“Well,” said Gumbril, “here I am again.”
“Already?” Mrs. Viveash had been reduced, by the violence of her
headache, to coming home after her luncheon with Piers Cotton for a
rest. She had fed her hungry pain on Pyramidon and now she was lying
down on the Dufy-upholstered sofa at the foot of her full-length
portrait by Jacques-Emile Blanche. Her head was not much better, but she
was bored. When the maid had announced Gumbril, she had given word that
he was to be let in. “I’m very ill,” she went on expiringly. “Look at
me,” she pointed to herself, “and me again.” She waved her hand towards
the sizzling brilliance of the portrait. “Before and after. Like the
advertisements, you know. Every picture tells a story.” She laughed
faintly, then made a little grimace and, sucking in the breath between
her lips, she put her hand to her forehead.
“My poor Myra.” Gumbril pulled up a chair to the sofa and sat there like
a doctor at his patient’s bedside. “But before and after what?” he
asked, almost professionally.
Mrs. Viveash gave an all but imperceptible shrug. “I don’t know,” she
said.
“Not influenza, I hope?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Not love, by any chance?”
Mrs. Viveash did not venture another laugh; she contented herself with
smiling agonizingly.
“That would have been a just retribution,” Gumbril went on, “after what
you’ve done to me.”
“What have I done to you?” Mrs. Viveash asked, opening wide her
pale-blue eyes.
“Merely wrecked my existence.”
“But you’re being childish, Theodore. Say what you mean without these
grand, silly phrases.” The dying voice spoke with impatience.
“Well, what I mean,” said Gumbril, “is merely this. You prevented me
from going to see the only person I ever really wanted to see in my
life. And yesterday, when I tried to see her, she was gone. Vanished.
And here am I left in the vacuum.”
Mrs. Viveash shut her eyes. “We’re all in the vacuum,” she said. “You’ll
still have plenty of company, you know.” She was silent for a moment.
“Still, I’m sorry,” she added. “Why didn’t you tell me? And why didn’t
you just pay no attention to me and go all the same?”
“I didn’t tell you,” Gumbril answered, “because, then, I didn’t know.
And I didn’t go because I didn’t want to quarrel with you.”
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Viveash, and patted his hand, “But what are you
going to do about it now? Not quarrelling with me is only a rather
negative satisfaction, I’m afraid.”
“I propose to leave the country to-morrow morning,” said Gumbril.
“Ah, the classical remedy.... But not to shoot big game, I hope?” She
thought of Viveash among the Tikki-tikkis and the tsetses. He was a
charming creature; charming, but ... but what?
“Good heavens!” exclaimed Gumbril. “What do you take me for? Big game!”
He leaned back in his chair and began to laugh, heartily, for the first
time since he had returned from Robertsbridge, yesterday evening. He had
felt then as though he would never laugh again. “Do you see me in a pith
helmet, with an elephant gun?”
Mrs. Viveash put her hand to her forehead. “I see you, Theodore,” she
said, “but I try to think you would look quite normal; because of my
head.”
“I go to Paris first,” said Gumbril. “After that, I don’t know. I shall
go wherever I think people will buy pneumatic trousers. I’m travelling
on business.”
This time, in spite of her head, Mrs. Viveash laughed.
“I thought of giving myself a farewell banquet,” Gumbril went on. “We’ll
go round before dinner, if you’re feeling well enough, that is, and
collect a few friends. Then, in profoundest gloom, we’ll eat and drink.
And in the morning, unshaved, exhausted and filled with disgust, I shall
take the train from Victoria, feeling thankful to get out of England.”
“We’ll do it,” said Mrs. Viveash faintly and indomitably from the sofa
that was almost genuinely a death-bed. “And, meanwhile, we’ll have a
second brew of tea and you shall talk to me.”
The tannin was brought in. Gumbril settled down to talk and Mrs. Viveash
to listen—to listen and from time to time to dab her brows with
eau-de-Cologne, to take a sniff of hartshorn.
Gumbril talked. He talked of the marriage ceremonies of octopuses, of
the rites intricately consummated in the submarine green grottos of the
Indian Ocean. Given a total of sixteen arms, how many permutations and
combinations of caresses? And in the middle of each bunch of arms a
mouth like the beak of a macaw.
On the backside of the moon, his friend Umbilikoff, the mystic, used to
assure him, the souls of the dead in the form of little bladders—like so
much swelled sago—are piled up and piled up till they squash and squeeze
one another with an excruciating and ever-growing pressure. In the
exoteric world this squeezing on the moon’s backside is known,
erroneously, as hell. And as for the constellation, Scorpio—he was the
first of all constellations to have a proper sort of backbone. For by an
effort of the will he ingurgitated his external armour, he compressed
and rebuilt it within his body and so became the first vertebrate. This,
you may well believe, was a notable day in cosmic history.
The rents in these new buildings in Regent Street and Piccadilly run to
as much as three or four pounds a square foot. Meanwhile, all the beauty
imagined by Nash has departed, and chaos and barbarism once more reign
supreme, even in Regent Street. The ghost of Gumbril Senior stalked
across the room.
Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or
the man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes till ninety-five?
One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the
beef-eater are lived only in time. “I can tell you all about heroin,”
said Mrs. Viveash.
Lady Capricorn, he understood, was still keeping open bed. How Rubens
would have admired those silk cushions, those gigantic cabbage roses,
those round pink pearls of hers, vaster than those that Captain Nemo
discovered in the immemorial oyster! And the warm dry rustle of flesh
over flesh as she walks, moving first one leg, then advancing the other.
