Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
Queen Victoria | by Lytton Strachey |
Eminent Victorians | Lytton Strachey |
Antic Hay | Aldous Huxley |
Along the Road | Aldous Huxley |
Tales of the Five Towns | Arnold Bennett |
The Mercy of Allah | Hilaire Belloc |
Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo | (1 vol.) David Garnett |
Books & Characters | Lytton Strachey |
Fiery Particles | C. E. Montague |
First Plays | A. A. Milne |
Crome Yellow | Aldous Huxley |
Art | Clive Bell |
Disenchantment | C. E. Montague |
Those Barren Leaves | Aldous Huxley |
Vision and Design | Roger Fry |
Essays of a Biologist | Julian Huxley |
Plays | Richard Hughes |
Limbo | Aldous Huxley |
Second Plays | A. A. Milne |
The Right Place | C. E. Montague |
The Sailor’s Return | David Garnett |
Mortal Coils | Aldous Huxley |
Mr. Weston’s Good Wine | T. F. Powys |
Lolly Willowes | Sylvia Townsend Warner |
On the Margin | Aldous Huxley |
The Grim Smile of the Five Towns | Arnold Bennett |
Tarr | Wyndham Lewis |
Little Mexican | Aldous Huxley |
Gumbril, Theodore Gumbril Junior, B.A. Oxon., sat in his oaken stall on the north side of the School Chapel and wondered, as he listened through the uneasy silence of half a thousand schoolboys to the First Lesson, pondered, as he looked up at the vast window opposite, all blue and jaundiced and bloody with nineteenth-century glass, speculated in his rapid and rambling way about the existence and the nature of God.
Standing in front of the spread brass eagle and fortified in his convictions by the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy (for this first Sunday of term was the Fifth after Easter), the Reverend Pelvey could speak of these things with an enviable certainty. “Hear, O Israel,” he was booming out over the top of the portentous Book: “the Lord our God is one Lord.”
One Lord; Mr. Pelvey knew; he had studied theology. But if theology and theosophy, then why not theography and theometry, why not theognomy, theotrophy, theotomy, theogamy? Why not theophysics and theo-chemistry? Why not that ingenious toy, the theotrope or wheel of gods? Why not a monumental theodrome?
In the great window opposite, young David stood like a cock, crowing on the dunghill of a tumbled giant. From the middle of Goliath’s forehead there issued, like a narwhal’s budding horn, a curious excrescence. Was it the embedded pebble? Or perhaps the giant’s married life?
“... with all thine heart,” declaimed the Reverend Pelvey, “and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”
No, but seriously, Gumbril reminded himself, the problem was very troublesome indeed. God as a sense of warmth about the heart, God as exultation, God as tears in the eyes, God as a rush of power or thought—that was all right. But God as truth, God as 2 + 2 = 4—that wasn’t so clearly all right. Was there any chance of their being the same? Were there bridges to join the two worlds? And could it be that the Reverend Pelvey, M.A., fog-horning away from behind the imperial bird, could it be that he had an answer and a clue? That was hardly believable. Particularly if one knew Mr. Pelvey personally. And Gumbril did.
“And these words which I command thee this day,” retorted Mr. Pelvey, “shall be in thine heart.”
Or in the heart, or in the head? Reply, Mr. Pelvey, reply. Gumbril jumped between the horns of the dilemma and voted for other organs.
“And thou shalt teach them diligently to thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”
Diligently to thy children.... Gumbril remembered his own childhood; they had not been very diligently taught to him. ‘Beetles, black beetles’—his father had a really passionate feeling about the clergy. Mumbojumbery was another of his favourite words. An atheist and an anti-clerical of the strict old school he was. Not that, in any case, he gave himself much time to think about these things; he was too busy being an unsuccessful architect. As for Gumbril’s mother, her diligence had not been dogmatic. She had just been diligently good, that was all. Good; good? It was a word people only used nowadays with a kind of deprecating humorousness. Good. Beyond good and evil? We are all that nowadays. Or merely below them, like earwigs? I glory in the name of earwig. Gumbril made a mental gesture and inwardly declaimed. But good in any case, there was no getting out of that, good she had been. Not nice, not merely molto simpatica—how charmingly and effectively these foreign tags assist one in the great task of calling a spade by some other name!—but good. You felt the active radiance of her goodness when you were near her.... And that feeling, was that less real and valid than two plus two?
The Reverend Pelvey had nothing to reply. He was reading with a holy gusto of “houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not.”
She had been good and she had died when he was still a boy; died—but he hadn’t been told that till much later—of creeping and devouring pain. Malignant disease—oh, caro nome!
“Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God,” said Mr. Pelvey.
Even when the ulcers are benign; thou shalt fear. He had travelled up from school to see her, just before she died. He hadn’t known that she was going to die, but when he entered her room, when he saw her lying so weakly in the bed, he had suddenly begun to cry, uncontrollably. All the fortitude, the laughter even, had been hers. And she had spoken to him. A few words only; but they had contained all the wisdom he needed to live by. She had told him what he was, and what he should try to be, and how to be it. And crying, still crying, he had promised that he would try.
“And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes,” said Mr. Pelvey, “for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this day.”
And had he kept his promise, Gumbril wondered, had he preserved himself alive?
“Here endeth the First Lesson.” Mr. Pelvey retreated from the eagle, and the organ presaged the coming Te Deum.
Gumbril hoisted himself to his feet; the folds of his B.A. gown billowed nobly about him as he rose. He sighed and shook his head with the gesture of one who tries to shake off a fly or an importunate thought. When the time came for singing, he sang. On the opposite side of the chapel two boys were grinning and whispering to one another behind their lifted Prayer Books. Gumbril frowned at them ferociously. The two boys caught his eye and their faces at once took on an expression of sickly piety; they began to sing with unction. They were two ugly, stupid-looking louts, who ought to have been apprenticed years ago to some useful trade. Instead of which they were wasting their own and their teacher’s and their more intelligent comrades’ time in trying, quite vainly, to acquire an elegant literary education. The minds of dogs, Gumbril reflected, do not benefit by being treated as though they were the minds of men.
“O Lord, have mercy upon us: have mercy upon us.”
Gumbril shrugged his shoulders and looked round the chapel at the faces of the boys. Lord, indeed, have mercy upon us! He was disturbed to find the sentiment echoed on a somewhat different note in the Second Lesson, which was drawn from the twenty-third chapter of St. Luke. “Father, forgive them,” said Mr. Pelvey in his unvaryingly juicy voice; “for they know not what they do.” Ah, but suppose one did know what one was doing? suppose one knew only too well? And of course one always did know. One was not a fool.
But this was all nonsense, all nonsense. One must think of something better than this. What a comfort it would be, for example, if one could bring air cushions into chapel! These polished oaken stalls were devilishly hard; they were meant for stout and lusty pedagogues, not for bony starvelings like himself. An air cushion, a delicious pneu.
“Here endeth,” boomed Mr. Pelvey, closing his book on the back of the German eagle.
As if by magic, Dr. Jolly was ready at the organ with the Benedictus. It was positively a relief to stand again; this oak was adamantine. But air cushions, alas, would be too bad an example for the boys. Hardy young Spartans! it was an essential part of their education that they should listen to the word of revelation without pneumatic easement. No, air cushions wouldn’t do. The real remedy, it suddenly flashed across his mind, would be trousers with pneumatic seats. For all occasions; not merely for churchgoing.
The organ blew a thin Puritan-preacher’s note through one of its hundred nostrils. “I believe....” With a noise like the breaking of a wave, five hundred turned towards the East. The view of David and Goliath was exchanged for a Crucifixion in the grand manner of eighteen hundred and sixty. “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” No, no, Gumbril preferred to look at the grooved stonework rushing smoothly up on either side of the great east window towards the vaulted roof; preferred to reflect, like the dutiful son of an architect he was, that Perpendicular at its best—and its best is its largest—is the finest sort of English Gothic. At its worst and smallest, as in most of the colleges of Oxford, it is mean, petty, and, but for a certain picturesqueness, almost wholly disgusting. He felt like a lecturer: next slide, please. “And the life everlasting. Amen.” Like an oboe, Mr. Pelvey intoned: “The Lord be with you.”
For prayer, Gumbril reflected, there would be Dunlop knees. Still, in the days when he had made a habit of praying, they hadn’t been necessary. “Our Father....” The words were the same as they were in the old days; but Mr. Pelvey’s method of reciting them made them sound rather different. Her dresses, when he had leaned his forehead against her knee to say those words—those words, good Lord! that Mr. Pelvey was oboeing out of existence—were always black in the evenings, and of silk, and smelt of orris root. And when she was dying, she had said to him: “Remember the Parable of the Sower, and the seeds that fell in shallow ground.” No, no. Amen, decidedly. “O Lord, show thy mercy upon us,” chanted oboe Pelvey, and Gumbril trombone responded, profoundly and grotesquely: “And grant us thy salvation.” No, the knees were obviously less important, except for people like revivalists and housemaids, than the seat. Sedentary are commoner than genuflectory professions. One would introduce little flat rubber bladders between two layers of cloth. At the upper end, hidden when one wore a coat, would be a tube with a valve: like a hollow tail. Blow it up—and there would be perfect comfort even for the boniest, even on rock. How did the Greeks stand marble benches in their theatres?
