Adrian Glynde (24 page)

The piercing cold and glassy purity of the garden brought out in rich contrast the warm, colourful beauty of the house. A great fire crackled in the hall, and the warm, summery fragrance of a hot-house plant which stood in a brass bowl on the central table seemed to be another aspect of the blue, orange, and straw-coloured rug and the lustrous silk hanging whose colours were the richer and more vivid for the hueless austerity of the garden. Every strange and beautiful object in Oliver's
study had taken on, by contrast, a brighter individuality. It was as if, in the absence of bloom in the garden, the house had broken into strange, exotic flowers of endless variety. In the drawing-room, as the afternoon drew on towards evening, those planes of the scarlet lacquer furniture that faced the hearth glowed as if red-hot in the firelight, fiery sheen stained the figured Chinese silk on the wall, and flecks of gold and scarlet fire flickered in the gilt frames and the golden backgrounds of the holy pictures. The glass chandelier was no longer the frozen shower of a fountain, but a rain of many-coloured jewels.

How delightful it was once more to be in the stimulating company of Oliver Glynde and Clara and Bob and to move about among these beautiful surroundings. When he thought of Charminster now, Adrian discovered in the back of his mind a deep affection for it. He loved and regretted gaunt, unlovely Taylor's, the rowdy Common-room, the bare stone stairs, the passage that led to the studies, all the rooms and corridors through which, like a small red corpuscle in the bloodstream of Charminster youth, he had circulated with his small freight of vivid, infinitely various emotions. Yes, he loved it all, even while thanking God he was not returning to it. His realisation of his love for it was, in fact, a condition of his not returning to it.

Clara had now begun to be much preoccupied with his future. Her orderly and practical mind insisted, now that he had been allowed to have his fling, that he ought to settle down to something. But she had not broached the subject except to Bob, who heartily agreed with her.

“But we must leave it to your father,” he said. “Obviously he has taken over the problem of Adrian. He actually seemed pleased when the young scamp bolted from school.”

But the active Clara could not leave it at that. “I shall raise the subject at the first opportunity,” she said and she found the opportunity that very evening at dinner, when her father suggested that Adrian should stay on at Abbot's Randale when she and Bob went home. “We might do some reading together,” the old man said to Adrian, “the classics, English, French, and perhaps a little Spanish.”

“But what, after all, of the future, my good creatures?” asked Clara.

Her father shot a challenging glance at her. “The future, Clara? There's no such thing.”

“Perhaps not,” said Clara, “but it has always been found convenient to pretend there is.”

“Take care of the present,” replied the old man, “and the future, allowing for the moment that it exists, will take care of itself.”

“And pray who said that?” said Clara superciliously.

“I did,” said Oliver; “and so, you may remember, did Jesus Christ. It is a golden rule which nowadays we are only to apt too disregard.”

Clara smiled indulgently. “It is obvious, my dear Father, that you have never been a woman or a housekeeper, and the same, I venture to say, applies to Jesus Christ. When he said that Mary had chosen the better part, I have always felt he was exceedingly unfair to Martha, who was, after all, busy about providing the indispensable motive power for his preaching and for Mary's adoration. For, say what you will, men and women are creatures of flesh and blood and stomachs, and supper, therefore, is supper.”

“My dear Clara, I should not be my daughter's father if I decried supper or any of the needs and pleasures of the body. But too many cooks, you remember! We can't all make the supper, and none of us need be
making the supper all the time. There's a time for supper-making and a time for adoration. It is awkward, I admit,” he added, “when, as on the historic occasion you mention, they coincide.”

“Oh, so long as you will admit,” Clara replied, “that there
is
, for everybody, a time for supper-making; and further, for washing-up too—an even less poetical business! And so long as you don't forget, in your preoccupation with poetry and the soul, my own little private pet the mind for whom I tried to put in a plea the last time I was here. It takes a mind to produce a good supper and a trace of mind even to remember the washing-up. What I'm driving at is, what about Oxford? What about a profession? Don't let Adrian forget the plates, my dear poet, in his preoccupation with Plato.”

