Gumbril had spent the afternoon at Bloxam Gardens. His chin was still
sore from the spirit gum with which he had attached to it the symbol of
the Complete Man; he was feeling also a little fatigued. Rosie had been
delighted to see him; St. Jerome had gone on solemnly communicating all
the time.
His father had gone out to dine, and Gumbril had eaten his rump steak
and drunk his bottle of stout alone. He was sitting now in front of the
open French windows which led from his father’s workroom on to the
balcony, with a block on his knee and a fountain-pen in his hand,
composing advertisements for the Patent Small-Clothes. Outside, in the
plane trees of the square, the birds had gone through their nightly
performance. But Gumbril had paid no attention to them. He sat there,
smoking, sometimes writing a word or two—sunk in the quagmire of his own
drowsy and comfortable body. The flawless weather of the day had
darkened into a blue May evening. It was agreeable merely to be alive.
He sketched out two or three advertisements in the grand idealistic
transatlantic style. He imagined one in particular with a picture of
Nelson at the head of the page and ‘England expects ...’ printed large
beneath it. “England ... Duty ... these are solemn words.” That was how
it would begin. “These are solemn words, and we use them solemnly as men
who realize what Duty is, and who do all that in them lies to perform it
as Englishmen should. The Manufacturer’s is a sacred trust. The guide
and ruler of the modern world, he has, like the Monarch of other days,
responsibilities towards his people; he has a Duty to fulfil. He rules,
but he must also serve. We realize our responsibilities, we take them
seriously. Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes have been brought into the
world that they may serve. Our Duty towards you is a Duty of Service.
Our proud boast is that we perform it. But besides his Duty towards
Others, every man has a duty towards Himself. What is that Duty? It is
to keep himself in the highest possible state of physical and spiritual
fitness. Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes protect the lumbar ganglia....”
After that it would be plain medical and mystical sailing.
As soon as he got to the ganglia, Gumbril stopped writing. He put down
the block, sheathed his pen, and abandoned himself to the pleasures of
pure idleness. He sat, he smoked his cigar. In the basement, two floors
down, the cook and the house-parlourmaid were reading—one the _Daily
Mirror_, the other the _Daily Sketch_. For them, Her Majesty the Queen
spoke kindly words to crippled female orphans; the jockeys tumbled at
the jumps; Cupid was busy in Society, and the murderers who had
disembowelled their mistresses were at large. Above him was the city of
models, was a bedroom, a servant’s bedroom, an attic of tanks and
ancient dirt, the roof and, after that, two or three hundred light-years
away, a star of the fourth magnitude. On the other side of the
party-wall on his right, a teeming family of Jews led their dark,
compact, Jewish lives with a prodigious intensity. At this moment they
were all passionately quarrelling. Beyond the wall on the left lived the
young journalist and his wife. To-night it was he who had cooked the
supper. The young wife lay on the sofa, feeling horribly sick; she was
going to have a baby, there could be no doubt about it now. They had
meant not to have one; it was horrible. And, outside, the birds were
sleeping in the trees, the invading children from the slum tumbled and
squealed. Ships meanwhile were walloping across the Atlantic freighted
with more cigars. Rosie at this moment was probably mending Shearwater’s
socks. Gumbril sat and smoked, and the universe arranged itself in a
pattern about him, like iron filings round a magnet.
The door opened, and the house-parlourmaid intruded Shearwater upon his
lazy felicity, abruptly, in her unceremonious old way, and hurried back
to the _Daily Sketch_.
“Shearwater! This is very agreeable,” said Gumbril. “Come and sit down.”
He pointed to a chair.
Clumsily, filling the space that two ordinary men would occupy,
Shearwater came zigzagging and lurching across the room, bumped against
the work-table and the sofa as he passed, and finally sat down in the
indicated chair.
It suddenly occurred to Gumbril that this was Rosie’s husband: he had
not thought of that before. Could it be in the marital capacity that he
presented himself so unexpectedly now? After this afternoon.... He had
come home; Rosie had confessed all.... Ah! but then she didn’t know who
he was. He smiled to himself at the thought. What a joke! Perhaps
Shearwater had come to complain to him of the unknown Complete Man—to
him! It was delightful. Anon—the author of all those ballads in the
_Oxford Book of English Verse_: the famous Italian painter—Ignoto.
Gumbril was quite disappointed when his visitor began to talk of other
themes than Rosie. Sunk in the quagmire of his own comfortable guts, he
felt good-humouredly obscene. The dramatic scabrousness of the situation
would have charmed him in his present mood. Good old Shearwater—but what
an ox of a man! If he, Gumbril, took the trouble to marry a wife, he
would at least take some interest in her.