Talking of octopuses, the swim-bladders of deep-sea fishes are filled
with almost absolutely pure oxygen. _C’est la vie_—Gumbril shrugged his
shoulders.
In Alpine pastures the grasshoppers start their flight, whizzing like
clockwork grasshoppers. And these brown invisible ones reveal themselves
suddenly as they skim above the flowers—a streak of blue lightning, a
trailing curve of scarlet. Then the overwing shuts down over the
coloured wing below and they are once more invisible fiddlers rubbing
their thighs, like Lady Capricorn, at the foot of the towering flowers.
Forgers give patina to their mediæval ivories by lending them to stout
young Jewesses to wear for a few months hanging, like an amulet, between
their breasts.
In Italian cemeteries the family vaults are made of glass and iron, like
greenhouses.
Sir Henry Griddle has finally married the hog-faced gentlewoman.
Piero della Francesca’s fresco of the Resurrection at San Sepolcro is
the most beautiful picture in the world, and the hotel there is far from
bad. Scriabine = _le_ Tschaikovsky _de nos jours_. The dullest landscape
painter is Marchand. The best poet....
“You bore me,” said Mrs. Viveash.
“Must I talk of love, then?” asked Gumbril.
“It looks like it,” Mrs. Viveash answered, and closed her eyes.
Gumbril told the anecdote about Jo Peters, Connie Asticot and Jim Baum.
The anecdote of Lola Knopf and the Baroness Gnomon. Of Margherita
Radicofani, himself, and the Pastor Meyer. Of Lord Cavey and little Toby
Nobes. When he had finished these, he saw that Mrs. Viveash had gone to
sleep.
He was not flattered. But a little sleep would do her headache, he
reflected, a world of good. And knowing that if he ceased to speak, she
would probably be woken by the sudden blankness of the silence, he went
on quietly talking to himself.
“When I’m abroad this time,” he soliloquized, “I shall really begin
writing my autobiography. There’s nothing like a hotel bedroom to work
in.” He scratched his head thoughtfully and even picked his nose, which
was one of his bad habits, when he was alone. “People who know me,” he
went on, “will think that what I write about the governess cart and my
mother and the flowers and so on is written merely because I know in
here,” he scratched his head a little harder to show himself that he
referred to his brain, “that that’s the sort of thing one ought to write
about. They’ll think I’m a sort of dingy Romain Rolland, hopelessly
trying to pretend that I feel the emotions and have the great spiritual
experiences, which the really important people do feel and have. And
perhaps they’ll be right. Perhaps the Life of Gumbril will be as
manifestly an _ersatz_ as the Life of Beethoven. On the other hand, they
may be astonished to find that it’s the genuine article. We shall see.”
Gumbril nodded his head slowly, while he transferred two pennies from
his right-hand trouser pocket to his left-hand trouser pocket. He was
somewhat distressed to find that these coppers had been trespassing
among the silver. Silver was for the right-hand, copper for the left. It
was one of the laws which it was extremely unlucky to infringe. “I have
a premonition,” he went on, “that one of these days I may become a
saint. An unsuccessful flickering sort of saint, like a candle beginning
to go out. As for love—m’yes, m’yes. And as for the people I have met—I
shall point out that I have known most of the eminent men in Europe, and
that I have said of all of them what I said after my first love affair:
Is that all?”
“Did you really say that about your first love affair?” asked Mrs.
Viveash, who had woken up again.
“Didn’t you?”
“No. I said: This _is_ all—everything, the universe. In love, it’s
either all or nothing at all.” She shut her eyes and almost immediately
went to sleep again.
Gumbril continued his lullaby-soliloquy.
“‘This charming little book.’... _The Scotsman._ ‘This farrago of
obscenity, slander and false psychology.’... _Darlington Echo._ ‘Mr.
Gumbril’s first cousin is St. Francis Xavier, his second cousin is the
Earl of Rochester, his third cousin is the Man of Feeling, his fourth
cousin is David Hume.’... _Court Journal._” Gumbril was already tired of
this joke. “When I consider how my light is spent,” he went on, “when I
consider!... Herr Jesu, as Fraulein Nimmernein used to exclaim at the
critical moment. Consider, dear cow, consider. This is not the time of
year for grass to grow. Consider, dear cow, consider, consider.” He got
up from his chair and tiptoed across the room to the writing-table. An
Indian dagger lay next to the blotting-pad; Mrs. Viveash used it as a
paper-knife. Gumbril picked it up, executed several passes with it.
“Thumb on the blade,” he said, “and strike upwards. On guard. Lunge. To
the hilt it penetrates. Poniard at the tip”—he ran the blade between his
fingers—“caress by the time it reaches the hilt. Z—zip.” He put down the
knife and stopping for a moment to make a grimace at himself in the
mirror over the mantelpiece, he went back to his chair.
At seven o’clock Mrs. Viveash woke up. She shook her head to feel if the
pain were still rolling about loose inside her skull.
“I really believe I’m all right,” she said. She jumped up. “Come on,”
she cried. “I feel ready for anything.”
“And I feel like so much food for worms,” said Gumbril. “Still,
_Versiam’ a tazza piena il generoso umor_.” He hummed the Drinking Song
out of _Robert the Devil_, and to that ingenuously jolly melody they
left the house.
Their taxi that evening cost them several pounds. They made the man
drive back and forth, like a shuttle, from one end of London to the
other. Every time they passed through Piccadilly Circus Mrs. Viveash
leant out of the window to look at the sky signs dancing their unceasing
St. Vitus’s dance above the monument to the Earl of Shaftesbury.