“But Plato, Clara, is a philosopher—one of your own little proteges.”

Clara shook her head disapprovingly. “A philosopher,” she said, “who always seemed to me, when I tried to read him, fatally tainted with poetry.” She turned to Adrian. “Have you given any thought, Adrian, to what you are going to be?”

Adrian looked sheepish, but before he could reply his grandfather had butted in.

“Going to be!” he echoed scornfully. “People are always worrying young folk about what they are going to be. In the state in which most of us live nowadays it is unfortunately necessary for them to do so. But we, by no particular merit of our own perhaps, are fortunate. We have enough money to be free of the necessity of working for our living. It is because of this increasing necessity to work for a living that culture is slowly dying out. There are very few really cultured young people in England today. It may be lack of inclination as well as of opportunity: I don't know. But Adrian has the inclination, so
for God's sake let us give him the opportunity. You had it, Clara, and you made the most of it, and from the way you have been lecturing us about pans and dish-clouts I judge that it hasn't done you any serious harm. You remain a practical person, though a little weak in that most practical of all matters, poetry.”

“My dear Father,” said Clara, “if we are to call poetry practical, what on earth is left for us to call unpractical?”

Oliver laughed. “I don't ever expect to convince you, Clara, that poetry is anything more than a polite drunkenness. But to the writer of poetry, poetry is immensely, superlatively practical, for it deals or attempts to deal with reality. And it deals with it directly, for it avoids the clumsy method of thought and takes the short-cut of emotion. If you say' I feel this' or' I feel that,' you are stating an incontrovertible truth; no one can justifiably get up and tell you that you don't, nor would it in the least impair the validity of your feelings if he did so. But if you say ‘I think this,' every Tom, Dick, and Harry may jump up and prove convincingly, if he happens to be a better logician than you are, that you are wrong. Besides, emotions are vital things, the most vital things we have, and you can hardly deny that the most vital are the most practical.”

“And so Adrian with his music has a perfect right to declare himself a practical business man?”

“I believe he would have been considered so in Elizabethan times, which, in such matters, were more enlightened than ours. Shakespearean doctors, you remember, are very fond of prescribing music for their patients. So if you consider Messrs. Burroughs and Welcome practical men of business, I don't see how you can deny Adrian the title. If you provoke us too persistently, Clara, we shall retort, in reply to all these
salvoes from your
batterie de cuisine
, that your own preoccupation with pots and kettles and sinks is comfortably and aesthetically removed from stern reality. I don't believe you have ever washed up in your life, and I should sit down to a supper which you had not only ordered but actually cooked, with the gravest misgivings.”

Bob gave a loud laugh. “Got you there, Clara! Don't you remember the plaice that wouldn't fry and the kidneys that turned into very fair imitations of india rubber boot-heels?”

Clara's composure collapsed and she gave one of her sudden, loud, hearty laughs, opening her mouth and showing her fine teeth. “Don't speak of them, Bob,” she said, shuddering. Then she turned, her eyes still shining with mirth, to her father. “But my private incapacities, and the fact that, when I provide supper, it is a supper not (except on that one unhappy occasion) cooked by myself, doesn't really affect the question. You will soon be telling me, I expect, that plumbers are vague dreamers, engine-drivers unworldly mystics, and that Santa Fina of San Gimignano, who spent all her brief life, I believe, at full length on the kitchen floor having visions, was a very energetic and businesslike young woman. It seems to me, I must confess, a mere confusion of terms.' The practical is quite unpractical, the only really practical things are the unpractical,' and so on. Why have words at all if we are to twist them into meaning their opposites?”