Shearwater had begun to talk in general terms about life. What could he
be getting at, Gumbril wondered? What particulars were ambushed behind
these generalizations? There were silences. Shearwater looked, he
thought, very gloomy. Under his thick moustache the small, pouting,
babyish mouth did not smile. The candid eyes had a puzzled, tired
expression in them.
“People are queer,” he said after one of his silences. “Very queer. One
has no idea how queer they are.”
Gumbril laughed. “But I have a very clear idea of their queerness,” he
said. “Every one’s queer, and the ordinary, respectable, bourgeois
people are the queerest of the lot. How do they manage to live like
that? It’s astonishing. When I think of all my aunts and uncles....” He
shook his head.
“Perhaps it’s because I’m rather incurious,” said Shearwater. “One ought
to be curious, I think. I’ve come to feel lately that I’ve not been
curious enough about people.” The particulars began to peep, alive and
individual, out of the vagueness, like rabbits; Gumbril saw them in his
fancy, at the fringe of a wood.
“Quite,” he said encouragingly. “Quite.”
“I think too much of my work,” Shearwater went on, frowning. “Too much
physiology. There’s also psychology. People’s minds as well as their
bodies.... One shouldn’t be limited. Not too much, at any rate. People’s
minds....” He was silent for a moment. “I can imagine,” he went on at
last, as in the tone of one who puts a very hypothetical case, “I can
imagine one’s getting so much absorbed in somebody else’s psychology
that one could really think of nothing else.” The rabbits seemed ready
to come out into the open.
“That’s a process,” said Gumbril, with middle-aged jocularity, speaking
out of his private warm morass, “that’s commonly called falling in
love.”
There was another silence. Shearwater broke it to begin talking about
Mrs. Viveash. He had lunched with her three or four days running. He
wanted Gumbril to tell him what she was really like. “She seems to me a
very extraordinary woman,” he said.
“Like everybody else,” said Gumbril irritatingly. It amused him to see
the rabbits scampering about at last.
“I’ve never known a woman like that before.”
Gumbril laughed. “You’d say that of any woman you happened to be
interested in,” he said. “You’ve never known any women at all.” He knew
much more about Rosie, already, than Shearwater did, or probably ever
would.
Shearwater meditated. He thought of Mrs. Viveash, her cool, pale,
critical eyes; her laughter, faint and mocking; her words that pierced
into the mind, goading it into thinking unprecedented thoughts.
“She interests me,” he repeated. “I want you to tell me what she’s
really like.” He emphasized the word really, as though there must, in
the nature of things, be a vast difference between the apparent and the
real Mrs. Viveash.
Most lovers, Gumbril reflected, picture to themselves, in their
mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see
every day. They are in love with somebody else—their own invention. And
sometimes there is a secret reality; and sometimes reality and
appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to
cause a shock. “I don’t know,” he said. “How should I know? You must
find out for yourself.”
“But you knew her, you know her well,” said Shearwater, almost with
anxiety in his voice.
“Not so well as all that.”
Shearwater sighed profoundly, like a whale in the night. He felt
restless, incapable of concentrating. His mind was full of a horrible
confusion. A violent eruptive bubbling up from below had shaken its calm
clarity to pieces. All this absurd business of passion—he had always
thought it nonsense, unnecessary. With a little strength of will one
could shut it out. Women—only for half an hour out of the twenty-four.
But she had laughed, and his quiet, his security had vanished. “I can
imagine,” he had said to her yesterday, “I can imagine myself giving up
everything, work and all, to go running round after you.” “And do you
suppose I should enjoy that?” Mrs. Viveash had asked. “It would be
ridiculous,” he said, “it would be almost shameful.” And she had thanked
him for the compliment. “And at the same time,” he went on, “I feel that
it might be worth it. It might be the only thing.” His mind was
confused, full of new thoughts. “It’s difficult,” he said after a pause,
“arranging things. Very difficult. I thought I had arranged them so
well....”
“I never arrange anything,” said Gumbril, very much the practical
philosopher. “I take things as they come.” And as he spoke the words,
suddenly he became rather disgusted with himself. He shook himself; he
climbed up out of his own morass. “It would be better, perhaps, if I
arranged things more,” he added.
“Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s,” said
Shearwater, as though to himself; “and to God, and to sex, and to
work.... There must be a working arrangement.” He sighed again.
“Everything in proportion. In proportion,” he repeated, as though the
word were magical and had power. “In proportion.”
