cup. Every one was talking
at once.
“Mayn’t the poor wretches talk?” asked Mrs. Viveash, turning back to
Bruin. “I never knew any one who had the lower classes on the brain as
much as you have.”
“I loathe them,” said Bruin. “I hate every one poor, or ill, or old.
Can’t abide them; they make me positively sick.”
“_Quelle âme bien-née_,” 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 Myra, bringing back the conversation to more
congenial themes, “hasn’t told us yet what he thinks of arms.”
“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 cartin’ 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 in India, in the war....”
“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 every
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 Abbé 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-huitième_ 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?’”
“_x_^2 – _y_^2,” 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,
bed bugs, tape worms, 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 a 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
peculiarities 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
Portsmouth, we thought we’d try to get one, even if it did mean walkin’
there.”
“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 Nineveh.
“There are two wretched people here,” and Gumbril told them
breathlessly, what he had overheard. It was terrible, terrible. “All the
way to Portsmouth and back again; on foot; without proper food; and the
woman’s with child.”
Coleman exploded with delight. “Gravid,” he kept repeating, “gravid,
gravid. The laws of gravidy, first formulated by Newton, now recodified
by the immortal Einstein. God said, Let Newstein be, and there was
light. And God said, Let there be Light; and there was darkness o’er the
face of the earth.” He roared with laughter.
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 death-bed 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 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, analysing 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 of 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 emotions
which, though the cause of them was different, were in themselves much
the same as the melancholy emotions which swelled windily up within him
to-night. He had been most horribly in love.
“What did 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 any
one who got involved in her decidedly uncomfortable.” After a day or
two’s continuous sweating, it suddenly occurred to him, one might
perhaps find sea-water 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
any one at all; but that was all one.) “How did it go? Ah, yes.” And he
recited, with suitable gestures:
“‘Puisque nous sommes là, je dois,
Vous avertir, sans trop de honte,
Que je n’égale 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 Edgware Road. He had suddenly
remembered Mr. Mercaptan, and the thought depressed him.