“How I adore them!” she said the first time they passed them. “Those
wheels that whizz round till the sparks fly out from under them: that
rushing motor, and that lovely bottle of port filling the glass and then
disappearing and reappearing and filling it again. Too lovely.”
“Too revolting,” Gumbril corrected her. “These things are the epileptic
symbol of all that’s most bestial and idiotic in contemporary life. Look
at those beastly things and then look at that.” He pointed to the County
Fire Office on the northern side of the Circus. “There stands decency,
dignity, beauty, repose. And there flickers, there gibbers and
twitches—what? Restlessness, distraction, refusal to think, anything for
an unquiet life....”
“What a delicious pedant you are!” She turned away from the window, put
her hands on his shoulders and looked at him. “Too exquisitely
ridiculous!” And she kissed him.
“You won’t force me to change my opinion.” Gumbril smiled at her.
“_Eppur’ si muove_—I stick to my guns like Galileo. They move and
they’re horrible.”
“They’re me,” said Mrs. Viveash emphatically. “Those things are me.”
They drove first to Lypiatt’s mews. Under the Piranesian arch. The
clothes-lines looped from window to window across the street might have
been those ropes which form so essential and so mysterious a part of the
furniture of the Prisons. The place smelt, the children were shouting;
the hyena-like laughter of the flappers reverberated between the
close-set walls. All Gumbril’s sense of social responsibility was
aroused in a moment.
Shut up in his room all day, Lypiatt had been writing—writing his whole
life, all his ideas and ideals, all for Myra. The pile of scribbled
sheets grew higher and higher. Towards evening he made an end; he had
written all that he wanted to write. He ate the remains of yesterday’s
loaf of bread and drank some water; for he realized suddenly that he had
been fasting the whole day. Then he composed himself to think; he
stretched himself out on the brink of the well and looked down into the
eyeless darkness.
He still had his Service revolver. Taking it out of the drawer in which
it was kept, he loaded it, he laid it on the packing-case which served
him as a table at his bed’s head, and stretched himself out on the bed.
He lay quite still, his muscles all relaxed, hardly breathing. He
imagined himself dead. Derision! there was still the plunge into the
well.
He picked up the pistol, looked down the barrel. Black and deep as the
well. The muzzle against his forehead was a cold mouth.
There was nothing new to be thought about death. There was not even the
possibility of a new thought. Only the old thoughts, the horrible old
questions returned.
The cold mouth to his forehead, his finger pressing on the trigger.
Already he would be falling, falling. And the annihilating crash would
be the same as the far-away sound of death at the bottom of the well.
And after that, in the silence? The old question was still the same.
After that, he would lie bleeding. The flies would drink his blood as
though it were red honey. In the end the people would come and fetch him
away, and the coroner’s jury would look at him in the mortuary and
pronounce him temporarily insane. Then he would be buried in a black
hole, would be buried and decay.
And meanwhile, would there be anything else? There was nothing new to be
thought or asked. And there was still no answer.
In the room it began to grow dark; colours vanished, forms ran together.
The easel and Myra’s portrait were now a single black silhouette against
the window. Near and far were fused, become one and continuous in the
darkness, became a part of the darkness. Outside the window the pale
twilight grew more sombre. The children shouted shrilly, playing their
games under the green gas lamps. The mirthless, ferocious laughter of
young girls mocked and invited. Lypiatt stretched out his hand and
fingered the pistol.
Down below, at his door, he heard a sharp knocking. He lifted his head
and listened, caught the sound of two voices, a man’s and a woman’s.
Myra’s voice he recognized at once; the other, he supposed, was
Gumbril’s.
“Hideous to think that people actually live in places like this,”
Gumbril was saying. “Look at those children. It ought to be punishable
by law to produce children in this street.”
“They always take me for the Pied Piper,” said Mrs. Viveash. Lypiatt got
up and crept to the window. He could hear all they said.
“I wonder if Lypiatt’s in. I don’t see any sign of a light.”
“But he has heavy curtains,” said Mrs. Viveash, “and I know for a fact
that he always composes his poetry in the dark. He may be composing
poetry.”
Gumbril laughed.
“Knock again,” said Mrs. Viveash. “Poets are always absorbed, you know.
And Casimir’s always the poet.”
“_Il Poeta_—capital P. Like d’Annunzio in the Italian papers,” said
Gumbril. “Did you know that d’Annunzio has books printed on mackintosh
for his bath?” He rapped again at the door. “I saw it in the _Corriere
della Sera_ the other day at the club. He reads the _Little Flowers of
St. Francis_ by preference in his bath. And he has a fountain pen with
waterproof ink in the soap-dish, so that he can add a few Fioretti of
his own whenever he feels like it. We might suggest that to Casimir.”
Lypiatt stood with folded arms by the window, listening. How lightly
they threw his life, his heart, from hand to hand, as though it were a
ball and they were playing a game! He thought suddenly of all the times
he had spoken lightly and maliciously of other people. His own person
had always seemed, on those occasions, sacred. One knew in theory very
well that others spoke of one contemptuously—as one spoke of them. In
practice—it was hard to believe.
“Poor Casimir!” said Mrs. Viveash. “I’m afraid his show was a failure.”
“I know it was,” said Gumbril. “Complete and absolute. I told my tame
capitalist that he ought to employ Lypiatt for our advertisements. He’d
be excellent for those. And it would mean some genuine money in his
pocket.”
“But the worst of it is,” said Mrs. Viveash, “that he’ll only feel
insulted by the suggestion.” She looked up at the window.
“I don’t know why,” she went on, “this house looks most horribly dead. I
hope nothing’s happened to poor Casimir. I have a most disagreeable
feeling that it may have.”