“Who’s talking about proportion?” They turned round. In the doorway
Gumbril Senior was standing, smoothing his ruffled hair and tugging at
his beard. His eyes twinkled cheerfully behind his spectacles. “Poaching
on my architectural ground?” he said.
“This is Shearwater,” Gumbril Junior put in, and explained who he was.
The old gentleman sat down. “Proportion,” he said—“I was just thinking
about it, now, as I was walking back. You can’t help thinking about it
in these London streets, where it doesn’t exist. You can’t help pining
for it. There are some streets ... oh, my God!” And Gumbril Senior threw
up his hands in horror. “It’s like listening to a symphony of cats to
walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way.
And the one street that was really like a symphony by Mozart—how busily
and gleefully they’re pulling it down now! Another year and there’ll be
nothing left of Regent Street. There’ll only be a jumble of huge,
hideous buildings at three-quarters of a million apiece. A concert of
Brobdingnagian cats. Order has been turned into a disgusting chaos. We
need no barbarians from outside; they’re on the premises, all the time.”
The old man paused and pulled his beard meditatively. Gumbril Junior sat
in silence, smoking; and in silence Shearwater revolved within the walls
of his great round head his agonizing thoughts of Mrs. Viveash.
“It has always struck me as very curious,” Gumbril Senior went on, “that
people are so little affected by the vile and discordant architecture
around them. Suppose, now, that all these brass bands of unemployed
ex-soldiers that blow so mournfully at all the street corners were
suddenly to play nothing but a series of senseless and devilish
discords—why, the first policeman would move them on, and the second
would put them under arrest, and the passers-by would try to lynch them
on their way to the police station. There would be a real spontaneous
outcry of indignation. But when at these same street corners the
contractors run up enormous palaces of steel and stone that are every
bit as stupid and ignoble and inharmonious as ten brass bandsmen each
playing a different tune in a different key, there is no outcry. The
police don’t arrest the architect; the passing pedestrians don’t throw
stones at the workmen. They don’t notice that anything’s wrong. It’s
odd,” said Gumbril Senior. “It’s very odd.”
“Very odd,” Gumbril Junior echoed.
“The fact is, I suppose,” Gumbril Senior went on, smiling with a certain
air of personal triumph, “the fact is that architecture is a more
difficult and intellectual art than music. Music—that’s just a faculty
you’re born with, as you might be born with a snub nose. But the sense
of plastic beauty—though that’s, of course, also an inborn faculty—is
something that has to be developed and intellectually ripened. It’s an
affair of the mind; experience and thought have to draw it out. There
are infant prodigies in music; but there are no infant prodigies in
architecture.” Gumbril Senior chuckled with a real satisfaction. “A man
can be an excellent musician and a perfect imbecile. But a good
architect must also be a man of sense, a man who knows how to think and
to profit by experience. Now, as almost none of the people who pass
along the streets in London, or any other city of the world, do know how
to think or to profit by experience, it follows that they cannot
appreciate architecture. The innate faculty is strong enough in them to
make them dislike discord in music; but they haven’t the wits to develop
that other innate faculty—the sense of plastic beauty—which would enable
them to see and disapprove of the same barbarism in architecture. Come
with me,” Gumbril Senior added, getting up from his chair, “and I’ll
show you something that will illustrate what I’ve been saying. Something
you’ll enjoy, too. Nobody’s seen it yet,” he said mysteriously as he led
the way upstairs. “It’s only just finished—after months and years. It’ll
cause a stir when they see it—when I let them see it, if ever I do, that
is. The dirty devils!” Gumbril Senior added good-humouredly.
On the landing of the next floor he paused, felt in his pocket, took out
a key and unlocked the door of what should have been the second best
bedroom. Gumbril Junior wondered, without very much curiosity, what the
new toy would turn out to be. Shearwater wondered only how he could
possess Mrs. Viveash.
“Come on,” called Gumbril Senior from inside the room. He turned on the
light. They entered.
It was a big room; but almost the whole of the floor was covered by an
enormous model, twenty feet long by ten or twelve wide, of a complete
city traversed from end to end by a winding river and dominated at its
central point by a great dome. Gumbril Junior looked at it with surprise
and pleasure. Even Shearwater was roused from his bitter ruminations of
desire to look at the charming city spread out at his feet.
“It’s exquisite,” said Gumbril Junior. “What is it? The capital of
Utopia, or what?”
Delighted, Gumbril Senior laughed. “Don’t you see something rather
familiar in the dome?” he asked.