The moment had now come for the Hymn. This being the first Sunday of the Summer term, they sang that special hymn, written by the Headmaster, with music by Dr. Jolly, on purpose to be sung on the first Sundays of terms. The organ quietly sketched out the tune. Simple it was, uplifting and manly.
Five hundred flawed adolescent voices took it up. For good example’s sake, Gumbril opened and closed his mouth; noiselessly, however. It was only at the third verse that he gave rein to his uncertain baritone. He particularly liked the third verse; it marked, in his opinion, the Headmaster’s highest poetical achievement.
At this point Dr. Jolly enriched his tune with a thick accompaniment in the lower registers, artfully designed to symbolize the depth, the gloom and general repulsiveness of the Tempter’s home.
Work, thought Gumbril, work. Lord, how passionately he disliked work! Let Austin have his swink to him reserved! Ah, if only one had work of one’s own, proper work, decent work—not forced upon one by the griping of one’s belly! Amen! Dr. Jolly blew the two sumptuous jets of reverence into the air; Gumbril accompanied them with all his heart. Amen, indeed.
Gumbril sat down again. It might be convenient, he thought, to have the tail so long that one could blow up one’s trousers while one actually had them on. In which case, it would have to be coiled round the waist like a belt; or looped up, perhaps, and fastened to a clip on one’s braces.
“The nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, part of the thirty-fourth verse.” The Headmaster’s loud, harsh voice broke violently out from the pulpit. “All with one voice for the space of about two hours cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians.”
Gumbril composed himself as comfortably as he could on his oaken seat. It was going to be one of the Headmaster’s real swingeing sermons. Great is Diana. And Venus? Ah, these seats, these seats!
Gumbril did not attend evening chapel. He stayed at home in his lodgings to correct the sixty-three Holiday Task Papers which had fallen to his share. They lay, thick piles of them, on the floor beside his chair: sixty-three answers to ten questions about the Italian Risorgimento. The Risorgimento, of all subjects! It had been one of the Headmaster’s caprices. He had called a special master’s meeting at the end of last term to tell them all about the Risorgimento. It was his latest discovery.
“The Risorgimento, gentlemen, is the most important event in modern European history.” And he had banged the table; he had looked defiantly round the room in search of contradictors.
But nobody had contradicted him. Nobody ever did; they all knew better. For the Headmaster was as fierce as he was capricious. He was for ever discovering something new. Two terms ago it had been singeing; after the hair-cut and before the shampoo, there must be singeing.
“The hair, gentlemen, is a tube. If you cut it and leave the end unsealed, the water will get in and rot the tube. Hence the importance of singeing, gentlemen. Singeing seals the tube. I shall address the boys about it after chapel to-morrow morning; and I trust that all house-masters”—and he had glared around him from under his savage eyebrows—“will see that their boys get themselves regularly singed after cutting.”
For weeks afterwards every boy trailed behind him a faint and nauseating whiff of burning, as though he were fresh from hell. And now it was the Risorgimento. One of these days, Gumbril reflected, it would be birth control, or the decimal system, or rational dress.
He picked up the nearest batch of papers. The printed questions were pinned to the topmost of them.
“Give a brief account of the character and career of Pope Pius IX, with dates wherever possible.”
Gumbril leaned back in his chair and thought of his own character, with dates. 1896: the first serious and conscious and deliberate lie. Did you break that vase, Theodore? No, mother. It lay on his conscience for nearly a month, eating deeper and deeper. Then he had confessed the truth. Or rather he had not confessed; that was too difficult. He led the conversation, very subtly, as he thought, round through the non-malleability of glass, through breakages in general, to this particular broken vase; he practically forced his mother to repeat her question. And then, with a burst of tears, he had answered, yes. It had always been difficult for him to say things directly, point-blank. His mother had told him, when she was dying.... No, no; not that.
In 1898 or 1899—oh, these dates!—he had made a pact with his little cousin, Molly, that she should let him see her with no clothes on, if he would do the same by her. She had fulfilled her part of the bargain; but he, overwhelmed at the last moment by a passion of modesty, had broken his promise.
Then, when he was about twelve and still at his preparatory school, in 1902 or 1903 he had done badly in his exams., on purpose; he had been frightened of Sadler, who was in the same form, and wanted to get the prize. Sadler was stronger than he was, and had a genius for persecution. He had done so badly that his mother was unhappy; and it was impossible for him to explain.
In 1906 he had fallen in love for the first time—ah, much more violently than ever since—with a boy of his own age. Platonic it had been and profound. He had done badly that term, too; not on purpose, but because he had spent so much time helping young Vickers with his work. Vickers was really very stupid. The next term he had ‘come out’—Staphylococcus pyogenes is a lover of growing adolescence—with spots and boils all over his face and neck. Gumbril’s affection ceased as suddenly as it had begun. He finished that term, he remembered, with a second prize.
But it was time to be thinking seriously of Pio Nono. With a sigh of disgusted weariness, Gumbril looked at his papers. What had Falarope Major to say of the Pontiff? “Pius IX was called Ferretti. He was a liberal before he was a Pope. A kindly man of less than average intelligence, he thought that all difficulties could be settled by a little goodwill, a few reforms and a political amnesty. He wrote several encyclicals and a syllabus.” Gumbril admired the phrase about less than average intelligence; Falarope Major should have at least one mark for having learnt it so well by heart. He turned to the next paper. Higgs was of opinion that “Pius the Ninth was a good but stupid man, who thought he could settle the Risorgimento with a few reforms and a political armistice.” Beddoes was severer. “Pius IX was a bad man, who said that he was infallible, which showed he had a less than average intelligence.” Sopwith Minor shared the general opinion about Pio’s intelligence, and displayed a great familiarity with the wrong dates. Clegg-Weller was voluminous and informative. “Pius IX was not so clever as his prime minister, Cardinal Antonelli. When he came to the tiara he was a liberal, and Metternich said he had never reckoned on a liberal pope. He then became a conservative. He was kindly, but not intelligent, and he thought Garibaldi and Cavour would be content with a few reforms and an amnesty.” At the top of Garstang’s paper was written: “I have had measles all the holidays, so have been unable to read more than the first thirty pages of the book. Pope Pius IX does not come into these pages, of the contents of which I will proceed to give the following précis.” And the précis duly followed. Gumbril would have liked to give him full marks. But the business-like answer of Appleyard called him back to a better sense of his duty. “Pius IX became Pope in 1846 and died in 1878. He was a kindly man, but his intelligence was below the....”
Gumbril laid the paper down and shut his eyes. No, this was really impossible. Definitely, it couldn’t go on, it could not go on. There were thirteen weeks in the summer term, there would be thirteen in the autumn and eleven or twelve in the spring; and then another summer of thirteen, and so it would go on for ever. For ever. It wouldn’t do. He would go away and live uncomfortably on his three hundred. Or, no, he would go away and he would make money—that was more like it—money on a large scale, easily; he would be free and he would live. For the first time, he would live. Behind his closed eyes, he saw himself living.
Over the plushy floors of some vast and ignoble Ritz slowly he walked, at ease, with confidence: over the plushy floors and there, at the end of a long vista, there was Myra Viveash, waiting, this time, for him; coming forward impatiently to meet him, his abject lover now, not the cool, free, laughing mistress who had lent herself contemptuously once to his pathetic and silent importunity and then, after a day, withdrawn the gift again. Over the plushy floors to dine. Not that he was in love with Myra any longer: but revenge is sweet.
He sat in his own house. The Chinese statues looked out from the niches; the Maillols passionately meditated, slept, and were more than alive. The Goyas hung on the walls, there was a Boucher in the bathroom; and when he entered with his guests, what a Piazzetta exploded above the dining-room mantelpiece! Over the ancient wine they talked together, and he knew everything they knew and more; he gave, he inspired, it was the others who assimilated and were enriched. After dinner there were Mozart quartets; he opened his portfolios and showed his Daumiers, his Tiepolos, his Canaletto sketches, his drawings by Picasso and Lewis, and the purity of his naked Ingres. And later, talking of Odalisques, there were orgies without fatigue or disgust, and the women were pictures and lust in action, art.
Over the empty plains forty horses impelled him towards Mantua: rubadub—adubadub, with the silencer out. Towards the most romantic city in all the world.
When he spoke to women—how easily and insolently he spoke now!—they listened and laughed and looked at him sideways and dropped their eyelids over the admission, the invitation, of their glance. With Phyllis once he had sat, for how long? in a warm and moonless darkness, saying nothing, risking no gesture. And in the end they had parted, reluctantly and still in silence. Phyllis now was with him once again in the summer night; but this time he spoke, now softly, now in the angry breathless whisper of desire, he reached out and took her, and she was naked in his arms. All chance encounters, all plotted opportunities recurred; he knew, now, how to live, how to take advantage of them.
