Antic Hay (21 page)

The door opened, and the house-parlourmaid intruded Shearwater upon his lazy felicity, abruptly, in her unceremonious old way, and hurried back to the
Daily Sketch
.

‘Shearwater! This is very agreeable,' said Gumbril. ‘Come and sit down!' He pointed to a chair.

Clumsily, filling the space that two ordinary men would occupy, Shearwater came zigzagging and lurching across the room, bumped against the work-table and the sofa as he passed, and finally sat down in the indicated chair.

It suddenly occurred to Gumbril that this was Rosie's husband: he had not thought of that before. Could it be in the marital capacity that he presented himself so unexpectedly now? After this afternoon . . . He had come home; Rosie had confessed all . . . Ah! but then she didn't know who he was. He smiled to himself at the thought. What a joke! Perhaps Shearwater had come to complain to him of the unknown Complete Man – to him! It was delightful. Anon – the author of all those ballads in the
Oxford Book of English Verse:
the famous Italian painter – Ignoto. Gumbril was quite disappointed when his visitor began to talk of other themes than Rosie. Sunk in the quagmire of his own comfortable guts, he felt good-humouredly obscene. The dramatic scabrousness of the situation would have charmed him in his present mood. Good old Shearwater – but what an ox of a man! If he, Gumbril, took the trouble to marry a wife, he would at least take some interest in her.

Shearwater had begun to talk in general terms about life. What would he be getting at, Gumbril wondered? What particulars were ambushed behind these generalizations? There were silences. Shearwater looked, he thought, very gloomy. Under his thick moustache the small, pouting babyish mouth did not smile. The candid eyes had a puzzled, tired expression in them.

‘People are queer,' he said after one of his silences. ‘Very queer. One has no idea how queer they are.'

Gumbril laughed. ‘But I have a very clear idea of their queerness,' he said. ‘Everyone's queer, and the ordinary, respectable, bourgeois people are the queerest of the lot. How do they manage to live like that? It's astonishing. When I think of all my aunts and uncles . . .' He shook his head.

‘Perhaps it's because I'm rather incurious,' said Shearwater. ‘One ought to be curious, I think. I've come to feel lately that I've not been curious enough about people.' The particulars began to peep, alive and individual, out of the vagueness, like rabbits; Gumbril saw them in his fancy, at the fringe of a wood.

‘Quite,' he said encouragingly. ‘Quite.'

‘I think too much of my work,' Shearwater went on, frowning. ‘Too much physiology. There's also psychology. People's minds as well as their bodies . . . One shouldn't be limited. Not too much, at any rate. People's minds . . .' He was silent for a moment. ‘I can imagine,' he went on at last, as in the tone of one who puts a very hypothetical case, ‘I can imagine one's getting so much absorbed in somebody else's psychology that one could really think of nothing else.' The rabbits seemed ready to come out into the open.

‘That's a process,' said Gumbril, with middle-aged jocularity, speaking out of his private warm morass, ‘that's commonly called falling in love.'

There was another silence. Shearwater broke it to begin talking about Mrs Viveash. He had lunched with her three or four days running. He wanted Gumbril to tell him what she was really like. ‘She seems to be a very extraordinary woman,' he said.

‘Like everybody else,' said Gumbril irritatingly. It amused him to see the rabbits scampering about at last.

‘I've never known a woman like that before.'

Gumbril laughed. ‘You'd say that of any woman you happen to be interested in,' he said. ‘You've never known any women at all.' He knew much more about Rosie, already, than Shearwater did, or probably ever would.

Shearwater meditated. He thought of Mrs Viveash, her cool, pale, critical eyes; her laughter, faint and mocking; her words that pierced into the mind, goading it into thinking unprecedented thoughts.

‘She interests me,' he repeated. ‘I want you to tell me what she's really like.' He emphasized the word really, as though there must, in the nature of things, be a vast difference between the apparent and the real Mrs Viveash.

Most lovers, Gumbril reflected, picture to themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see every day. They are in love with somebody else – their own invention. And sometimes there is a secret reality; and sometimes reality and appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to cause a shock. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘How should I know? You must find out for yourself.'