“Well, I had thought ...” Gumbril Junior hesitated, afraid that he might
be going to say something stupid. He bent down to look more closely at
the dome. “I had thought it looked rather like St. Paul’s—and now I see
that it is St. Paul’s.”
“Quite right,” said his father. “And this is London.”
“I wish it were,” Gumbril Junior laughed.
“It’s London as it might have been if they’d allowed Wren to carry out
his plans of rebuilding after the Great Fire.”
“And why didn’t they allow him to?” Shearwater asked.
“Chiefly,” said Gumbril Senior, “because, as I’ve said before, they
didn’t know how to think or profit by experience. Wren offered them open
spaces and broad streets; he offered them sunlight and air and
cleanliness; he offered them beauty, order and grandeur. He offered to
build for the imagination and the ambitious spirit of man, so that even
the most bestial, vaguely and remotely, as they walked those streets,
might feel that they were of the same race—or very nearly—as
Michelangelo; that they too might feel themselves, in spirit at least,
magnificent, strong and free. He offered them all these things; he drew
a plan for them, walking in peril among the still smouldering ruins. But
they preferred to re-erect the old intricate squalor; they preferred the
mediæval darkness and crookedness and beastly irregular quaintness; they
preferred holes and crannies and winding tunnels; they preferred foul
smells, sunless, stagnant air, phthisis and rickets; they preferred
ugliness and pettiness and dirt; they preferred the wretched human
scale, the scale of the sickly body, not of the mind. Miserable fools!
But I suppose,” the old man continued, shaking his head, “we can’t blame
them.” His hair had blown loose from its insecure anchorage; with a
gesture of resignation he brushed it back into place. “We can’t blame
them. We should have done the same in the circumstances—undoubtedly.
People offer us reason and beauty; but we will have none of them,
because they don’t happen to square with the notions that were grafted
into our souls in youth, that have grown there and become a part of us.
_Experientia docet_—nothing falser, so far as most of us are concerned,
was ever said. You, no doubt, my dear Theodore, have often in the past
made a fool of yourself with women....”
Gumbril Junior made an embarrassed gesture that half denied, half
admitted the soft impeachment. Shearwater turned away, painfully
reminded of what, for a moment, he had half forgotten. Gumbril Senior
swept on.
“Will that prevent you from making as great a fool of yourself again
to-morrow? It will not. It will most assuredly not.” Gumbril Senior
shook his head. “The inconveniences and horrors of the pox are perfectly
well known to every one; but still the disease flourishes and spreads.
Several million people were killed in a recent war and half the world
ruined; but we all busily go on in courses that make another event of
the same sort inevitable. _Experientia docet? Experientia_ doesn’t. And
that is why we must not be too hard on these honest citizens of London
who, fully appreciating the inconveniences of darkness, disorder and
dirt, manfully resisted any attempt to alter conditions which they had
been taught from childhood onwards to consider as necessary, right and
belonging inevitably to the order of things. We must not be too hard. We
are doing something even worse ourselves. Knowing by a century of
experience how beautiful, how graceful, how soothing to the mind is an
ordered piece of town-planning, we pull down almost the only specimen of
it we possess and put up in its place a chaos of Portland stone that is
an offence against civilization. But let us forget about these old
citizens and the labyrinth of ugliness and inconvenience which we have
inherited from them, and which is called London. Let us forget the
contemporaries who are making it still worse than it was. Come for a
walk with me through this ideal city. Look.”
And Gumbril Senior began expounding it to them.
In the middle, there, of that great elliptical Piazza at the eastern end
of the new City, stands, four-square, the Royal Exchange. Pierced only
with small dark windows, and built of rough ashlars of the silvery
Portland stone, the ground floor serves as a massy foundation for the
huge pilasters that slide up, between base and capital, past three tiers
of pedimented windows. Upon them rest the cornice, the attic and the
balustrade, and on every pier of the balustrade a statue holds up its
symbol against the sky. Four great portals, rich with allegory, admit to
the courtyard with its double tier of coupled columns, its cloister and
its gallery. The statue of Charles the Martyr rides triumphantly in the
midst, and within the windows one guesses the great rooms, rich with
heavy garlands of plaster, panelled with carved wood.
Ten streets give on to the Piazza, and at either end of its ellipse the
water of sumptuous fountains ceaselessly blows aloft and falls.
