Antic Hay (36 page)

At seven o'clock Mrs Viveash woke up. She shook her head to feel if the pain were still rolling about loose inside her skull.

‘I really believe I'm all right,' she said. She jumped up. ‘Come on,' she cried. ‘I feel ready for anything.'

‘And I feel like so much food for worms,' said Gumbril. ‘Still,
Versiam' a tazza piena il generoso umor.'
He hummed the Drinking Song out of
Robert the Devil,
and to that ingenuously jolly melody they left the house.

Their taxi that evening cost them several pounds. They made the man drive back and forth, like a shuttle, from one end of London to the other. Every time they passed through Piccadilly Circus Mrs Viveash leant out of the window to look at the sky signs dancing their unceasing St Vitus's dance above the monument to the Earl of Shaftesbury.

‘How I adore them!' she said the first time they passed them. ‘Those wheels that whiz round till the sparks fly out from under them: that rushing motor, and that lovely bottle of port filling the glass and then disappearing and reappearing and filling it again. Too lovely.'

‘Too revolting,' Gumbril corrected her. ‘These things are the epileptic symbol of all that's most bestial and idiotic in contemporary life. Look at those beastly things and then look at that.' He pointed to the County Fire Office on the northern side of the Circus. ‘There stands decency, dignity, beauty, repose. And there flickers, there gibbers and twitches – what? Restlessness, distraction, refusal to think, anything for an unquiet life . . .'

‘What a delicious pedant you are!' She turned away from the window, put her hands on his shoulders and looked at him. ‘Too exquisitely ridiculous!' And she kissed him.

‘You won't force me to change my opinion.' Gumbril smiled at her.
‘Eppur' si muove
– I stick to my guns like Galileo. They move and they're horrible.'

‘They're me,' said Mrs Viveash emphatically. ‘Those things are me.'

They drove first to Lypiatt's mews. Under the Piranesian arch. The clothes-line looped from window to window across the street might have been those ropes which form so essential and so mysterious a part of the furniture of the Prisons. The place smelt, the children were shouting; the hyena-like laughter of the flappers reverberated between the close-set walls. All Gumbril's sense of social responsibility was aroused in a moment.

Shut up in his room all day, Lypiatt had been writing – writing his whole life, all his ideas and ideals, all for Myra. The pile of scribbled sheets grew higher and higher. Towards evening he made an end; he had written all that he wanted to write. He ate the remains of yesterday's loaf of bread and drank some water; for he realized suddenly that he had been fasting the whole day. Then he composed himself to think; he stretched himself out on the brink of the well and looked down into the eyeless darkness.

He still had his Service revolver. Taking it out of the drawer in which it was kept, he loaded it, he laid it on the packing-case which served him as a table at his bed's head, and stretched himself out on the bed. He lay quite still, his muscles all relaxed, hardly breathing. He imagined himself dead. Derision! there was still the plunge into the well.

He picked up the pistol, looked down the barrel. Black and deep as the well. The muzzle against his forehead was a cold mouth.

There was nothing new to be thought about death. There was not even the possibility of a new thought. Only the old thoughts, the horrible old questions returned.

The cold mouth to his forehead, his finger pressing on the trigger. Already he would be falling, falling. And the annihilating crash would be the same as the far-away sound of death at the bottom of the well. And after that, in the silence? The old question was still the same.

After that, he would lie bleeding. The flies would drink his blood as though it were red honey. In the end the people would come and fetch him away, and the coroner's jury would look at him in the mortuary and pronounce him temporarily insane. Then he would be buried in a black hole, would be buried and decay.

And meanwhile, would there be anything else? There was nothing new to be thought or asked. And there was still no answer.

In the room it began to grow dark; colours vanished, forms ran together. The easel and Myra's portrait were now a single black silhouette against the window. Near and far were fused, become one and continuous in the darkness, became a part of the darkness. Outside the window the pale twilight grew more sombre. The children shouted shrilly, playing their games under the green gas lamps. The mirthless, ferocious laughter of young girls mocked and invited. Lypiatt stretched out his hand and fingered the pistol.

Down below, at his door, he heard a sharp knocking. He lifted his head and listened, caught the sound of two voices, a man's and a woman's. Myra's voice he recognized at once; the other, he supposed, was Gumbril's.

‘Hideous to think that people actually live in places like this,' Gumbril was saying. ‘Look at those children. It ought to be punishable by law to produce children in this street.'

