Antic Hay (11 page)

‘Oh, a terrible evening,' Mrs Viveash concluded. ‘The only thing which kept up my spirits was the spectacle of Bruin's bad temper. You've no idea, Bruin, what an incomparable comic you can be.'

Bruin ignored the remark. With an expression of painfully repressed disgust he was eating a hard-boiled egg. Myra's caprices were becoming more and more impossible. That Hampton Court business had been bad enough; but when it came to eating in the street, in the middle of a lot of filthy workmen – well, really, that was rather too much.

Mrs Viveash looked about her. ‘Am I never to know who this mysterious person is?' She pointed to Shearwater, who was standing a little apart from the group, his back leaning against the park railings and staring thoughtfully at the ground.

‘The physiologue,' Coleman explained, ‘and he has the key. The key, the key!' He hammered the pavement with his stick.

Gumbril performed the introduction in more commonplace style.

‘You don't seem to take much interest in us, Mr Shearwater,' Myra called expiringly. Shearwater looked up; Mrs Viveash regarded him intently through pale, unwavering eyes, smiling as she looked that queer, downward-turning smile which gave to her face, through its mask of laughter, a peculiar expression of agony. ‘You don't seem to take much interest in us,' she repeated.

Shearwater shook his heavy head. ‘No,' he said, ‘I don't think I do.'

‘Why don't you?'

‘Why should I? There's not time to be interested in everything. One can only be interested in what's worth while.'

‘And we're not worth while?'

‘Not to me personally,' replied Shearwater with candour. ‘The Great Wall of China, the political situation in Italy, the habits of Trematodes – all these are most interesting in themselves. But they aren't interesting to me; I don't permit them to be. I haven't the leisure.'

‘And what do you allow yourself to be interested in?'

‘Shall we go?' said Bruin impatiently; he had succeeded in swallowing the last fragment of his hard-boiled egg. Mrs Viveash did not answer, did not even look at him.

Shearwater, who had hesitated before replying, was about to speak. But Coleman answered for him. ‘Be respectful,' he said to Mrs Viveash. ‘This is a great man. He reads no papers, not even those in which our Mercaptan so beautifully writes. He does not know what a beaver is. And he lives for nothing but the kidneys.'

Mrs Viveash smiled her smile of agony. ‘Kidneys? But what a
memento mori!
There are other portions of the anatomy.' She threw back her cloak, revealing an arm, a bare shoulder, a slant of pectoral muscle. She was wearing a white dress that, leaving her back and shoulders bare, came up, under either arm, to a point in front and was held there by a golden thread about the neck. ‘For example,' she said, and twisted her hand several times over and over, making the slender arm turn at the elbow, as though to demonstrate the movement of the articulations and the muscular play.

‘
Memento vivere
,' Mr Mercaptan aptly commented. ‘
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus
.'

Mrs Viveash dropped her arm and pulled the cloak back into place. She looked at Shearwater, who had followed all her movements with conscientious attention, and who now nodded with an expression of interrogation on his face, as though to ask: what next?

‘We all know that you've got beautiful arms,' said Bruin angrily. ‘There's no need for you to make an exhibition of them in the street, at midnight. Let's get out of this.' He laid his hand on her shoulder and made as if to draw her away. ‘We'd better be going. Goodness knows what's happening behind us.' He indicated with a little movement of the head the loiterers round the coffee-stall. ‘Some disturbance among the
canaille
.'

Mrs Viveash looked round. The cab-drivers and the other consumers of midnight coffee had gathered in an interested circle, curious and sympathetic, round the figure of a woman who was sitting, like a limp bundle tied up in black cotton and mackintosh, on the stall-keeper's high stool, leaning wearily against the wall of the booth. A man stood beside her drinking tea out of a thick white cup. Every one was talking at once.

‘Mayn't the poor wretches talk?' asked Mrs Viveash, turning back to Bruin. ‘I never knew any one who had the lower classes on the brain as much as you have.'

‘I loathe them,' said Bruin. ‘I hate every one poor, or ill, or old. Can't abide them; they make me positively sick.'

‘
Quelle âme bien-née
,' piped Mr Mercaptan. ‘And how well and frankly you express what we all feel and lack the courage to say.'

Lypiatt gave vent to indignant laughter.