“Ah, this famous feminine intuition,” laughed Gumbril. He knocked again.
“I can’t help feeling that he may be lying there dead, or delirious, or
something.”
“And I can’t help feeling that he must have gone out to dinner. We shall
have to give him up, I’m afraid. It’s a pity. He’s so good with
Mercaptan. Like bear and mastiff. Or rather, like bear and poodle, bear
and King Charles’s spaniel—or whatever those little dogs are that you
see ladies in eighteenth-century French engravings taking to bed with
them. Let’s go.”
“Just knock once again,” said Mrs. Viveash. “He might really be
preoccupied, or asleep, or ill.” Gumbril knocked. “Now listen. Hush.”
They were silent; the children still went on hallooing in the distance.
There was a great clop-clopping of horse’s feet as a van was backed into
a stable door near by. Lypiatt stood motionless, his arms still crossed,
his chin on his breast. The seconds passed.
“Not a sound,” said Gumbril. “He must have gone out.”
“I suppose so,” said Mrs. Viveash.
“Come on, then. We’ll go and look for Mercaptan.”
He heard their steps in the street below, heard the slamming of the taxi
door. The engine was started up. Loud on the first gear, less loud on
the second, whisperingly on the third, it moved away, gathering speed.
The noise of it was merged with the general noise of the town. They were
gone.
Lypiatt walked slowly back to his bed. He wished suddenly that he had
gone down to answer the last knock. These voices—at the well’s edge he
had turned to listen to them; at the well’s extreme verge. He lay quite
still in the darkness; and it seemed to him at last that he had floated
away from the earth, that he was alone, no longer in a narrow dark room,
but in an illimitable darkness outside and beyond. His mind grew calmer;
he began to think of himself, of all that he had known, remotely, as
though from a great way off.
“Adorable lights!” said Mrs. Viveash, as they drove once more through
Piccadilly Circus.
Gumbril said nothing. He had said all that he had to say last time.
“And there’s another,” exclaimed Mrs. Viveash, as they passed, near
Burlington House, a fountain of Sandeman’s port. “If only they had an
automatic jazz band attached to the same mechanism!” she said
regretfully.
The Green Park remained solitary and remote under the moon. “Wasted on
us,” said Gumbril, as they passed. “One should be happily in love to
enjoy a summer night under the trees.” He wondered where Emily could be
now. They sat in silence; the cab drove on.
Mr. Mercaptan, it seemed, had left London. His housekeeper had a long
story to tell. A regular Bolshevik had come yesterday, pushing in. And
she had heard him shouting at Mr. Mercaptan in his own room. And then,
luckily, a lady had come and the Bolshevik had gone away again. And this
morning Mr. Mercaptan had decided, quite sudden like, to go away for two
or three days. And it wouldn’t surprise her at all if it had something
to do with that horrible Bolshevik fellow. Though of course Master
Paster hadn’t said anything about it. Still, as she’d known him when he
was so high and seen him grow up like, she thought she could say she
knew him well enough to guess why he did things. It was only brutally
that they contrived to tear themselves away.
Secure, meanwhile, behind a whole troop of butlers and footmen, Mr.
Mercaptan was dining comfortably at Oxhanger with the most faithful of
his friends and admirers, Mrs. Speegle. It was to Mrs. Speegle that he
had dedicated his coruscating little ‘Loves of the Pachyderms’; for Mrs.
Speegle it was who had suggested, casually one day at luncheon, that the
human race ought to be classified in two main species—the Pachyderms,
and those whose skin, like her own, like Mr. Mercaptan’s and a few
others’, was fine and ‘responsive,’ as Mr. Mercaptan himself put it, ‘to
all caresses, including those of pure reason.’ Mr. Mercaptan had taken
the casual hint and had developed it, richly. The barbarous Pachyderms
he divided up into a number of subspecies: steatocephali, acephali,
theolaters, industrious Judæorhynci—busy, compact and hard as
dung-beetles—Peabodies, Russians and so on. It was all very witty and
delicately savage. Mr. Mercaptan had a standing invitation at Oxhanger.
With dangerous pachyderms like Lypiatt ranging loose about the town, he
thought it best to avail himself of it. Mrs. Speegle, he knew, would be
delighted to see him. And indeed she was. He arrived just at lunch-time.
Mrs. Speegle and Maisie Furlonger were already at the fish.
“Mercaptan!” Mrs. Speegle’s soul seemed to be in the name. “Sit down,”
she went on, cooing as she talked, like a ring-dove. There seemed to be
singing in every word she spoke. She pointed to a chair next to hers.
“N’you’re n’just in time to tell us all about _n’your_ Lesbian
experiences.”
And Mercaptan, giving vent to his fully orchestrated laugh—squeal and
roar together—had sat down and, speaking in French partly, he nodded
towards the butler and the footman, ‘_à cause des valets_,’ and partly
because the language lent itself more deliciously to this kind of
confidences, he had begun there and then, interrupted and spurred on by
the cooing of Mrs. Speegle and the happy shrieks of Maisie Furlonger, to
recount at length and with all the wit in the world his experience among
the Isles of Greece. How delicious it was, he said to himself, to be
with really civilized people! In this happy house it seemed scarcely
possible to believe that such a thing as a pachyderm existed.
But Lypiatt still lay, face upwards, on his bed, floating, it seemed to
himself, far out into the dark emptinesses between the stars. From those
distant abstract spaces he seemed to be looking impersonally down upon
his own body stretched out by the brink of the hideous well; to be
looking back over his own history. Everything, even his own unhappiness,
seemed very small and beautiful; every frightful convulsion had become
no more than a ripple, and only the fine musical ghost of sound came up
to him from all the shouting.