Over the empty plains towards Mantua, towards Mantua, he slid along at ease, free and alone. He explored the horrors of Roman society; visited Athens and Seville. To Unamuno and Papini he conversed familiarly in their own tongues. He understood perfectly and without effort the quantum theory. To his friend Shearwater he gave half a million for physiological research. He visited Schoenberg and persuaded him to write still better music. He exhibited to the politicians the full extent of their stupidity and their wickedness; he set them working for the salvation, not the destruction, of humanity. Once in the past when he had been called upon to make a public speech, he had felt so nervous that he was sick; the thousands who listened to him now bent like wheat under the wind of his eloquence. But it was only by the way and occasionally that he troubled himself to move them. He found it easy now to come to terms with every one he met, to understand all points of view, to identify himself with even the most unfamiliar spirit. And he knew how everybody lived, and what it was like to be a mill girl, a dustman, an engine-driver, a Jew, an Anglican bishop, a confidence-trickster. Accustomed as he was to being swindled and imposed upon without protest, he now knew the art of being brutal. He was just dressing down that insolent porter at the Continental, who had complained that ten francs wasn’t enough (and had got, as a matter of historic fact, another five in addition), when his landlady gave a knock, opened the door and said: “Dinner’s ready, Mr. Gumbril.”
Feeling a little ashamed at having been interrupted in what was, after all, one of the ignobler and more trivial occupations of his new life, Gumbril went down to his fatty chop and green peas. It was the first meal to be eaten under the new dispensation; he ate it, for all that it was unhappily indistinguishable from the meals of the past, with elation and a certain solemnity, as though he were partaking of a sacrament. He felt buoyant with the thought that at last, at last, he was doing something about life.
When the chop was eaten, he went upstairs and, after filling two suit-cases and a Gladstone bag with the most valued of his possessions, addressed himself to the task of writing to the Headmaster. He might have gone away, of course, without writing. But it would be nobler, more in keeping, he felt, with his new life, to leave a justification behind—or rather not a justification, a denouncement. He picked up his pen and denounced.
Gumbril senior occupied a tall, narrow-shouldered and rachitic house in a little obscure square not far from Paddington. There were five floors, and a basement with beetles, and nearly a hundred stairs, which shook when any one ran too rudely down them. It was a prematurely old and decaying house in a decaying quarter. The square in which it stood was steadily coming down in the world. The houses which a few years ago had all been occupied by respectable families, were now split up into squalid little maisonnettes, and from the neighbouring slums, which along with most other unpleasant things the old bourgeois families had been able to ignore, invading bands of children came to sport on the once sacred pavements.
Mr. Gumbril was almost the last survivor of the old inhabitants. He liked his house, and he liked his square. Social decadence had not affected the fourteen plane trees which adorned its little garden, and the gambols of the dirty children did not disturb the starlings who came, evening by evening in summer-time, to roost in their branches.
On fine evenings he used to sit out on his balcony waiting for the coming of the birds. And just at sunset, when the sky was most golden, there would be a twittering overhead, and the black, innumerable flocks of starlings would come sweeping across on the way from their daily haunts to their roosting-places, chosen so capriciously among the tree-planted squares and gardens of the city and so tenaciously retained, year after year, to the exclusion of every other place. Why his fourteen plane trees should have been chosen, Mr. Gumbril could never imagine. There were plenty of larger and more umbrageous gardens all round; but they remained birdless, while every evening, from the larger flocks, a faithful legion detached itself to settle clamorously among his trees. They sat and chattered till the sun went down and twilight was past, with intervals every now and then of silence that fell suddenly and inexplicably on all the birds at once, lasted through a few seconds of thrilling suspense, to end as suddenly and senselessly in an outburst of the same loud and simultaneous conversation.
The starlings were Mr. Gumbril’s most affectionately cherished friends; sitting out on his balcony to watch and listen to them, he had caught at the shut of treacherous evenings many colds and chills on the liver, he had laid up for himself many painful hours of rheumatism. These little accidents did nothing, however, to damp his affection for the birds; and still on every evening that could possibly be called fine, he was always to be seen in the twilight, sitting on the balcony, gazing up, round-spectacled and rapt, at the fourteen plane trees. The breezes stirred in his grey hair, tossing it up in long, light wisps that fell across his forehead and over his spectacles; and then he would shake his head impatiently, and the bony hand would be freed for a moment from its unceasing combing and clutching of the sparse grey beard to push back the strayed tendrils, to smooth and reduce to order the whole ruffled head. The birds chattered on, the hand went back to its clutching and combing; once more the wind blew; darkness came down, and the gas lamps round the square lit up the outer leaves of the plane trees, touched the privet bushes inside the railings with an emerald light; behind them was impenetrable night; instead of shorn grass and bedded geraniums there was mystery, there were endless depths. And the birds at last were silent.
Mr. Gumbril would get up from his iron chair, stretch his arms and his stiff cold legs and go in through the French window to work. The birds were his diversion; when they were silent, it was time to think of serious matters.
To-night, however, he was not working; for always on Sunday evenings his old friend Porteous came to dine and talk. Breaking in unexpectedly at midnight, Gumbril Junior found them sitting in front of the gas fire in his father’s study.
“My dear fellow, what on earth are you doing here?” Gumbril Senior jumped up excitedly at his son’s entrance. The light silky hair floated up with the movement, turned for a moment into a silver aureole, then subsided again. Mr. Porteous stayed where he was, calm, solid and undishevelled as a seated pillar-box. He wore a monocle on a black ribbon, a black stock tie that revealed above its double folds a quarter of an inch of stiff white collar, a double-breasted black coat, a pair of pale checked trousers and patent leather boots with cloth tops. Mr. Porteous was very particular about his appearance. Meeting him casually for the first time, one would not have guessed that Mr. Porteous was an expert on Late Latin poetry; and he did not mean that you should guess. Thin-limbed, bent and agile in his loose, crumpled clothes, Gumbril Senior had the air, beside Mr. Porteous, of a strangely animated scarecrow.
“What on earth?” the old gentleman repeated his question.
Gumbril Junior shrugged his shoulders. “I was bored, I decided to cease being a schoolmaster.” He spoke with a fine airy assumption of carelessness. “How are you, Mr. Porteous?”
“Thank you, invariably well.”
“Well, well,” said Gumbril Senior, sitting down again, “I must say I’m not surprised. I’m only surprised that you stood it, not being a born pedagogue, for as long as you did. What ever induced you to think of turning usher, I can’t imagine.” He looked at his son first through his spectacles, then over the top of them; the motives of the boy’s conduct revealed themselves to neither vision.
“What else was there for me to do?” asked Gumbril Junior, pulling up a chair towards the fire. “You gave me a pedagogue’s education and washed your hands of me. No opportunities, no openings. I had no alternative. And now you reproach me.”
Mr. Gumbril made an impatient gesture. “You’re talking nonsense,” he said. “The only point of the kind of education you had is this, it gives a young man leisure to find out what he’s interested in. You apparently weren’t sufficiently interested in anything——”
“I am interested in everything,” interrupted Gumbril Junior.
“Which comes to the same thing,” said his father parenthetically, “as being interested in nothing.” And he went on from the point at which he had been interrupted. “You weren’t sufficiently interested in anything to want to devote yourself to it. That was why you sought the last refuge of feeble minds with classical educations, you became a schoolmaster.”
“Come, come,” said Mr. Porteous. “I do a little teaching myself; I must stand up for the profession.”
Gumbril Senior let go his beard and brushed back the hair that the wind of his own vehemence had brought tumbling into his eyes. “I don’t denigrate the profession,” he said. “Not at all. It would be an excellent profession if every one who went into it were as much interested in teaching as you are in your job, Porteous, or I in mine. It’s these undecided creatures like Theodore, who ruin it by drifting in. Until all teachers are geniuses and enthusiasts, nobody will learn anything, except what they teach themselves.”
“Still,” said Mr. Porteous, “I wish I hadn’t had to learn so much by myself. I wasted a lot of time finding out how to set to work and where to discover what I wanted.”
Gumbril Junior was lighting his pipe. “I have come to the conclusion,” he said, speaking in little jerks between each suck of the flame into the bowl, “that most people ... ought never ... to be taught anything at all.” He threw away the match. “Lord have mercy upon us, they’re dogs. What’s the use of teaching them anything except to behave well, to work and obey. Facts, theories, the truth about the universe—what good are those to them? Teach them to understand—why, it only confuses them; makes them lose hold of the simple real appearance. Not more than one in a hundred can get any good out of a scientific or literary education.”
“And you’re one of the ones?” asked his father.
“That goes without saying,” Gumbril Junior replied.
“I think you mayn’t be so far wrong,” said Mr. Porteous. “When I think of my own children, for example....” he sighed, “I thought they’d be interested in the things that interested me; they don’t seem to be interested in anything but behaving like little apes—not very anthropoid ones either, for that matter. At my eldest boy’s age I used to sit up most of the night reading Latin texts. He sits up—or rather stands, reels, trots up—dancing and drinking. Do you remember St. Bernard? ‘Vigilet tota nocte luxuriosus non solum patienter’ (the ascetic and the scholar only watch patiently); ‘sed et libenter, ut suam expleat voluptatem.’ What the wise man does out of a sense of duty, the fool does for fun. And I’ve tried very hard to make him like Latin.”