“No, Clara,” said the old man, “the confusion is not in the terms, but in the ideas. To call art unpractical is only a sympton of the mercenary dullness of the modern outlook. It is time we
dissociated
, as Remy de Gourmont used to say, the ideas of the artistic and the unpractical. The New Psychologists, I believe, have already exploded
some of the strongholds of the practical. Nothing, it used to be generally believed (though I myself never credited it for an instant), could be more utterly practical than a spring-cleaning. A woman in the act of spring-cleaning was the very symbol, the apotheosis of the practical. But all that has been exploded long since. It is known to-day that spring-cleaning is a sublimated sexual orgy, though why they should grace it with the qualification of
sublimated
is more than I can understand. Why not
diverted
?”

“Or
perverted
?” suggested Bob.

“Or perverted.” Oliver accepted the suggestion. “For a simple orgy affects no one but the participators, whereas a spring-cleaning raises a dust that is far better left lying, and causes horrible discomfort to numberless innocent males who ask nothing better than to be allowed to rest peacefully in a comfortable average of cleanliness and dirt.”

Clara laughed. “The New Psychology,” she said, “is obviously a science invented by men. If women were as poetical as men they could, I am sure, throw a very lurid light on pipe-smoking and company-promoting.”

They rose from the table, and that was all Clara got out of her laudable attempt to introduce the theme of Adrian's future.

Whether or not there was such a thing as the future, Adrian had been thinking of it. After his long holiday he felt a desire for hard work, he wanted to get to grips with something, and his mind turned again to music. A crowd of ideas was stirring in him, but he knew nothing, beyond what in his youthful attempts he had discovered for himself, of the technical side of composition. He now determined that before going any further he must master this, and so equip himself thoroughly as a workman before he again tried to be an artist. He discussed the matter with his grandfather, and they decided that he should go to London and study at the Royal College of Music. Adrian wrote to Ronny, asking advice about rooms in London, and Ronny replied urging him to share his. They could easily share the sitting-room, he said, and by good luck the front bedroom above the sitting-room was vacant at the moment. “I've booked it for you from the twenty-third,” he wrote. “It will be like old times when you used to share my study.” He took it for granted that Adrian would be delighted to join him, and he was right.

“I feel guilty about you, Adrian,” said his grandfather on the evening before Adrian moved to London. “Here we are, apprenticing you to art without making any arrangements about the complementary apprenticeship to coal-heaving. The difficulty lies in the present organisation of society. If we coal-heave at all, society
insists that we do so every day except Sunday, and not every alternate day. What are we to do for Adrian the animal? In the country it is fairly easy to keep the animal exercised, but in town it is a difficult job. That's why I would never keep a dog when I lived in London.”

“He'll have to take his chance,” said Adrian. “I shall be too busy to give him much attention.”

“But don't ignore the poor devil, old man. Don't turn into a hermit. What a pity you took to music instead of sculpture. The sculptor is the only man who escapes from the limits imposed by modern life. His work involves both the poetry and the coal-heaving. If I could begin again I would be a sculptor.”

“But think of the slowness of it. How exasperatingly the manual labour would lag behind the thought. You're the best off in that respect, Grandfather. I'm sure music must be maddening at times. Think of the sheer mechanical labour of putting together an orchestral score.
You
work in single lines, but the wretched symphony-writer works by pages: every musical word has to be … to be built up vertically as well as horizontally.”

“Horrible!” said Oliver. “And none of it requiring any appreciable muscular effort, nothing but a skipping and scratching among the staves. No, your sculptor's the only happy man. He has to sweat with hammer and chisel.”

“But why should that be better than to sit still and write a poem and then go for a walk? Or to coal-heave for a living and read Voltaire for pleasure in the evenings?”

“Why, indeed?” said the old man. “It's mere prejudice on my part. I don't mind reading for pleasure, because I'm a professional writer; but I resent the unproductiveness of my muscular life. I want a little
serious coal-heaving to make a walk in the country a justifiable indulgence.”

“But a walk is justifiable, because you enjoy it and it does you good.”

“Exactly! You're more truly classic than I am, Adrian. I suffer, it seems, from a tiresome romantic puritanism which I never seem to grow out of. So you won't be worried by having no coal-heaving to do?”