“We have no luck,” said Gumbril, as they climbed once more into the cab.
“I’m not sure,” said Mrs. Viveash, “that we haven’t really had a great
deal. Did you genuinely want very much to see Mercaptan?”
“Not in the least,” said Gumbril. “But do you genuinely want to see me?”
Mrs. Viveash drew the corners of her mouth down into a painful smile and
did not answer. “Aren’t we going to pass through Piccadilly Circus
again?” she asked. “I should like to see the lights again. They give one
temporarily the illusion of being cheerful.”
“No, no,” said Gumbril, “we are going straight to Victoria.”
“We couldn’t tell the driver to...?”
“Certainly not.”
“Ah, well,” said Mrs. Viveash. “Perhaps one’s better without stimulants.
I remember when I was very young, when I first began to go about at all,
how proud I was of having discovered champagne. It seemed to me
wonderful to get rather tipsy. Something to be exceedingly proud of.
And, at the same time, how much I really disliked wine! Loathed the
taste of it. Sometimes, when Calliope and I used to dine quietly
together, _tête-à-tête_, with no awful men about, and no appearances to
keep up, we used to treat ourselves to the luxury of a large
lemon-squash, or even raspberry syrup and soda. Ah, I wish I could
recapture the deliciousness of raspberry syrup.”
Coleman was at home. After a brief delay he appeared himself at the
door. He was wearing pyjamas, and his face was covered with red-brown
smears, the tips of his beard were clotted with the same dried pigment.
“What have you been doing to yourself?” asked Mrs. Viveash.
“Merely washing in the blood of the Lamb,” Coleman answered, smiling,
and his eyes sparkling blue fire, like an electric machine.
The door on the opposite side of the little vestibule was open. Looking
over Coleman’s shoulder, Gumbril could see through the opening a
brightly lighted room and, in the middle of it, like a large rectangular
island, a wide divan. Reclining on the divan an odalisque by Ingres—but
slimmer, more serpentine, more like a lithe pink length of boa—presented
her back. That big, brown mole on the right shoulder was surely
familiar. But when, startled by the loudness of the voices behind her,
the odalisque turned round—to see in a horribly embarrassing instant
that the Cossack had left the door open and that people could look in,
were looking in, indeed—the slanting eyes beneath their heavy white
lids, the fine aquiline nose, the wide, full-lipped mouth, though they
presented themselves for only the fraction of a second, were still more
recognizable and familiar. For only the fraction of a second did the
odalisque reveal herself definitely as Rosie. Then a hand pulled
feverishly at the counterpane, the section of buff-coloured boa wriggled
and rolled; and, in a moment, where an odalisque had been, lay only a
long packet under a white sheet, like a jockey with a fractured skull
when they carry him from the course.
Well, really.... Gumbril felt positively indignant; not jealous, but
astonished and righteously indignant.
“Well, when you’ve finished bathing,” said Mrs. Viveash, “I hope you’ll
come and have dinner with us.” Coleman was standing between her and the
farther door; Mrs. Viveash had seen nothing in the room beyond the
vestibule.
“I’m busy,” said Coleman.
“So I see.” Gumbril spoke as sarcastically as he could.
“Do you see?” asked Coleman, and looked round. “So you do!” He stepped
back and closed the door.
“It’s Theodore’s last dinner,” pleaded Mrs. Viveash.
“Not even if it were his last supper,” said Coleman, enchanted to have
been given the opportunity to blaspheme a little. “Is he going to be
crucified? Or what?”
“Merely going abroad,” said Gumbril.
“He has a broken heart,” Mrs. Viveash explained.
“Ah, the genuine platonic towsers?” Coleman uttered his artificial
demon’s laugh.
“That’s just about it,” said Gumbril, grimly.
Relieved by the shutting of the door from her immediate embarrassment,
Rosie threw back a corner of the counterpane and extruded her head, one
arm and the shoulder with the mole on it. She looked about her, opening
her slanting eyes as wide as she could. She listened with parted lips to
the voices that came, muffled now, through the door. It seemed to her as
though she were waking up; as though now, for the first time, she were
hearing that shattering laugh, were looking now for the first time on
these blank, white walls and the one lovely and horrifying picture.
Where was she? What did it all mean? Rosie put her hand to her forehead,
tried to think. Her thinking was always a series of pictures; one after
another the pictures swam up before her eyes, melted again in an
instant.
Her mother taking off her pince-nez to wipe them—and at once her eyes
were tremulous and vague and helpless. “You should always let the
gentleman get over the stile first,” she said, and put on her glasses
again. Behind the glasses her eyes immediately became clear, piercing,
steady and efficient. Rather formidable eyes. They had seen Rosie
getting over the stile in front of Willie Hoskyns, and there was too
much leg.
James reading at his desk; his heavy, round head propped on his hand.
She came up behind him and threw her arms round his neck. Very gently,
and without turning his eyes from the page, he undid her embrace and,
with a little push that was no more than a hint, an implication,
signified that he didn’t want her. She had gone to her pink room, and
cried.
Another time James shook his head and smiled patiently under his
moustache. ‘You’ll never learn,’ he said. She had gone to her room and
cried that time too.
Another time they were lying in bed together, in the pink bed; only you
couldn’t see it was pink because there was no light. They were lying
very quietly. Warm and happy and remote she felt. Sometimes as it were
the physical memory of pleasure plucked at her nerves, making her start,
making her suddenly shiver. James was breathing as though he were
asleep. All at once he stirred. He patted her shoulder two or three
times in a kindly and business-like way. “I know what that means,” she
said, “when you pat me like that.” And she patted him—pat-pat-pat, very
quickly. “It means you’re going to bed.” “How do you know?” he asked.