“Well in any case,” said Gumbril Junior, “you didn’t try to feed him on history. That’s the real unforgivable sin. And that’s what I’ve been doing, up till this evening—encouraging boys of fifteen and sixteen to specialize in history, hours and hours a week, making them read bad writers’ generalizations about subjects on which only our ignorance allows us to generalize; teaching them to reproduce these generalizations in horrid little ‘Essays’ of their own; rotting their minds, in fact, with a diet of soft vagueness; scandalous it was. If these creatures are to be taught anything, it should be something hard and definite. Latin—that’s excellent. Mathematics, physical science. Let them read history for amusement, certainly. But for Heaven’s sake don’t make it the staple of education!” Gumbril Junior spoke with the greatest earnestness, as though he were an inspector of schools, making a report. It was a subject on which, at the moment, he felt very profoundly; he felt profoundly on all subjects while he was talking about them. “I wrote a long letter to the Headmaster about the teaching of history this evening,” he added. “It’s most important.” He shook his head thoughtfully, “Most important.”
“Hora novissima, tempora pessimma sunt, vigilemus,” said Mr. Porteous, in the words of St. Peter Damianus.
“Very true,” Gumbril Senior applauded. “And talking about bad times, Theodore, what do you propose to do now, may I ask?”
“I mean to begin by making some money.”
Gumbril Senior put his hands on his knees, bent forward and laughed, “Ha, ha, ha!” He had a profound bell-like laugh that was like the croaking of a very large and melodious frog. “You won’t,” he said, and shook his head till the hair fell into his eyes. “You won’t,” and he laughed again.
“To make money,” said Mr. Porteous, “one must be really interested in money.”
“And he’s not,” said Gumbril Senior. “None of us are.”
“When I was still uncommonly hard up,” Mr. Porteous continued, “we used to lodge in the same house with a Russian Jew, who was a furrier. That man was interested in money, if you like. It was a passion, an enthusiasm, an ideal. He could have led a comfortable, easy life, and still have made enough to put by something for his old age. But for his high abstract ideal of money he suffered more than Michelangelo ever suffered for his art. He used to work nineteen hours a day, and the other five he slept, lying under his bench, in the dirt, breathing into his lungs the stink and the broken hairs. He is now very rich indeed and does nothing with his money, doesn’t want to do anything, doesn’t know what one does do with it. He desires neither power nor pleasure. His desire for lucre is purely disinterested. He reminds me of Browning’s ‘Grammarian.’ I have a great admiration for him.”
Mr. Porteous’s own passion had been for the poems of Notker Balbulus and St. Bernard. It had taken him nearly twenty years to get himself and his family out of the house where the Russian furrier used to lodge. But Notker was worth it, he used to say; Notker was worth even the weariness and the pallor of a wife who worked beyond her strength, even the shabbiness of ill-dressed and none too well-fed children. He had readjusted his monocle and gone on. But there had been occasions when it needed more than the monocle and the careful, distinguished clothes to keep up his morale. Still, those times were over now; Notker had brought him at last a kind of fame—even, indirectly, a certain small prosperity.
Gumbril Senior turned once more towards his son. “And how do you propose,” he asked, “to make this money?”
Gumbril Junior explained. He had thought it all out in the cab on the way from the station. “It came to me this morning,” he said, “in chapel, during service.”
“Monstrous,” put in Gumbril Senior, with a genuine indignation, “monstrous these mediæval survivals in schools! Chapel, indeed!”
“It came,” Gumbril Junior went on, “like an apocalypse, suddenly, like a divine inspiration. A grand and luminous idea came to me—the idea of Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.”
“And what are Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes?”
“A boon to those whose occupation is sedentary”; Gumbril Junior had already composed his prospectus and his first advertisements: “a comfort to all travellers, civilization’s substitute for steatopygism, indispensable to first-nighters, the concert-goers’ friend, the....”
“Lectulus Dei floridus,” intoned Mr. Porteous.
Your small-clothes sound to me very like one of my old litanies, Theodore.”
“We want scientific descriptions, not litanies,” said Gumbril Senior. “What are Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes?”
“Scientifically, then,” said Gumbril Junior, “my Patent Small-Clothes may be described as trousers with a pneumatic seat, inflateable by means of a tube fitted with a valve; the whole constructed of stout seamless red rubber, enclosed between two layers of cloth.”
“I must say,” said Gumbril Senior on a tone of somewhat grudging approbation, “I have heard of worse inventions. You are too stout, Porteous, to be able to appreciate the idea. We Gumbrils are all a bony lot.”
“When I have taken out a patent for my invention,” his son went on, very business-like and cool, “I shall either sell it to some capitalist, or I shall exploit it commercially myself. In either case, I shall make money, which is more, I may say, than you or any other Gumbril have ever done.”
“Quite right,” said Gumbril Senior, “quite right”; and he laughed very cheerfully. “And nor will you. You can be grateful to your intolerable Aunt Flo for having left you that three hundred a year. You’ll need it. But if you really want a capitalist,” he went on, “I have exactly the man for you. He’s a man who has a mania for buying Tudor houses and making them more Tudor than they are. I’ve pulled half a dozen of the wretched things to pieces and put them together again differently for him.”
“He doesn’t sound much good to me,” said his son.
“Ah, but that’s only his vice. Only his amusement. His business,” Gumbril Senior hesitated.
“Well, what is his business?”
“Well, it seems to be everything. Patent medicine, trade newspapers, bankrupt tobacconist’s stock—he’s talked to me about those and heaps more. He seems to flit like a butterfly in search of honey, or rather money.”
“And he makes it?”
“Well, he pays my fees and he buys more Tudor houses, and he gives me luncheons at the Ritz. That’s all I know.”
“Well, there’s no harm in trying.”
“I’ll write to him,” said Gumbril Senior. “His name is Boldero. He’ll either laugh at your idea or take it and give you nothing for it. Still,” he looked at his son over the top of his spectacles, “if by any conceivable chance you ever should become rich; if, if, if....” And he emphasized the remoteness of the conditional by raising his eyebrows a little higher, by throwing out his hands in a dubious gesture a little farther at every repetition of the word, “if—why, then I’ve got exactly the thing for you. Look at this really delightful little idea I had this afternoon.” He put his hand in his coat pocket and after some sorting and sifting produced a sheet of squared paper on which was roughly drawn the elevation of a house. “For any one with eight or ten thousand to spend, this would be—this would be....” Gumbril Senior smoothed his hair and hesitated, searching for something strong enough to say of his little idea. “Well, this would be much too good for most of the greasy devils who do have eight or ten thousand to spend.”
He passed the sheet to Gumbril Junior, who held it out so that both Mr. Porteous and himself could look at it. Gumbril Senior got up from his chair and, standing behind them, leant over to elucidate and explain.
“You see the idea,” he said, anxious lest they should fail to understand. “A central block of three stories, with low wings of only one, ending in pavilions with a second floor. And the flat roofs of the wings are used as gardens—you see?—protected from the north by a wall. In the east wing there is the kitchen and the garage, with the maids’ rooms in the pavilion at the end. The west is a library, and it has an arcaded loggia along the front. And instead of a solid superstructure corresponding to the maids’ rooms, there’s a pergola with brick piers. You see? And in the main block there’s a Spanish sort of balcony along the whole length at first-floor level; that gives a good horizontal line. And you get the perpendiculars with coigns and raised panels. And the roof’s hidden by a balustrade, and there are balustrades along the open sides of the roof gardens on the wings. All in brick it is. This is the garden front; the entrance front will be admirable too. Do you like it?”
Gumbril Junior nodded. “Very much,” he said.
His father sighed and taking the sketch put it back in his pocket. “You must hurry up with your ten thousand,” he said. “And you Porteous, and you. I’ve been waiting so long to build your splendid house.”
Laughing, Mr. Porteous got up from his chair. “And long, dear Gumbril,” he said, “may you continue to wait. For my splendid house won’t be built this side of New Jerusalem, and you must go on living a long time yet. A long, long time,” Mr. Porteous repeated; and carefully he buttoned up his double-breasted coat, carefully, as though he were adjusting an instrument of precision, he took out and replaced his monocle. Then, very erect and neat, very soldierly and pillar-boxical, he marched towards the door. “You’ve kept me very late to-night,” he said. “Unconscionably late.”
The front door closed heavily behind Mr. Porteous’s departure. Gumbril Senior came upstairs again into the big room on the first floor smoothing down his hair, which the impetuosity of his ascent had once more disarranged.
“That’s a good fellow,” he said of his departed guest, “a splendid fellow.”
“I always admire the monocle,” said Gumbril Junior irrelevantly. But his father turned the irrelevance into relevance.