‘I remember when I was a little boy,' Bruin went on, ‘my old grandfather used to tell me stories about his childhood. He told me that when he was about five or six, just before the passing of the Reform Bill of ‘thirty-two, there was a song which all right-thinking people used to sing, with a chorus that went like this: “Rot the People, blast the People, damn the Lower Classes”. I wish I knew the rest of the words and the tune. It must have been a good song.'

Coleman was enraptured with the song. He shouldered his walking-stick and began marching round and round the nearest lamp-post chanting the words to a stirring march tune. ‘Rot the People, blast the People . . .' He marked the rhythm with heavy stamps of his feet.

‘Ah, if only they'd invent servants with internal combustion engines,' said Bruin, almost pathetically. ‘However well trained they are, they always betray their humanity occasionally. And that is really intolerable.'

‘How tedious is a guilty conscience!' Gumbril murmured the quotation.

‘But Mr Shearwater,' said Myra, bringing back the conversation to more congenial themes, ‘hasn't told us yet what he thinks of arms.'

‘Nothing at all,' said Shearwater. ‘I'm occupied with the regulation of the blood at the moment.'

‘But is it true what he says, Theodore?' She appealed to Gumbril.

‘I should think so.' Gumbril's answer was rather dim and remote. He was straining to hear the talk of Bruin's
canaille,
and Mrs Viveash's question seemed a little irrelevant.

‘I used to do cartin' jobs,' the man with the teacup was saying. ‘'Ad a van and a nold pony of me own. And didn't do so badly neither. The only trouble was me lifting furniture and 'eavy weights about the place. Because I 'ad malaria out in India, in the war . . .'

‘Nor even – you compel me to violate the laws of modesty – nor even,' Mrs Viveash went on, smiling painfully, speaking huskily, expiringly, ‘of legs?'

A spring of blasphemy was touched in Coleman's brain. ‘Neither delighteth He in any man's legs,' he shouted, and with an extravagant show of affection he embraced Zoe, who caught hold of his hand and bit it.

‘It comes back on you when you get tired like, malaria does.' The man's face was sallow and there was an air of peculiar listlessness and hopelessness about his misery. ‘It comes back on you, and then you go down with fever and you're as weak as a child.'

Shearwater shook his head.

‘Nor even of the heart?' Mrs Viveash lifted her eyebrows. ‘Ah, now the inevitable word has been pronounced, the real subject of every conversation has appeared on the scene. Love, Mr Shearwater!'

‘But as I says,' recapitulated the man with the teacup, ‘we didn't do so badly after all. We 'ad nothing to complain about. ‘Ad we, Florrie?'

The black bundle made an affirmative movement with its upper extremity.

‘That's one of the subjects,' said Shearwater, ‘like the Great Wall of China and the habits of Trematodes, I don't allow myself to be interested in.'

Mrs Viveash laughed, breathed out a little ‘Good God!' of incredulity and astonishment, and asked, ‘Why not?'

‘No time,' he explained. ‘You people of leisure have nothing else to do or think about. I'm busy, and so naturally less interested in the subject than you; and I take care, what's more, to limit such interest as I have.'

‘I was goin' up Ludgate 'Ill one day with a vanload of stuff for a chap in Clerkenwell. I was leadin' Jerry up the ‘ill – Jerry's the name of our ole pony . . .'

‘One can't have everything,' Shearwater was explaining, ‘not all at the same time, in any case. I've arranged my life for work now. I'm quietly married, I simmer away domestically.'

‘
Quelle horreur!
' said Mr Mercaptan. All the Louis Quinze Abbé in him was shocked and revolted by the thought.

‘But love?' questioned Mrs Viveash. ‘Love?'

‘Love!' Lypiatt echoed. He was looking up at the Milky Way.

‘All of a sudden out jumps a copper at me. “'Ow old is that 'orse?” 'e says. “It ain't fit to drawr a load, it limps in all four feet,” 'e says. “No, it doesn't,' I says. “None of your answerin' back,” 'e says. “Take it outer the shafts at once.”'

‘But I know all about love already. I know precious little still about kidneys.'

‘But, my good Shearwater, how can you know all about love before you've made it with all women?'

‘Off we goes, me and the cop and the 'orse, up in front of the police-court magistrate . . .'