“Do you think I don’t know you after all this time? I know that pat by
heart.” And suddenly all her warm, quiet happiness evaporated; it was
all gone. “I’m only a machine for going to bed with,” she said. “That’s
all I am for you.” She felt she would like to cry. But James only
laughed and said, “Nonsense!” and pulled his arm clumsily from
underneath her. “You go to sleep,” he said, and kissed her on the
forehead. Then he got out of bed, and she heard him bumping clumsily
about in the darkness. “Damn!” he said once. Then he found the door,
opened, and was gone.
She thought of those long stories she used to make up when she went
shopping. The fastidious lady; the poets; all the adventures.
Toto’s hands were wonderful.
She saw, she heard Mr. Mercaptan reading his essay. Poor father, reading
aloud from the _Hibbert Journal_!
And now the Cossack, covered with blood. He, too, might read aloud from
the _Hibbert Journal_—only backwards, so to speak. She had a bruise on
her arm. “You think there’s nothing inherently wrong and disgusting in
it?” he had asked. “There is, I tell you.” He had laughed and kissed her
and stripped off her clothes and caressed her. And she had cried, she
had struggled, she had tried to turn away; and in the end she had been
overcome by a pleasure more piercing and agonizing than anything she had
ever felt before. And all the time Coleman had hung over her, with his
blood-stained beard, smiling into her face, and whispering, “Horrible,
horrible, infamous and shameful.” She lay in a kind of stupor. Then,
suddenly there had been that ringing. The Cossack had left her. And now
she was awake again, and it was horrible, it was shameful. She
shuddered; she jumped out of bed and began as quickly as she could to
put on her clothes.
“Really, really, won’t you come?” Mrs. Viveash was insisting. She was
not used to people saying no when she asked, when she insisted. She
didn’t like it.
“No.” Coleman shook his head. “You may be having the last supper. But I
have a date here with the Magdalen.”
“Oh, a woman,” said Viveash. “But why didn’t you say so before?”
“Well, as I’d left the door open,” said Coleman, “I thought it was
unnecessary.”
“Fie,” said Mrs. Viveash. “I find this very repulsive. Let’s go away.”
She plucked Gumbril by the sleeve.
“Good-bye,” said Coleman, politely. He shut the door after them and
turned back across the little hall.
“What! Not thinking of going?” he exclaimed, as he came in. Rosie was
sitting down on the edge of the bed pulling on her shoes.
“Go away,” she said. “You disgust me.”
“But that’s splendid,” Coleman declared. “That’s all as it should be,
all as I intended.” He sat down beside her on the divan. “Really,” he
said, admiringly, “what exquisite legs!”
Rosie would have given anything in the world to be back again in Bloxam
Gardens. Even if James did live in his books all the time.... Anything
in the world.
“This time,” said Mrs. Viveash, “we simply must go through Piccadilly
Circus.”
“It’ll only be about two miles farther.”
“Well, that isn’t much.”
Gumbril leaned out and gave the word to the driver.
“And besides, I like driving about like this,” said Mrs. Viveash. “I
like driving for driving’s sake. It’s like the Last Ride Together. Dear
Theodore!” She laid her hand on his.
“Thank you,” said Gumbril, and kissed it.
The little cab buzzed along down the empty Mall. They were silent.
Through the thick air one could see the brightest of the stars. It was
one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are
one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when
others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous. It was one of
those evenings when love is once more invented for the first time. That,
too, seems a little ridiculous, sometimes, in the morning.
“Here are the lights again,” said Mrs. Viveash. “Hop, twitch, flick—yes,
genuinely an illusion of jollity, Theodore. Genuinely.”
Gumbril stopped the cab. “It’s after half-past eight,” he said. “At this
rate we shall never get anything to eat. Wait a minute.”
He ran into Appenrodt’s, and came back in a moment with a packet of
smoked salmon sandwiches, a bottle of white wine and a glass.
“We have a long way to go,” he explained, as he got into the taxi.
They ate their sandwiches, they drank their wine. The taxi drove on and
on.
“This is positively exhilarating,” said Mrs. Viveash, as they turned
into the Edgware Road.
Polished by the wheels and shining like an old and precious bronze, the
road stretched before them, reflecting the lamps. It had the inviting
air of a road which goes on for ever.
“They used to have such good peep-shows in this street,” Gumbril
tenderly remembered: “Little back shops where you paid twopence to see
the genuine mermaid, which turned out to be a stuffed walrus, and the
tattooed lady, and the dwarf, and the living statuary, which one always
hoped, as a boy, was really going to be rather naked and thrilling, but
which was always the most pathetic of unemployed barmaids, dressed in
the thickest of pink Jaeger.”
“Do you think there’d be any of those now?” asked Mrs. Viveash.
Gumbril shook his head. “They’ve moved on with the march of
civilization. But where?” He spread out his hands interrogatively. “I
don’t know which direction civilization marches—whether north towards
Kilburn and Golders Green, or over the river to the Elephant, to Clapham
and Sydenham and all those other mysterious places. But, in any case,
high rents have marched up here; there are no more genuine mermaids in
the Edgware Road. What stories we shall be able to tell our children!”
“Do you think we shall ever have any?” Mrs. Viveash asked.
“One can never tell.”