“He couldn’t have come through without it, I believe. It was a symbol, a proud flag. Poverty’s squalid, not fine at all. The monocle made a kind of difference, you understand. I’m always so enormously thankful I had a little money. I couldn’t have stuck it without. It needs strength, more strength than I’ve got.” He clutched his beard close under the chin and remained for a moment pensively silent. “The advantage of Porteous’s line of business,” he went on at last, reflectively, “is that it can be carried on by oneself, without collaboration. There’s no need to appeal to any one outside oneself, or to have any dealings with other people at all, if one doesn’t want to. That’s so deplorable about architecture. There’s no privacy, so to speak; always this horrible jostling with clients and builders and contractors and people, before one can get anything done. It’s really revolting. I’m not good at people. Most of them I don’t like at all, not at all,” Mr. Gumbril repeated with vehemence. “I don’t deal with them very well; it isn’t my business. My business is architecture. But I don’t often get a chance of practising it. Not properly.”
Gumbril Senior smiled rather sadly. “Still,” he said, “I can do something. I have my talent, I have my imagination. They can’t take those from me. Come and see what I’ve been doing lately.”
He led the way out of the room and mounted, two steps at a time, towards a higher floor. He opened the door of what should have been, in a well-ordered house, the Best Bedroom, and slipped into the darkness.
“Don’t rush in,” he called back to his son, “for God’s sake don’t rush in. You’ll smash something. Wait till I’ve turned on the light. It’s so like these asinine electricians to have hidden the switch behind the door like this.” Gumbril Junior heard him fumbling in the darkness; there was suddenly light. He stepped in.
The only furniture in the room consisted of a couple of long trestle tables. On these, on the mantelpiece and all over the floor, were scattered confusedly, like the elements of a jumbled city, a vast collection of architectural models. There were cathedrals, there were town halls, universities, public libraries, there were three or four elegant little sky-scrapers, there were blocks of offices, huge warehouses, factories, and finally dozens of magnificent country mansions, complete with their terraced gardens, their noble flights of steps, their fountains and ornamental waters and grandly bridged canals, their little rococo pavilions and garden houses.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Gumbril Senior turned enthusiastically towards his son. His long grey hair floated wispily about his head, his spectacles flashed, and behind them his eyes shone with emotion.
“Beautiful,” Gumbril Junior agreed.
“When you’re really rich,” said his father, “I’ll build you one of these.” And he pointed to a little village of Chatsworths clustering, at one end of a long table, round the dome of a vaster and austerer St. Peter’s. “Look at this one, for example.” He picked his way nimbly across the room, seized the little electric reading-lamp that stood between a railway station and a baptistery on the mantelpiece, and was back again in an instant, trailing behind him a long flex that, as it tautened out, twitched one of the crowning pinnacles off the top of a sky-scraper near the fireplace. “Look,” he repeated, “look.” He switched on the current, and moving the lamp back and forth, up and down in front of the miniature palace. “See the beauty of the light and shade,” he said. “There, underneath the great, ponderous cornice, isn’t that fine? And look how splendidly the pilasters carry up the vertical lines. And then the solidity of it, the size, the immense, impending bleakness of it!” He threw up his arms, he turned his eyes upwards as though standing overwhelmed at the foot of some huge precipitous façade. The lights and shadows vacillated wildly through all the city of palaces and domes as he brandished the lamp in ecstasy above his head.
“And then,” he had suddenly stooped down, he was peering and pointing once more into the details of his palace, “then there’s the doorway—all florid and rich with carving. How magnificently and surprisingly it flowers out of the bare walls! Like the colossal writing of Darius, like the figures graven in the bald face of the precipice over Behistun—unexpected and beautiful and human, human in the surrounding emptiness.”
Gumbril Senior brushed back his hair and turned, smiling, to look at his son over the top of his spectacles.
“Very fine,” Gumbril Junior nodded to him. “But isn’t the wall a little too blank? You seem to allow very few windows in this vast palazzo.”
“True,” his father replied, “very true.” He sighed. “I’m afraid this design would hardly do for England. It’s meant for a place where there’s some sun—where you do your best to keep the light out, instead of letting it in, as you have to do here. Windows are the curse of architecture in this country. Your walls have to be like sieves, all holes, it’s heart-breaking. If you wanted me to build you this house, you’d have to live in Barbados or somewhere like that.”
“There’s nothing I should like better,” said Gumbril Junior.
“Another great advantage of sunny countries,” Gumbril Senior pursued, “is that one can really live like an aristocrat, in privacy, by oneself. No need to look out on the dirty world or to let the dirty world look in on you. Here’s this great house, for example, looking out on the world through a few dark portholes and a single cavernous doorway. But look inside.” He held his lamp above the courtyard that was at the heart of the palace. Gumbril Junior leaned and looked, like his father. “All the life looks inwards—into a lovely courtyard, a more than Spanish patio. Look there at the treble tiers of arcades, the vaulted cloisters for your cool peripatetic meditations, the central Triton spouting white water into a marble pool, the mosaic work on the floor and flowering up the walls, brilliant against the white stucco. And there’s the archway that leads out into the gardens. And now you must come and have a look at the garden front.”
He walked round with his lamp to the other side of the table. There was suddenly a crash; the wire had twitched a cathedral from off the table. It lay on the floor in disastrous ruin as though shattered by some appalling cataclysm.
“Hell and death!” said Gumbril Senior in an outburst of Elizabethan fury. He put down the lamp and ran to see how irreparable the disaster had been. “They’re so horribly expensive, these models,” he explained, as he bent over the ruins. Tenderly he picked up the pieces and replaced them on the table. “It might have been worse,” he said at last, brushing the dust off his hands. “Though I’m afraid that dome will never be quite the same again.” Picking up the lamp once more, he held it high above his head and stood looking out, with a melancholy satisfaction, over his creations. “And to think,” he said after a pause, “that I’ve been spending these last days designing model cottages for workmen at Bletchley! I’m in luck to have got the job, of course, but really, that a civilized man should have to do jobs like that! It’s too much. In the old days these creatures built their own hovels, and very nice and suitable they were too. The architects busied themselves with architecture—which is the expression of human dignity and greatness, which is man’s protest, not his miserable acquiescence. You can’t do much protesting in a model cottage at seven hundred pounds a time. A little, no doubt, you can protest a little; you can give your cottage decent proportions and avoid sordidness and vulgarity. But that’s all; it’s really a negative process. You can only begin to protest positively and actively when you abandon the petty human scale and build for giants—when you build for the spirit and the imagination of man, not for his little body. Model cottages, indeed!”
Mr. Gumbril snorted with indignation. “When I think of Alberti!” And he thought of Alberti—Alberti, the noblest Roman of them all, the true and only Roman. For the Romans themselves had lived their own actual lives, sordidly and extravagantly in the middle of a vulgar empire. Alberti and his followers in the Renaissance lived the ideal Roman life. They put Plutarch into their architecture. They took the detestable real Cato, the Brutus of history, and made of them Roman heroes to walk as guides and models before them. Before Alberti there were no true Romans, and with Piranesi’s death the race began to wither towards extinction.
“And when I think of Brunelleschi!” Gumbril Senior went on to remember with passion the architect who had suspended on eight thin flying ribs of marble the lightest of all domes and the loveliest.
“And when of Michelangelo! The grim, enormous apse.... And of Wren and of Palladio, when I think of all these——” Gumbril Senior waved his arms and was silent. He could not put into words what he felt when he thought of them.
Gumbril Junior looked at his watch. “Half-past two,” he said. “Time to go to bed.”
“Mister Gumbril!” Surprise was mingled with delight. “This is indeed a pleasure!” Delight was now the prevailing emotion expressed by the voice that advanced, as yet without a visible source, from the dark recesses of the shop.
“The pleasure, Mr. Bojanus, is mine.” Gumbril closed the shop door behind him.
A very small man, dressed in a frock-coat, popped out from a canyon that opened, a mere black crevice, between two stratified precipices of mid-season suitings, and advancing into the open space before the door bowed with an old-world grace, revealing a nacreous scalp thinly mantled with long damp creepers of brown hair.
“And to what, may I ask, do I owe this pleasure, sir?” Mr. Bojanus looked up archly with a sideways cock of his head that tilted the rigid points of his waxed moustache. The fingers of his right hand were thrust into the bosom of his frock-coat and his toes were turned out in the dancing-master’s First Position. “A light spring great-coat, is it? Or a new suit? I notice,” his eye travelled professionally up and down Gumbril’s long, thin form, “I notice that the garments you are wearing at present, Mr. Gumbril, look—how shall I say?—well, a trifle negleejay, as the French would put it, a trifle negleejay.”
Gumbril looked down at himself. He resented Mr. Bojanus’s negleejay, he was pained and wounded by the aspersion. Negleejay? And he had fancied that he really looked rather elegant and distinguished (but, after all, he always looked that, even in rags)—no, that he looked positively neat, like Mr. Porteous, positively soldierly in his black jacket and his musical comedy trousers and his patent leather shoes. And the black felt hat—didn’t that just add the foreign, the Southern touch which saved the whole composition from banality? He regarded himself, trying to see his clothes—garments, Mr. Bojanus had called them; garments, good Lord!—through the tailor’s expert eyes. There were sagging folds about the overloaded pockets, there was a stain on his waistcoat, the knees of his trousers were baggy and puckered like the bare knees of Hélène Fourmont in Rubens’s fur-coat portrait at Vienna. Yes, it was all horribly negleejay. He felt depressed; but looking at Mr. Bojanus’s studied and professional correctness, he was a little comforted. That frock-coat, for example. It was like something in a very modern picture—such a smooth, unwrinkled cylinder about the chest, such a sense of pure and abstract conic-ness in the sleekly rounded skirts! Nothing could have been less negleejay. He was reassured.