‘They always take me for the Pied Piper,' said Mrs Viveash. Lypiatt got up and crept to the window. He could hear all they said.

‘I wonder if Lypiatt's in. I don't see any sign of a light.'

‘But he has heavy curtains,' said Mrs Viveash, ‘and I know for a fact that he always composes his poetry in the dark. He may be composing poetry.'

Gumbril laughed.

‘Knock again,' said Mrs Viveash. ‘Poets are always absorbed, you know. And Casimir's always the poet.'

‘
Il Poeta
– capital P. Like d'Annunzio in the Italian papers,' said Gumbril. ‘Did you know that d'Annunzio has books printed on mackintosh for his bath?' He rapped again at the door. ‘I saw it in the
Corriere della Sera
the other day at the club. He reads the
Little Flowers of St Francis
by preference in his bath. And he has a fountain-pen with waterproof ink in the soap-dish, so that he can add a few Fioretti of his own whenever he feels like it. We might suggest that to Casimir.'

Lypiatt stood with folded arms by the window, listening. How lightly they threw his life, his heart, from hand to hand, as though it were a ball and they were playing a game! He thought suddenly of all the times he had spoken lightly and maliciously of other people. His own person had always seemed, on those occasions, sacred. One knew in theory very well that others spoke of one contemptuously – as one spoke of them. In practice – it was hard to believe.

‘Poor Casimir!' said Mrs Viveash. ‘I'm afraid his show was a failure.'

‘I know it was,' said Gumbril. ‘Complete and absolute. I told my tame capitalist that he ought to employ Lypiatt for our advertisements. He'd be excellent for those. And it would mean some genuine money in his pocket.'

‘But the worst of it is,' said Mrs Viveash, ‘that he'll only feel insulted by the suggestion.' She looked up at the window.

‘I don't know why,' she went on, ‘this house looks most horribly dead. I hope nothing's happened to poor Casimir. I have a most disagreeable feeling that it may have.'

‘Ah, this famous feminine intuition,' laughed Gumbril. He knocked again.

‘I can't help feeling that he may be lying there dead, or delirious, or something.'

‘And I can't help feeling that he must have gone out to dinner. We shall have to give him up, I'm afraid. It's a pity. He's so good with Mercaptan. Like bear and mastiff. Or rather, like bear and poodle, bear and King Charles's spaniel – or whatever those little dogs are that you see ladies in eighteenth-century French engravings taking to bed with them. Let's go.'

‘Just knock once again,' said Mrs Viveash. ‘He might really be preoccupied, or asleep, or ill.' Gumbril knocked. ‘Now listen. Hush.'

They were silent; the children still went on hallooing in the distance. There was a great clop-clopping of horse's feet as a van backed into a stable door near by. Lypiatt stood motionless, his arms crossed, his chin on his breast. The seconds passed.

‘Not a sound,' said Gumbril. ‘He must have gone out.'

‘I suppose so,' said Mrs Viveash.

‘Come on, then. We'll go and look for Mercaptan.'

He heard their steps in the street below, heard the slamming of the taxi door. The engine was started up. Loud on the first gear, less loud on the second, whisperingly on the third, it moved away, gathering speed. The noise of it was merged with the general noise of the town. They were gone.

Lypiatt walked slowly back to his bed. He wished suddenly that he had gone down to answer the last knock. These voices – at the well's edge he had turned to listen to them; at the well's extreme verge. He lay quite still in the darkness; and it seemed to him at last that he had floated away from the earth, that he was alone, no longer in a narrow dark room, but in an illimitable darkness outside and beyond. His mind grew calmer; he began to think of himself, of all that he had known, remotely, as though from a great way off.

‘Adorable lights!' said Mrs Viveash, as they drove once more through Piccadilly Circus.

Gumbril said nothing. He had said all that he had to say last time.

‘And there's another,' exclaimed Mrs Viveash, as they passed, near Burlington House, a fountain of Sandeman's port. ‘If only they had an automatic jazz band attached to the same mechanism!' she said regretfully.

The Green Park remained solitary and remote under the moon. ‘Wasted on us,' said Gumbril, as they passed. ‘One should be happily in love to enjoy a summer night under the trees.' He wondered where Emily could be now. They sat in silence; the cab drove on.