“I should have thought one could,” said Mrs. Viveash. Children—that
would be the most desperate experiment of all. The most desperate, and
perhaps the only one having any chance of being successful. History
recorded cases.... On the other hand, it recorded other cases that
proved the opposite. She had often thought of this experiment. There
were so many obvious reasons for not making it. But some day,
perhaps—she always put it off, like that.
The cab had turned off the main road into quieter and darker streets.
“Where are we now?” asked Mrs. Viveash.
“Penetrating into Maida Vale. We shall soon be there. Poor old
Shearwater!” He laughed. Other people in love were always absurd.
“Shall we find him in, I wonder?” It would be fun to see Shearwater
again. She liked to hear him talking, learnedly, and like a child. But
when the child is six feet high and three feet wide and two feet thick,
when it tries to plunge head first into your life—then, really, no....
“But what did you want with me?” he had asked. “Just to look at you,”
she answered. Just to look; that was all. Music hall, not boudoir.
“Here we are.” Gumbril got out and rang the second floor bell.
The door was opened by an impertinent-looking little maid.
“Mr. Shearwater’s at the lavatory,” she said, in answer to Gumbril’s
question.
“Laboratory?” he suggested.
“At the ’ospital.” That made it clear.
“And is Mrs. Shearwater at home?” he asked maliciously.
The little maid shook her head. “I expected ’er, but she didn’t come
back to dinner.”
“Would you mind giving her a message when she does come in,” said
Gumbril. “Tell her that Mr. Toto was very sorry he hadn’t time to speak
to her when he saw her this evening in Pimlico.”
“Mr. who?”
“Mr. Toto.”
“Mr. Toto is sorry ’e ’adn’t the time to speak to Mrs. Shearwater when
’e saw ’er in Pimlico this evening. Very well, sir.”
“You won’t forget?” said Gumbril.
“No, I won’t forget.”
He went back to the cab and explained that they had drawn blank once
more.
“I’m rather glad,” said Mrs. Viveash. “If we ever did find anybody, it
would mean the end of this Last-Ride-Together feeling. And that would be
sad. And it’s a lovely night. And really, for the moment, I feel I can
do without my lights. Suppose we just drove for a bit now.”
But Gumbril would not allow that. “We haven’t had enough to eat yet,” he
said, and he gave the cabman Gumbril Senior’s address.
Gumbril Senior was sitting on his little iron balcony among the
dried-out pots that had once held geraniums, smoking his pipe and
looking earnestly out into the darkness in front of him. Clustered in
the fourteen plane trees of the square, the starlings were already
asleep. There was no sound but the rustling of the leaves. But
sometimes, every hour or so, the birds would wake up. Something—perhaps
it might be a stronger gust of wind, perhaps some happy dream of worms,
some nightmare of cats simultaneously dreamed by all the flock
together—would suddenly rouse them. And then they would all start to
talk at once, at the tops of their shrill voices—for perhaps half a
minute. Then in an instant they all went to sleep again and there was
once more no sound but the rustling of the shaken leaves. At these
moments Mr. Gumbril would lean forward, would strain his eyes and his
ears in the hope of seeing, of hearing something—something significant,
explanatory, satisfying. He never did, of course; but that in no way
diminished his happiness.
Mr. Gumbril received them on his balcony with courtesy.
“I was just thinking of going in to work,” he said. “And now you come
and give me a good excuse for sitting out here a little longer. I’m
delighted.”
Gumbril Junior went downstairs to see what he could find in the way of
food. While he was gone, his father explained to Mrs. Viveash the
secrets of the birds. Enthusiastically, his light floss of grey hair
floating up and falling again about his head as he pointed and
gesticulated, he told her; the great flocks assembled—goodness only knew
where!—they flew across the golden sky, detaching here a little troop,
there a whole legion, they flew until at last all had found their
appointed resting-places and there were no more to fly. He made this
nightly flight sound epical, as though it were a migration of peoples, a
passage of armies.
“And it’s my firm belief,” said Gumbril Senior, adding notes to his
epic, “that they make use of some sort of telepathy, some kind of direct
mind-to-mind communication between themselves. You can’t watch them
without coming to that conclusion.”
“A charming conclusion,” said Mrs. Viveash.
“It’s a faculty,” Gumbril Senior went on, “we all possess, I believe.
All we animals.” He made a gesture which included himself, Mrs. Viveash
and the invisible birds among the plane trees. “Why don’t we use it
more? You may well ask. For the simple reason, my dear young lady, that
half our existence is spent in dealing with things that have no
mind—things with which it is impossible to hold telepathic
communication. Hence the development of the five senses. I have eyes
that preserve me from running into the lamp-post, ears that warn me I’m
in the neighbourhood of Niagara. And having made these instruments very
efficient, I use them even in holding converse with other beings having
a mind. I let my telepathic faculty lie idle, preferring to employ an
elaborate and cumbrous arrangement of symbols in order to make my
thought known to you through your senses. In certain individuals,
however, the faculty is naturally so well-developed—like the musical, or
the mathematical, or the chess-playing faculties in other people—that
they cannot help entering into direct communication with other minds,
whether they want to or not. If we knew a good method of educating and
drawing out the latent faculty, most of us could make ourselves
moderately efficient telepaths; just as most of us can make ourselves
into moderate musicians, chess players and mathematicians. There would
also be a few, no doubt, who could never communicate directly. Just as
there are a few who cannot recognize ‘Rule Britannia’ or Bach’s Concerto
in D minor for two violins, and a few who cannot comprehend the nature
of an algebraical symbol. Look at the general development of the
mathematical and musical faculties only within the last two hundred
years. By the twenty-first century, I believe, we shall all be
telepaths. Meanwhile, these delightful birds have forestalled us. Not
having the wit to invent a language or an expressive pantomime, they
contrive to communicate such simple thoughts as they have, directly and
instantaneously. They all go to sleep at once, wake at once, say the
same thing at once; they turn all at once when they’re flying. Without a
leader, without a word of command, they do everything together, in
complete unison. Sitting here in the evenings, I sometimes fancy I can
feel their thoughts striking against my own. It has happened to me once
or twice: that I have known a second before it actually happened, that
the birds were going to wake up and begin their half-minute of chatter
in the dark. Wait! Hush.” Gumbril Senior threw back his head, pressed
his hand over his mouth, as though by commanding silence on himself he
could command it on the whole world. “I believe they’re going to wake
now. I feel it.”