‘But you know her, you know her well,' said Shearwater, almost with anxiety in his voice.

‘Not so well as all that.'

Shearwater sighed profoundly, like a whale in the night. He felt restless, incapable of concentrating. His mind was full of a horrible confusion. A violent eruptive bubbling up from below had shaken its calm clarity to pieces. All this absurd business of passion – he had always thought it nonsense, unnecessary. With a little strength of will one could shut it out. Women – only for half an hour out of the twenty-four. But she had laughed, and his quiet, his security had vanished. ‘I can imagine,' he had said to her yesterday, ‘I can imagine myself giving up everything, work and all, to go running round after you.' ‘And do you suppose I should enjoy that?' Mrs Viveash had asked. ‘It would be ridiculous,' he said, ‘it would be almost shameful.' And she had thanked him for the compliment. ‘And at the same time,' he went on, ‘I feel that it might be worth it. It might be the only thing.' His mind was confused, full of new thoughts. ‘It's difficult,' he said after a pause, ‘arranging things. Very difficult. I thought I had arranged them so well . . .'

‘I never arrange anything,' said Gumbril, very much the practical philosopher. ‘I take things as they come.' And as he spoke the words, suddenly he became rather disgusted with himself. He shook himself; he climbed up out of his own morass. ‘It would be better, perhaps, if I arranged things more,' he added.

‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's,' said Shearwater, as though to himself; ‘and to God, and to sex, and to work . . . There must be a working arrangement.' He sighed again. ‘Everything in proportion. In proportion,' he repeated, as though the word were magical and had power. ‘In proportion.'

‘Who's talking about proportion?' They turned round. In the doorway Gumbril Senior was standing, smoothing his ruffled hair and tugging at his beard. His eyes twinkled cheerfully behind his spectacles. ‘Poaching on my architectural ground?' he said.

‘This is Shearwater,' Gumbril Junior put in, and explained who he was.

The old gentleman sat down. ‘Proportion,' he said – ‘I was just thinking about it, now, as I was walking back. You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist. You can't help pining for it. There are some streets . . . oh, my God!' And Gumbril Senior threw up his hands in horror. ‘It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way. And the one street that was really like a symphony by Mozart – how busily and gleefully they're pulling it down now! Another year and there'll be nothing left of Regent Street. There'll only be a jumble of huge, hideous buildings at three-quarters of a million apiece. A concert of Brobdingnagian cats. Order has been turned into a disgusting chaos. We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.'

The old man paused and pulled his beard meditatively. Gumbril Junior sat in silence, smoking; and in silence Shearwater revolved within the walls of his great round head his agonizing thoughts of Mrs Viveash.

‘It has always struck me as very curious,' Gumbril Senior went on, ‘that people are so little affected by the vile and discordant architecture around them. Suppose, now, that all these brass bands of unemployed ex-soldiers that blow so mournfully at all the street corners were suddenly to play nothing but a series of senseless and devilish discords – why, the first policeman would move them on, and the second would put them under arrest, and the passers-by would try to lynch them on their way to the police station. There would be a real spontaneous outcry of indignation. But when at these same street corners the contractors run up enormous palaces of steel and stone that are every bit as stupid and ignoble and inharmonious as ten brass bandsmen each playing a different tune in a different key, there is no outcry. The police don't arrest the architect; the passing pedestrians don't throw stones at the workmen. They don't notice that anything's wrong. It's odd,' said Gumbril Senior. ‘It's very odd.'

‘Very odd,' Gumbril Junior echoed.