Commerce, in that to the north of the Exchange, holds up her cornucopia,
and from the midst of its grapes and apples the master jet leaps up;
from the teats of all the ten Useful Arts, grouped with their symbols
about the central figure, there spouts a score of fine subsidiary
streams. The dolphins, the sea-horses and the Tritons sport in the basin
below. To the south, the ten principal cities of the Kingdom stand in a
family round the Mother London, who pours from her urn an inexhaustible
Thames.
Ranged round the Piazza are the Goldsmiths’ Hall, the Office of Excise,
the Mint, the Post Office. Their flanks are curved to the curve of the
ellipse. Between pilasters, their windows look out on to the Exchange,
and the sister statues on the balustrades beckon to one another across
the intervening space.
Two master roads of ninety feet from wall to wall run westwards from the
Exchange. New Gate ends the more northern vista with an Arch of Triumph,
whose three openings are deep, shadowy and solemn as the entries of
caverns. The Guildhall and the halls of the twelve City Companies in
their livery of rose-red brick, with their lacings of white stone at the
coigns and round the windows, lend to the street an air of domestic and
comfortable splendour. And every two or three hundred paces the line of
the houses is broken, and in the indentation of a square recess there
rises, conspicuous and insular, the fantastic tower of a parish church.
Spire out of dome; octagon on octagon diminishing upwards; cylinder on
cylinder; round lanterns, lanterns of many sides; towers with airy
pinnacles; clusters of pillars linked by incurving cornices, and above
them, four more clusters and above once more; square towers pierced with
pointed windows; spires uplifted on flying buttresses; spires bulbous at
the base—the multitude of them beckons, familiar and friendly, on the
sky. From the other shore, or sliding along the quiet river, you see
them all, you tell over their names; and the great dome swells up in the
midst overtopping them all.
The dome of St. Paul’s.
The other master street that goes westward from the Piazza of the
Exchange slants down towards it. The houses are of brick, plain-faced
and square, arcaded at the base, so that the shops stand back from the
street and the pedestrian walks dry-shod under the harmonious succession
of the vaultings. And there at the end of the street, at the base of a
triangular space formed by the coming together of this with another
master street that runs eastwards to Tower Hill, there stands the
Cathedral. To the north of it is the Deanery and under the arcades are
the booksellers’ shops.
From St. Paul’s the main road slopes down under the swaggering
Italianate arches of Ludgate, past the wide lime-planted boulevards that
run north and south within and without the city wall, to the edge of the
Fleet Ditch—widened now into a noble canal, on whose paved banks the
barges unload their freights of country stuff—leaps it on a single
flying arch to climb again to a round circus, a little to the east of
Temple Bar, from which, in a pair of diagonally superimposed crosses,
eight roads radiate: three northwards towards Holborn, three from the
opposite arc towards the river, one eastward to the City, and one past
Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the west. The piazza is all of brick and the
houses that compose it are continuous above the ground-floor level; for
the roads lead out under archways. To one who stands in the centre at
the foot of the obelisk that commemorates the victory over the Dutch, it
seems a smooth well of brickwork pierced by eight arched conduits at the
base and diversified above by the three tiers of plain, unornamented
windows.
Who shall describe all the fountains in the open places, all the statues
and monuments? In the circus north of London Bridge, where the four
roads come together, stands a pyramid of nymphs and Tritons—river
goddesses of Polyolbion, sea-gods of the island beaches—bathing in a
ceaseless tumble of white water. And here the city griffon spouts from
its beak, the royal lion from between its jaws. St. George at the foot
of the Cathedral rides down a dragon whose nostrils spout, not fire, but
the clear water of the New River. In front of the India House, four
elephants of black marble, endorsed with towers of white, blow through
their upturned trunks the copious symbol of Eastern wealth. In the
gardens of the Tower sits Charles the Second, enthroned among a troop of
Muses, Cardinal Virtues, Graces and Hours. The tower of the
Customs-House is a pharos. A great water-gate, the symbol of naval
triumph, spans the Fleet at its junction with the Thames. The river is
embanked from Blackfriars to the Tower, and at every twenty paces a
grave stone angel looks out from the piers of the balustrade across the
water....
Gumbril Senior expounded his city with passion. He pointed to the model
on the ground, he lifted his arms and turned up his eyes to suggest the
size and splendour of his edifices. His hair blew wispily loose and fell
into his eyes, and had to be brushed impatiently back again. He pulled
at his beard; his spectacles flashed, as though they were living eyes.
Looking at him, Gumbril Junior could imagine that he saw before him the
passionate and gesticulating silhouette of one of those old shepherds
who stand at the base of Piranesi’s ruins demonstrating obscurely the
prodigious grandeur and the abjection of the human race.