‘Or are you one of those imbeciles,' Mrs Viveash went on, ‘who speak of women with a large W and pretend we're all the same? Poor Theodore here might possibly think so in his feebler moments.' Gumbril smiled vaguely from a distance. He was following the man with the teacup into the magistrate's stuffy court. ‘And Mercaptan certainly does, because all the women who ever sat on his
dix-huitième
sofa certainly were exactly like one another. And perhaps Casimir does too; all women look like his absurd ideal. But you, Shearwater, you're intelligent. Surely you don't believe anything so stupid?'

Shearwater shook his head.

‘The cop, 'e gave evidence against me. “Limping in all four feet,” 'e says. “It wasn't,” I says, and the police-court vet, 'e bore me out. “The 'orse 'as been very well treated,” 'e says. “But 'e's old, 'e's very old.” “I know 'e's old,” I says. “But where am I going to find the price for a young one?”'

‘
x
²
–
y
²
,' Shearwater was saying, ‘=(
x
+
y
)(
x
-
y
). And the equation holds good whatever the values of
x
and
y
 . . . It's the same with your love business, Mrs Viveash. The relation is still fundamentally the same, whatever the value of the unknown personal quantities concerned. Little individual tics and peculiarities – after all, what do they matter?'

‘What indeed!' said Coleman. ‘Tics, mere tics. Sheep ticks, horse ticks, bed bugs, tape worms, taint worms, guinea worms, liver flukes . . .'

‘“The 'orse must be destroyed,” says the beak. “'E's too old for work.” “But I'm not,” I says. “I can't get a old age pension at thirty-two, can I? ‘Ow am I to earn my living if you take away what I earns my living by?”'

Mrs Viveash smiled agonizingly. ‘Here's a man who thinks personal peculiarities are trivial and unimportant,' she said. ‘You're not even interested in people, then?'

‘“I don't know what you can do,” 'e says. “I'm only 'ere to administer the law.” “Seems a queer sort of law,” I says. “What law is it?”'

Shearwater scratched his head. Under his formidable black moustache he smiled at last his ingenuous, childish smile. ‘No,' he said. ‘No, I suppose I'm not. It hadn't occurred to me, until you said it. But I suppose I'm not. No.' He laughed, quite delighted, it seemed, by this discovery about himself.

‘“What law is it?” 'e says. “The Croolty to Animals law. That's what it is,” 'e says.'

The smile of mockery and suffering appeared and faded. ‘One of these days,' said Mrs Viveash, ‘you may find them more absorbing than you do now.'

‘Meanwhile,' said Shearwater . . .

‘I couldn't find a job 'ere, and 'aving been workin' on my own, my own master like, couldn't get unemployment pay. So when we 'eard of jobs at Portsmouth, we thought we'd try to get one, even if it did mean walkin' there.'

‘Meanwhile, I have my kidneys.'

‘“'Opeless,” 'e says to me, “quite ‘opeless. More than two hundred comes for three vacancies.” So there was nothing for it but to walk back again. Took us four days it did, this time. She was very bad on the way, very bad. Being nearly six months gone. Our first it is. Things will be ‘arder still, when it comes.'

From the black bundle there issued a sound of quiet sobbing.

‘Look here,' said Gumbril, making a sudden irruption into the conversation. ‘This is really too awful.' He was consumed with indignation and piety; he felt like a prophet in Nineveh.

‘There are two wretched people here,' and Gumbril told them breathlessly what he had overheard. It was terrible, terrible. ‘All the way to Portsmouth and back again; on foot, without proper food; and the woman's with child.'

Coleman exploded with delight. ‘Gravid,' he kept repeating, ‘gravid, gravid. The laws of gravidity, first formulated by Newton, now recodified by the immortal Einstein. God said, Let Newstein be, and there was light. And God said, Let there be Light; and there was darkness o'er the face of the earth.' He roared with laughter.

Between them they raised five pounds. Mrs Viveash undertook to give them to the black bundle. The cabmen made way for her as she advanced; and there an uncomfortable silence. The black bundle lifted a face that was old and worn, like the face of a statue in the portal of a cathedral; an old face, but one was aware, somehow, that it belonged to a woman still young by the reckoning of years. Her hands trembled as she took the notes, and when she opened her mouth to speak her hardly articulate whisper of gratitude, one saw that she had lost several of her teeth.