He was silent. Mrs. Viveash looked towards the dark trees and listened.
A full minute passed. Then the old gentleman burst out happily laughing.
“Completely wrong!” he said. “They’ve never been more soundly asleep.”
Mrs. Viveash laughed too. “Perhaps they all changed their minds, just as
they were waking up,” she suggested.
Gumbril Junior reappeared; glasses clinked as he walked, and there was a
little rattle of crockery. He was carrying a tray.
“Cold beef,” he said, “and salad and a bit of a cold apple-pie. It might
be worse.”
They drew up chairs to Gumbril Senior’s work-table, and there, among the
letters and the unpaid bills and the sketchy elevations of archiducal
palaces, they ate the beef and the apple-pie, and drank the
one-and-ninepenny _vin ordinaire_ of the house. Gumbril Senior, who had
already supped, looked on at them from the balcony.
“Did I tell you,” said Gumbril Junior, “that we saw Mr. Porteous’s son
the other evening—very drunk?”
Gumbril Senior threw up his hands. “If you knew the calamities that
young imbecile has been the cause of!”
“What’s he done?”
“Gambled away I don’t know how much borrowed money. And poor Porteous
can’t afford anything—even now.” Mr. Gumbril shook his head and clutched
and combed his beard. “It’s a fearful blow, but of course, Porteous is
very steadfast and serene and.... There!” Gumbril Senior interrupted
himself, holding up his hand. “Listen!”
In the fourteen plane trees the starlings had suddenly woken up.
There was a wild outburst, like a stormy sitting in the Italian
Parliament. Then all was silent. Gumbril Senior listened, enchanted. His
face, as he turned back towards the light, revealed itself all smiles.
His hair seemed to have blown loose of its own accord, from within, so
to speak; he pushed it into place.
“You heard them?” he asked Mrs. Viveash. “What can they have to say to
one another, I wonder, at this time of night?”
“And did you feel they were going to wake up?” Mrs. Viveash inquired.
“No,” said Gumbril Senior with candour.
“When we’ve finished,” Gumbril Junior spoke with his mouth full, “you
must show Myra your model of London. She’d adore it—except that it has
no electric sky-signs.”
His father looked all of a sudden very much embarrassed. “I don’t think
it would interest Mrs. Viveash much,” he said.
“Oh, yes it would. Really,” she declared.
“Well, as a matter of fact it isn’t here.” Gumbril Senior pulled with
fury at his beard.
“Not here? But what’s happened to it?”
Gumbril Senior wouldn’t explain. He just ignored his son’s question and
began to talk once more about the starlings. Later on, however, when
Gumbril and Mrs. Viveash were preparing to go, the old man drew him
apart into a corner and began to whisper the explanation.
“I didn’t want to blare it about in front of strangers,” he said, as
though it were a question of the housemaid’s illegitimate baby or a
repair to the water-closet. “But the fact is, I’ve sold it. The Victoria
and Albert had wind that I was making it; they’ve been wanting it all
the time. And I’ve let them have it.”
“But why?” Gumbril Junior asked in a tone of astonishment. He knew with
what a paternal affection—no, more than paternal; for he was sure that
his father was more whole-heartedly attached to his models than his
son—with what pride he regarded these children of his spirit.
Gumbril Senior sighed. “It’s all that young imbecile,” he said.
“What young imbecile?”
“Porteous’s son, of course. You see, poor Porteous has had to sell his
library, among other things. You don’t know what that means to him. All
these precious books. And collected at the price of such hardships. I
thought I’d like to buy a few of the best ones back for him. They gave
me quite a good price at the Museum.” He came out of his corner and
hurried across the room to help Mrs. Viveash with her cloak. “Allow me,
allow me,” he said.
Slowly and pensively Gumbril Junior followed him. Beyond good and evil?
Below good and evil? The name of earwig.... The tubby pony trotted. The
wild columbines suspended, among the shadows of the hazel copse, hooked
spurs, helmets of aerial purple. The twelfth sonata of Mozart was
insecticide; no earwigs could crawl through that music. Emily’s breasts
were firm and pointed and she had slept at last without a tremor. In the
starlight, good, true and beautiful became one. Write the discovery in
books—in books _quos_, in the morning, _legimus cacantes_. They
descended the stairs. The cab was waiting outside.
“The Last Ride again,” said Mrs. Viveash.
“Golgotha Hospital, Southwark,” said Gumbril to the driver and followed
her into the cab.
“Drive, drive, drive,” repeated Mrs. Viveash. “I like your father,
Theodore. One of these days he’ll fly away with the birds. And how nice
it is of those starlings to wake themselves up like that in the middle
of the night, merely to amuse him. Considering how unpleasant it is to
be woken in the night. Where are we going?”
“We’re going to look at Shearwater in his laboratory.”
“Is that a long way away?”
“Immensely,” said Gumbril.
“Thank God for that,” Mrs. Viveash piously and expiringly breathed.