“I want you,” he said at last, clearing his throat importantly, “to make me a pair of trousers to a novel specification of my own. It’s a new idea.” And he gave a brief description of Gumbril’s Patent Small Clothes.
Mr. Bojanus listened with attention.
“I can make them for you,” he said, when the description was finished. “I can make them for you—if you really wish, Mr. Gumbril,” he added.
“Thank you,” said Gumbril.
“And do you intend, may I ask, Mr. Gumbril, to wear these ... these garments?”
Guiltily, Gumbril denied himself. “Only to demonstrate the idea, Mr. Bojanus. I am exploiting the invention commercially, you see.”
“Commercially? I see, Mr. Gumbril.”
“Perhaps you would like a share,” suggested Gumbril.
Mr. Bojanus shook his head. “It wouldn’t do for my cleeantail, I fear, Mr. Gumbril. You could ’ardly expect the Best People to wear such things.”
“Couldn’t you?”
Mr. Bojanus went on shaking his head. “I know them,” he said, “I know the Best People. Well.” And he added with an irrelevance that was, perhaps, only apparent, “Between ourselves, Mr. Gumbril, I am a great admirer of Lenin....”
“So am I,” said Gumbril, “theoretically. But then I have so little to lose to Lenin. I can afford to admire him. But you, Mr. Bojanus, you, the prosperous bourgeois—oh, purely in the economic sense of the word, Mr. Bojanus....”
Mr. Bojanus accepted the explanation with one of his old-world bows.
“... you would be among the first to suffer if an English Lenin were to start his activities here.”
“There, Mr. Gumbril, if I may be allowed to say so, you are wrong.” Mr. Bojanus removed his hand from his bosom and employed it to emphasize the points of his discourse. “When the revolution comes, Mr. Gumbril—the great and necessary revolution, as Alderman Beckford called it—it won’t be the owning of a little money that’ll get a man into trouble. It’ll be his class-habits, Mr. Gumbril, his class-speech, his class-education. It’ll be Shibboleth all over again, Mr. Gumbril; mark my words. The Red Guards will stop people in the street and ask them to say some such word as ‘towel.’ If they call it ‘towel,’ like you and your friends, Mr. Gumbril, why then....” Mr. Bojanus went through the gestures of pointing a rifle and pulling the trigger; he clicked his tongue against his teeth to symbolize the report.... “That’ll be the end of them. But if they say ‘tèaul,’ like the rest of us, Mr. Gumbril, it’ll be: ‘Pass Friend and Long Live the Proletariat.’ Long live Tèaul.”
“I’m afraid you may be right,” said Gumbril.
“I’m convinced of it,” said Mr. Bojanus. “It’s my clients, Mr. Gumbril, it’s the Best People that the other people resent. It’s their confidence, their ease, it’s the habit their money and their position give them of ordering people about, it’s the way they take their place in the world for granted, it’s their prestige, which the other people would like to deny, but can’t—it’s all that, Mr. Gumbril, that’s so galling.”
Gumbril nodded. He himself had envied his securer friends their power of ignoring the humanity of those who were not of their class. To do that really well, one must always have lived in a large house full of clockwork servants; one must never have been short of money, never at a restaurant ordered the cheaper thing instead of the more delicious; one must never have regarded a policeman as anything but one’s paid defender against the lower orders, never for a moment have doubted one’s divine right to do, within the accepted limits, exactly what one liked without a further thought to anything or any one but oneself and one’s own enjoyment. Gumbril had been brought up among these blessed beings; but he was not one of them. Alas? or fortunately? He hardly knew which.
“And what good do you expect the revolution to do, Mr. Bojanus?” he asked at last.
Mr. Bojanus replaced his hand in his bosom. “None whatever, Mr. Gumbril,” he said. “None whatever.”
“But Liberty,” Gumbril suggested, “equality and all that. What about those, Mr. Bojanus?”
Mr. Bojanus smiled up at him tolerantly and kindly, as he might have smiled at some one who had suggested, shall we say, that evening trousers should be turned up at the bottom. “Liberty, Mr. Gumbril?” he said; “you don’t suppose any serious-minded person imagines a revolution is going to bring liberty, do you?”
“The people who make the revolution always seem to ask for liberty.”
“But do they ever get it, Mr. Gumbril?” Mr. Bojanus cocked his head playfully and smiled. “Look at ’istory, Mr. Gumbril, look at ’istory. First it’s the French Revolution. They ask for political liberty. And they gets it. Then comes the Reform Bill, then Forty-Eight, then all the Franchise Acts and Votes for Women—always more and more political liberty. And what’s the result, Mr. Gumbril? Nothing at all. Who’s freer for political liberty? Not a soul, Mr. Gumbril. There was never a greater swindle ’atched in the ’ole of ’istory. And when you think ’ow those poor young men like Shelley talked about it—it’s pathetic,” said Mr. Bojanus, shaking his head, “reelly pathetic. Political liberty’s a swindle because a man doesn’t spend his time being political. He spends it sleeping, eating, amusing himself a little and working—mostly working. When they’d got all the political liberty they wanted—or found they didn’t want—they began to understand this. And so now it’s all for the industrial revolution, Mr. Gumbril. But bless you, that’s as big a swindle as the other. How can there ever be liberty under any system? No amount of profit-sharing or self-government by the workers, no amount of hyjeenic conditions or cocoa villages or recreation grounds can get rid of the fundamental slavery—the necessity of working. Liberty? why, it doesn’t exist! There’s no liberty in this world; only gilded cages. And then, Mr. Gumbril, even suppose you could somehow get rid of the necessity of working, suppose a man’s time were all leisure. Would he be free then? I say nothing of the natural slavery of eating and sleeping and all that, Mr. Gumbril; I say nothing of that, because that, if I may say so, would be too ’air-splitting and metaphysical. But what I do ask you is this,” and Mr. Bojanus wagged his forefinger almost menacingly at the sleeping partner in this dialogue: “would a man with unlimited leisure be free, Mr. Gumbril? I say he would not. Not unless he ’appened to be a man like you or me, Mr. Gumbril, a man of sense, a man of independent judgment. An ordinary man would not be free. Because he wouldn’t know how to occupy his leisure except in some way that would be forced on ’im by other people. People don’t know ’ow to entertain themselves now; they leave it to other people to do it for them. They swallow what’s given them. They ’ave to swallow it, whether they like it or not. Cinemas, newspapers, magazines, gramophones, football matches, wireless telephones—take them or leave them, if you want to amuse youself. The ordinary man can’t leave them. He takes; and what’s that but slavery? And so you see, Mr. Gumbril,” Mr. Bojanus smiled with a kind of roguish triumph, “you see that even in the purely ’ypothetical case of a man with indefinite leisure, there still would be no freedom.... And the case, as I have said, is purely ’ypothetical; at any rate so far as concerns the sort of people who want a revolution. And as for the sort of people who do enjoy leisure, even now—why I think, Mr. Gumbril, you and I know enough about the Best People to know that freedom, except possibly sexual freedom, is not their strongest point. And sexual freedom—what’s that?” Mr. Bojanus dramatically inquired. “You and I, Mr. Gumbril,” he answered confidentially, “we know. It’s an ’orrible, ’ideous slavery. That’s what it is. Or am I wrong, Mr. Gumbril?”
“Quite right, quite right, Mr. Bojanus,” Gumbril hastened to reply.
“From all of which,” continued Mr. Bojanus, “it follows that, except for a few, a very few people like you and me, Mr. Gumbril, there’s no such thing as liberty. It’s an ’oax, Mr. Gumbril. An ’orrible plant. And if I may be allowed to say so,” Mr. Bojanus lowered his voice, but still spoke with emphasis, “a bloody swindle.”
“But in that case, Mr. Bojanus, why are you so anxious to have a revolution?” Gumbril inquired.
Thoughtfully, Mr. Bojanus twisted to a finer point his waxed moustaches. “Well,” he said at last, “it would be a nice change. I was always one for change and a little excitement. And then there’s the scientific interest. You never quite know ’ow an experiment will turn out, do you, Mr. Gumbril? I remember when I was a boy, my old dad—a great gardener he was, a regular floriculturist, you might say, Mr. Gumbril—he tried the experiment of grafting a sprig of Gloire de Dijon on to a black currant bush. And, would you believe it? the roses came out black, coal black, Mr. Gumbril. Nobody would ever have guessed that if the thing had never been tried. And that’s what I say about the revolution. You don’t know what’ll come of it till you try. Black roses, blue roses—’oo knows, Mr. Gumbril, ’oo knows?”
“Who indeed?” Gumbril looked at his watch. “About those trousers ...” he added.
“Those garments,” corrected Mr. Bojanus. “Ah, yes. Should we say next Tuesday?”
“Let us say next Tuesday.” Gumbril opened the shop door. “Good morning, Mr. Bojanus.”
Mr. Bojanus bowed him out, as though he had been a prince of the blood.