‘The fact is, I suppose,' Gumbril Senior went on, smiling with a certain air of personal triumph, ‘the fact is that architecture is a more difficult and intellectual art than music. Music – that's just a faculty you're born with, as you might be born with a snub nose. But the sense of plastic beauty – though that's, of course, also an inborn faculty – is something that has to be developed and intellectually ripened. It's an affair of the mind; experiences and thought have to draw it out. There are infant prodigies in music; but there are no infant prodigies in architecture.' Gumbril Senior chuckled with a real satisfaction. ‘A man can be an excellent musician and a perfect imbecile. But a good architect must also be a man of sense, a man who knows how to think and to profit by experience. Now, as almost none of the people who pass along the streets in London, or any other city of the world, do know how to think or to profit by experience, it follows that they cannot appreciate architecture. The innate faculty is strong enough in them to make them dislike discord in music; but they haven't the wit to develop that other innate faculty – the sense of plastic beauty – which would enable them to see and disapprove of the same barbarism in architecture. Come with me,' Gumbril Senior added, getting up from his chair, ‘and I'll show you something that will illustrate what I've been saying. Something you'll enjoy, too. Nobody's seen it yet,' he said mysteriously as he led the way upstairs. ‘It's only just finished – after months and years. It'll cause a stir when they see it – when I let them see it, if ever I do, that is. The dirty devils!' Gumbril Senior added good-humouredly.

On the landing of the next floor he paused, felt in his pocket, took out a key and unlocked the door of what should have been the second best bedroom. Gumbril Junior wondered, without very much curiosity, what the new toy would turn out to be. Shearwater wondered only how he could possess Mrs Viveash.

‘Come on,' called Gumbril Senior from inside the room. He turned on the light. They entered.

It was a big room; but almost the whole of the floor was covered by an enormous model, twenty feet long by ten or twelve wide, of a complete city traversed from end to end by a winding river and dominated at its central point by a great dome. Gumbril Junior looked at it with surprise and pleasure. Even Shearwater was roused from his bitter ruminations of desire to look at the charming city spread out at his feet.

‘It's exquisite,' said Gumbril Junior. ‘What is it? The capital of Utopia, or what?'

Delighted, Gumbril Senior laughed. ‘Don't you see something rather familiar in the dome?' he asked.

‘Well, I had thought . . .' Gumbril Junior hesitated, afraid that he might be going to say something stupid. He bent down to look more closely at the dome. ‘I had thought it looked rather like St Paul's – and now I see that it is St Paul's.'

‘Quite right,' said his father. ‘And this is London.'

‘I wish it were,' Gumbril Junior laughed.

‘It's London as it might have been if they'd allowed Wren to carry out his plans of rebuilding after the Great Fire.'

‘And why didn't they allow him to?' Shearwater asked.

‘Chiefly,' said Gumbril Senior, ‘because, as I've said before, they didn't know how to think or profit by experience. Wren offered them open spaces and broad streets; he offered them sunlight and air and cleanliness; he offered them beauty, order and grandeur. He offered to build for the imagination and the ambitious spirit of man, so that even the most bestial, vaguely and remotely, as they walked those streets, might feel that they were of the same race – or very nearly – as Michelangelo; that they too might feel themselves, in spirit at least, magnificent, strong and free. He offered them all these things; he drew a plan for them, walking in peril among the still smouldering ruins. But they preferred to re-erect the old intricate squalor; they preferred the mediaeval darkness and crookedness and beastly irregular quaintness; they preferred holes and crannies and winding tunnels; they preferred foul smells, sunless, stagnant air, phthisis and rickets; they preferred ugliness and pettiness and dirt; they preferred the wretched human scale, the scale of the sickly body, not of the mind. Miserable fools! But I suppose,' the old man continued, shaking his head, ‘we can't blame them.' His hair had blown loose from its insecure anchorage; with a gesture of resignation he brushed it back into place. ‘We can't blame them. We should have done the same in the circumstances – undoubtedly. People offer us reason and beauty; but we will have none of them, because they don't happen to square with the notions that were grafted into our souls in youth, that have grown there and become a part of us.
Experientia docet
– nothing falser, so far as most of us are concerned, was ever said. You, no doubt, my dear Theodore, have often in the past made a fool of yourself with women . . .'

Gumbril Junior made an embarrassed gesture that half denied, half admitted the soft impeachment. Shearwater turned away, painfully reminded of what, for a moment, he had half forgotten. Gumbril Senior went on.