Mr Mercaptan, it seemed, had left London. His housekeeper had a long story to tell. A regular Bolshevik had come yesterday, pushing in. And she had heard him shouting at Mr Mercaptan in his own room. And then, luckily, a lady had come and the Bolshevik had gone away again. And this morning Mr Mercaptan had decided, quite sudden like, to go away for two or three days. And it wouldn't surprise her at all if it had something to do with that horrible Bolshevik fellow. Though of course Master Paster hadn't said anything about it. Still, as she'd known him when he was so high and seen him grow up like, she thought she could say she knew him well enough to guess why he did things. It was only brutally that they contrived to tear themselves away.

Secure, meanwhile, behind a whole troop of butlers and footmen, Mr Mercaptan was dining comfortably at Oxhanger with the most faithful of his friends and admirers, Mrs Speegle. It was to Mrs Speegle that he had dedicated his coruscating little ‘Loves of the Pachyderms'; for Mrs Speegle it was who had suggested, casually one day at luncheon, that the human race ought to be classified in two main species – the pachyderms, and those whose skin, like her own, like Mr Mercaptan's and a few others, was fine and ‘responsive,' as Mr Mercaptan himself put it, ‘to all caresses, including those of pure reason.' Mr Mercaptan had taken the casual hint and had developed it, richly. The barbarous pachyderms he divided up into a number of subspecies: steatocephali, acephali, theolaters, industrious Judaeorhynci – busy, compact and hard as dung-beetles – Peabodies, Russians and so on. It was all very witty and delicately savage. Mr Mercaptan had a standing invitation at Oxhanger. With dangerous pachyderms like Lypiatt ranging loose about the town, he thought it best to avail himself of it. Mrs Speegle, he knew, would be delighted to see him. And indeed she was. He arrived just at lunch-time. Mrs Speegle and Maisie Furlonger were already at the fish.

‘Mercaptan!' Mrs Speegle's soul seemed to be in the name. ‘Sit down,' she went on, cooing as she talked, like a ring-dove. There seemed to be singing in every word she spoke. She pointed to a chair next to hers. ‘N'you're n'just in time to tell us all about
n'your
Lesbian experiences.'

And Mercaptan, giving vent to his fully orchestrated laugh – squeal and roar together – had sat down and, speaking in French partly, he nodded towards the butler and the footman, ‘
à cause des valets
,' and partly because the language lent itself more deliciously to this kind of confidences, he had begun there and then, interrupted and spurred on by the cooing of Mrs Speegle and the happy shrieks of Maisie Furlonger, to recount at length and with all the wit in the world his experience among the Isles of Greece. How delicious it was, he said to himself, to be with really civilized people! In this happy house it seemed scarcely possible to believe that such a thing as a pachyderm existed.

But Lypiatt still lay, face upwards, on his bed, floating, it seemed to himself, far out into the dark emptiness between the stars. From those distant abstract spaces he seemed to be looking impersonally down upon his own body stretched out by the brink of the hideous well; to be looking back over his own history. Everything, even his own unhappiness, seemed very small and beautiful; every frightful convulsion had become no more than a ripple, and only the fine musical ghost of sound came up to him from all the shouting.

‘We have no luck,' said Gumbril, as they climbed once more into the cab.

‘I'm not sure,' said Mrs Viveash, ‘that we haven't really had a great deal. Did you genuinely want very much to see Mercaptan?'

‘Not in the least,' said Gumbril. ‘But do you genuinely want to see me?'

Mrs Viveash drew the corners of her mouth down into a painful smile and did not answer. ‘Aren't we going to pass through Piccadilly Circus again?' she asked. ‘I should like to see the lights again. They give one temporarily the illusion of being cheerful.'

‘No, no,' said Gumbril, ‘we are going straight to Victoria.'

‘We couldn't tell the driver to . . .?'

‘Certainly not.'

‘Ah, well,' said Mrs Viveash. ‘Perhaps one's better without stimulants. I remember when I was very young, when I first began to go about at all, how proud I was of having discovered champagne. It seemed to me wonderful to get rather tipsy. Something to be exceedingly proud of. And, at the same time, how much I really disliked wine! Loathed the taste of it. Sometimes, when Calliope and I used to dine quietly together,
tête-à-tête
, with no awful men about, and no appearances to keep up, we used to treat ourselves to the luxury of a large lemon-squash, or even raspberry syrup and soda. Ah, I wish I could recapture the deliciousness of raspberry syrup.'