The sun was shining and at the end of the street between the houses the sky was blue. Gauzily the distances faded to a soft rich indistinctness; there were veils of golden muslin thickening down the length of every vista. On the trees in the Hanover Square gardens the young leaves were still so green that they seemed to be alight, green fire, and the sooty trunks looked blacker and dirtier than ever. It would have been a pleasant and apposite thing if a cuckoo had started calling. But though the cuckoo was silent it was a happy day. A day, Gumbril reflected, as he strolled idly along, to be in love.
From the world of tailors Gumbril passed into that of the artificial pearl merchants and with a still keener appreciation of the amorous qualities of this clear spring day, he began a leisured march along the perfumed pavements of Bond Street. He thought with a profound satisfaction of those sixty-three papers on the Risorgimento. How pleasant it was to waste time! And Bond Street offered so many opportunities for wasting it agreeably. He trotted round the Spring Exhibition at the Grosvenor and came out, a little regretting, he had to confess, his eighteen pence for admission. After that, he pretended that he wanted to buy a grand piano. When he had finished practising his favourite passages on the magnificent instrument to which they obsequiously introduced him, he looked in for a few moments at Sotheby’s, sniffed among the ancient books and strolled on again, admiring the cigars, the lucid scent-bottles, the socks, the old masters, the emerald necklaces, everything, in fact, in all the shops he passed.
‘Forthcoming Exhibition of Works by Casimir Lypiatt.’ The announcement caught his eye. And so poor old Lypiatt was on the warpath again, he reflected, as he pushed open the doors of the Albemarle Galleries. Poor old Lypiatt! Dear old Lypiatt, even. He liked Lypiatt. Though he had his defects. It would be fun to see him again.
Gumbril found himself in the midst of a dismal collection of etchings. He passed them in review, wondering why it was that, in these hard days when no painter can sell a picture, almost any dull fool who can scratch a conventional etcher’s view of two boats, a suggested cloud and the flat sea should be able to get rid of his prints by the dozen and at guineas apiece. He was interrupted in his speculations by the approach of the assistant in charge of the gallery. He came up shyly and uncomfortably, but with the conscientious determination of one ambitious to do his duty and make good. He was a very young man with pale hair, to which heavy oiling had given a curious greyish colour, and a face of such childish contour and so imberb that he looked like a little boy playing at grown-ups. He had only been at this job a few weeks and he found it very difficult.
“This,” he remarked, with a little introductory cough, pointing to one view of the two boats and the flat sea, “is an earlier state than this.” And he pointed to another view, where the boats were still two and the sea seemed just as flat—though possibly, on a closer inspection, it might really have been flatter.
“Indeed,” said Gumbril.
The assistant was rather pained by his coldness. He blushed; but constrained himself to go on. “Some excellent judges,” he said, “prefer the earlier state, though it is less highly finished.”
“Ah?”
“Beautiful atmosphere, isn’t it?” The assistant put his head on one side and pursed his childish lips appreciatively.
Gumbril nodded.
With desperation, the assistant indicated the shadowed rump of one of the boats. “A wonderful feeling in this passage,” he said, redder than ever.
“Very intense,” said Gumbril.
The assistant smiled at him gratefully. “That’s the word,” he said, delighted. “Intense. That’s it. Very intense.” He repeated the word several times as though to make sure of remembering it when the occasion next presented itself. He was determined to make good.
“I see Mr. Lypiatt is to have a show here soon,” remarked Gumbril, who had had enough of the boats.
“He is making the final arrangements with Mr. Albemarle at this very moment,” said the assistant triumphantly, with the air of one who produces, at the dramatic and critical moment, a rabbit out of the empty hat.
“You don’t say so?” Gumbril was duly impressed. “Then I’ll wait till he comes out,” he said, and sat down with his back to the boats.
The assistant returned to his desk and picked up the gold-belted fountain pen which his Aunt had given him when he first went into business, last Christmas. “Very intense,” he wrote in capitals on a half-sheet of notepaper. “The feeling in this passage is very intense.” He studied the paper for a few moments, then folded it up carefully and put it away in his waistcoat pocket. “Always make a note of it.” That was one of the business mottoes he had himself written out so laboriously in Indian ink and old English lettering. It hung over his bed between “The Lord is my Shepherd,” which his mother had given him, and a quotation from Dr. Frank Crane, “A smiling face sells more goods than a clever tongue.” Still, a clever tongue, the young assistant had often reflected, was a very useful thing, especially in this job. He wondered whether one could say that the composition of a picture was very intense. Mr. Albemarle was very keen on the composition, he noticed. But perhaps it was better to stick to plain ‘fine,’ which was a little commonplace, perhaps, but very safe. He would ask Mr. Albemarle about it. And then there was all that stuff about plastic values and pure plasticity. He sighed. It was all very difficult. A chap might be as willing and eager to make good as he liked; but when it came to this about atmosphere and intense passages and plasticity—well, really, what could a chap do? Make a note of it. It was the only thing.
In Mr. Albemarle’s private room Casimir Lypiatt thumped the table. “Size, Mr. Albemarle,” he was saying, “size and vehemence and spiritual significance—that’s what the old fellows had, and we haven’t....” He gesticulated as he talked, his face worked and his green eyes, set in their dark, charred orbits, were full of a troubled light. The forehead was precipitous, the nose long and sharp; in the bony and almost fleshless face, the lips of the wide mouth were surprisingly full.
“Precisely, precisely,” said Mr. Albemarle in his juicy voice. He was a round, smooth, little man with a head like an egg; he spoke, he moved with a certain pomp, a butlerish gravity, that were evidently meant to be ducal.
“That’s what I’ve set myself to recapture,” Lypiatt went on: “the size, the masterfulness of the masters.” He felt a warmth running through him as he spoke, flushing his cheeks, pulsing hotly behind the eyes, as though he had drunk a draught of some heartening red wine. His own words elated him, and drunkenly gesticulating, he was as though drunken. The greatness of the masters—he felt it in him. He knew his own power, he knew, he knew. He could do all that they had done. Nothing was beyond his strength.
Egg-headed Albemarle confronted him, impeccably the butler, exacerbatingly serene. Albemarle too should be fired. He struck the table once more, he broke out again:
“It’s been my mission,” he shouted, “all these years.”
All these years.... Time had worn the hair from his temples; the high, steep forehead seemed higher than it really was. He was forty now; the turbulent young Lypiatt who had once declared that no man could do anything worth doing after he was thirty, was forty now. But in these fiery moments he could forget the years, he could forget the disappointments, the unsold pictures, the bad reviews. “My mission,” he repeated; “and by God! I feel, I know I can carry it through.”
Warmly the blood pulsed behind his eyes.
“Quite,” said Mr. Albemarle, nodding the egg. “Quite.”
“And how small the scale is nowadays!” Lypiatt went on, rhapsodically. “How trivial the conception, how limited the scope! You see no painter-sculptor-poets, like Michelangelo; no scientist-artists, like Leonardo; no mathematician-courtiers, like Boscovitch; no impresario-musicians, like Handel; no geniuses of all trades, like Wren. I have set myself against this abject specialization of ours. I stand alone, opposing it with my example.” Lypiatt raised his hand. Like the statue of Liberty, standing colossal and alone.
“Nevertheless,” began Mr. Albemarle.
“Painter, poet, musician,” cried Lypiatt. “I am all three. I....”
“... there is a danger of—how shall I put it—dissipating one’s energies,” Mr. Albemarle went on with determination. Discreetly, he looked at his watch. This conversation, he thought, seemed to be prolonging itself unnecessarily.
“There is a greater danger in letting them stagnate and atrophy,” Lypiatt retorted. “Let me give you my experience.” Vehemently, he gave it.
Out in the gallery, among the boats, the views of the Grand Canal, and the Firth of Forth, Gumbril placidly ruminated. Poor old Lypiatt, he was thinking. Dear old Lypiatt, even, in spite of his fantastic egotism. Such a bad painter, such a bombinating poet, such a loud emotional improviser on the piano! And going on like this, year after year, pegging away at the same old things—always badly! And always without a penny, always living in the most hideous squalor! Magnificent and pathetic old Lypiatt!
A door suddenly opened and a loud, unsteady voice, now deep and harsh, now breaking to shrillness, exploded into the gallery.
“... like a Veronese,” it was saying; “enormous, vehement, a great swirling composition” (‘swirling composition’—mentally, the young assistant made a note of that), “but much more serious, of course, much more spiritually significant, much more——”
“Lypiatt!” Gumbril had risen from his chair, had turned, had advanced, holding out his hand.
“Why, it’s Gumbril. Good Lord!” and Lypiatt seized the proffered hand with an excruciating cordiality. He seemed to be in exuberantly good spirits. “We’re settling about my show, Mr. Albemarle and I,” he explained. “You know Gumbril, Mr. Albemarle?”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Mr. Albemarle. “Our friend, Mr. Lypiatt,” he added richly, “has the true artistic temp——”
“It’s going to be magnificent.” Lypiatt could not wait till Mr. Albemarle had finished speaking. He gave Gumbril a heroic blow on the shoulder.
“... artistic temperament, as I was saying,” pursued Mr. Albemarle. “He is altogether too impatient and enthusiastic for us poor people ...” a ducal smile of condescension accompanied this graceful act of self-abasement ... “who move in the prosaic, practical, workaday world.”
Lypiatt laughed, a loud, discordant peal. He didn’t seem to mind being accused of having an artistic temperament; he seemed, indeed, to enjoy it, if anything. “Fire and water,” he said aphoristically, “brought together, beget steam. Mr. Albemarle and I go driving along like a steam engine. Psh, psh!” He worked his arms like a pair of alternate pistons. He laughed; but Mr. Albemarle only coldly and courteously smiled. “I was just telling Mr. Albemarle about the great Crucifixion I’ve just been doing. It’s as big and headlong as a Veronese, but much more serious, more....”
Behind them the little assistant was expounding to a new visitor the beauties of the etchings. “Very intense,” he was saying, “the feeling in this passage.” The shadow, indeed, clung with an insistent affection round the stern of the boat. “And what a fine, what a——” he hesitated for an instant, and under his pale, oiled hair his face became suddenly very red—“what a swirling composition.” He looked anxiously at the visitor. The remark had been received without comment. He felt immensely relieved.
They left the galleries together. Lypiatt set the pace, striding along at a great rate and with a magnificent brutality through the elegant and leisured crowd, gesticulating and loudly talking as he went. He carried his hat in his hand; his tie was brilliantly orange. People turned to look at him as he passed and he liked it. He had, indeed, a remarkable face—a face that ought by rights to have belonged to a man of genius. Lypiatt was aware of it. The man of genius, he liked to say, bears upon his brow a kind of mark of Cain, by which men recognize him at once—“and having recognized, generally stone him,” he would add with that peculiar laugh he always uttered whenever he said anything rather bitter or cynical; a laugh that was meant to show that the bitterness, the cynicism, justifiable as events might have made them, were really only a mask, and that beneath it the artist was still serenely and tragically smiling. Lypiatt thought a great deal about the ideal artist. That titanic abstraction stalked within his own skin. He was it—a little too consciously, perhaps.
“This time,” he kept repeating, “they’ll be bowled over. This time.... It’s going to be terrific.” And with the blood beating behind his eyes, with the exultant consciousness and certainty of power growing and growing in him with every word he spoke, Lypiatt began to describe the pictures there would be at his show; he talked about the preface he was writing to the catalogue, the poems that would be printed in it by way of literary complement to the pictures. He talked, he talked.
Gumbril listened, not very attentively. He was wondering how any one could talk so loud, could boast so extravagantly. It was as though the man had to shout in order to convince himself of his own existence. Poor Lypiatt; after all these years, Gumbril supposed, he must have some doubts about it. Ah, but this time, this time he was going to bowl them all over.
“You’re pleased, then, with what you’ve done recently,” he said at the end of one of Lypiatt’s long tirades.
“Pleased?” exclaimed Lypiatt; “I should think I was.”
Gumbril might have reminded him that he had been as well pleased in the past and that ‘they’ had by no means been bowled over. He preferred, however, to say nothing. Lypiatt went on about the size and universality of the old masters. He himself, it was tacitly understood, was one of them.
They parted near the bottom of the Tottenham Court Road, Lypiatt to go northward to his studio off Maple Street, Gumbril to pay one of his secret visits to those rooms of his in Great Russell Street. He had taken them nearly a year ago now, two little rooms over a grocer’s shop, promising himself goodness only knew what adventures in them. But somehow there had been no adventures. Still, it had pleased him, all the same, to be able to go there from time to time when he was in London and to think, as he sat in solitude before his gas fire, that there was literally not a soul in the universe who knew where he was. He had an almost childish affection for mysteries and secrets.
“Good-bye,” said Gumbril, raising his hand to the salute. “And I’ll beat up some people for dinner on Friday.” (For they had agreed to meet again.) He turned away, thinking that he had spoken the last words; but he was mistaken.
“Oh, by the way,” said Lypiatt, who had also turned to go, but who now came stepping quickly after his companion. “Can you, by any chance, lend me five pounds. Only till after the exhibition, you know. I’m a bit short.”
Poor old Lypiatt! But it was with reluctance that Gumbril parted from his Treasury notes.
Lypiatt had a habit, which some of his friends found rather trying—and not only friends, for Lypiatt was ready to let the merest acquaintances, the most absolute strangers, even, into the secrets of his inspiration—a habit of reciting at every possible opportunity his own verses. He would declaim in a voice loud and tremulous, with an emotion that never seemed to vary with the varying subject-matter of his poems, for whole quarters of an hour at a stretch; would go on declaiming till his auditors were overwhelmed with such a confusion of embarrassment and shame, that the blood rushed to their cheeks and they dared not meet one another’s eyes.
He was declaiming now; not merely across the dinner table to his own friends, but to the whole restaurant. For at the first reverberating lines of his latest, “The Conquistador,” there had been a startled turning of heads, a craning of necks from every corner of the room. The people who came to this Soho restaurant because it was, notoriously, so ‘artistic,’ looked at one another significantly and nodded; they were getting their money’s worth, this time. And Lypiatt, with a fine air of rapt unconsciousness, went on with his recitation.
“Look down on Mexico, Conquistador”—that was the refrain.
The Conquistador, Lypiatt had made it clear, was the Artist, and the Vale of Mexico on which he looked down, the towered cities of Tlacopan and Chalco, of Tenochtitlan and Iztapalapan symbolized—well, it was difficult to say precisely what. The universe, perhaps?
“Look down,” cried Lypiatt, with a quivering voice.
“Not ‘dream,’” said Gumbril, putting down the glass from which he had been profoundly drinking. “You can’t possibly say ‘dream,’ you know.”
“Why do you interrupt me?” Lypiatt turned on him angrily. His wide mouth twitched at the corners, his whole long face worked with excitement. “Why don’t you let me finish?” He allowed his hand, which had hung awkwardly in the air above him, suspended, as it were, at the top of a gesture, to sink slowly to the table. “Imbecile!” he said, and once more picked up his knife and fork.
“But really,” Gumbril insisted, “you can’t say ‘dream.’ Can you now, seriously?” He had drunk the best part of a bottle of Burgundy and he felt good-humoured, obstinate and a little bellicose.
“And why not?” Lypiatt asked.
“Oh, because one simply can’t.” Gumbril leaned back in his chair, smiled and caressed his drooping blond moustache. “Not in this year of grace, nineteen twenty-two.”
“But why?” Lypiatt repeated, with exasperation.
“Because it’s altogether too late in the day,” declared precious Mr. Mercaptan, rushing up to his emphasis with flutes and roaring, like a true Conquistador, to fall back, however, at the end of the sentence rather ignominiously into a breathless confusion. He was a sleek, comfortable young man with smooth brown hair parted in the centre and conducted in a pair of flowing curves across the temples, to be looped in damp curls behind his ears. His face ought to have been rather more exquisite, rather more refinedly dix-huitième than it actually was. It had a rather gross, snouty look, which was sadly out of harmony with Mr. Mercaptan’s inimitably graceful style. For Mr. Mercaptan had a style and used it, delightfully, in his middle articles for the literary weeklies. His most precious work, however, was that little volume of essays, prose poems, vignettes and paradoxes, in which he had so brilliantly illustrated his favourite theme—the pettiness, the simian limitations, the insignificance and the absurd pretentiousness of Homo soi-disant Sapiens. Those who met Mr. Mercaptan personally often came away with the feeling that perhaps, after all, he was right in judging so severely of humanity.
“Too late in the day,” he repeated. “Times have changed. Sunt lacrymæ rerum, nos et mutamur in illis.” He laughed his own applause.
“Quot homines, tot disputandum est,” said Gumbril, taking another sip of his Beaune Supérieure. At the moment, he was all for Mercaptan.
“But why is it too late?” Lypiatt insisted.
Mr. Mercaptan made a delicate gesture. “Ça se sent, mon cher ami,” he said, “ça ne s’explique pas.” Satan, it is said, carries hell in his heart; so it was with Mr. Mercaptan—wherever he was, it was Paris. “Dreams in nineteen twenty-two....” He shrugged his shoulders.
“After you’ve accepted the war, swallowed the Russian famine,” said Gumbril. “Dreams!”
“They belonged to the Rostand epoch,” said Mr. Mercaptan, with a little titter. “Le Rève—ah!”
Lypiatt dropped his knife and fork with a clatter and leaned forward, eager for battle. “Now I have you,” he said, “now I have you on the hip. You’ve given yourselves away. You’ve given away the secret of your spiritual poverty, your weakness and pettiness and impotence....”
“Impotence? You malign me, sir,” said Gumbril.
Shearwater ponderously stirred. He had been silent all this time, sitting with hunched shoulders, his elbows on the table, his big round head bent forward, absorbed, apparently, in the slow meticulous crumbling of a piece of bread. Sometimes he put a piece of crust in his mouth and under the bushy brown moustache his jaw moved slowly, ruminatively, with a sideways motion, like a cow’s. He nudged Gumbril with his elbow. “Ass,” he said, “be quiet.”