Antic Hay (31 page)

Mr Mercaptan had just come to this decision and his poised pen was moving farther down the page, when he was disturbed by the sound of arguing voices in the corridor, outside his room.

‘What is it, Mrs Goldie?' he called irritably, for it was not difficult to distinguish his housekeeper's loud and querulous tones. He had given orders that he was not to be disturbed. In these critical moments of correction one needed such absolute tranquillity.

But Mr Mercaptan was to have no tranquillity this afternoon. The door of his sacred boudoir was thrown rudely open, and there strode in, like a Goth into the elegant marble vomitorium of Petronius Arbiter, a haggard and dishevelled person whom Mr Mercaptan recognized, with a certain sense of discomfort, as Casimir Lypiatt.

‘To what do I owe the
pleasure
of this unexpected . . .?' Mr Mercaptan began with an essay in offensive courtesy.

But Lypiatt, who had no feeling for the finer shades, coarsely interrupted him. ‘Look here, Mercaptan,' he said. ‘I want to have a talk with you.'

‘Delighted, I'm sure,' Mr Mercaptan replied. ‘And
what
, may I ask, about?' He knew, of course, perfectly well; and the prospect of the talk disturbed him.

‘About this,' said Lypiatt; and he held out what looked like a roll of paper.

Mr Mercaptan took the roll and opened it out. It was a copy of the
Weekly World.
‘Ah!' said Mr Mercaptan, in a tone of delighted surprise, ‘The
World.
You have read my little article?'

‘That was what I wanted to talk to you about,' said Lypiatt.

Mr Mercaptan modestly laughed. ‘It hardly deserves it,' he said.

Preserving a calm of expression which was quite unnatural to him, and speaking in a studiedly quiet voice, Lypiatt pronounced with careful deliberation: ‘It is a disgusting, malicious, ignoble attack on me,' he said.

‘Come,
come
!' protested Mr Mercaptan. ‘A critic must be allowed to criticize.'

‘But there are limits,' said Lypiatt.

‘Oh, I
quite
agree,' Mr Mercaptan eagerly conceded. ‘But, after all, Lypiatt, you can't pretend that I have come anywhere near those limits. If I had called you a
mur
derer, or even an
adul
terer – then, I admit, you would have some cause to complain. But I haven't. There's nothing like a personality in the whole thing.'

Lypiatt laughed derisively, and his face went all to pieces, like a pool of water into which a stone is suddenly dropped.

‘You've merely said I was insincere, an actor, a mountebank, a quack, raving fustian, spouting mock heroics. That's all.'

Mr Mercaptan put on the expression of one who feels himself injured and misunderstood. He shut his eyes, he flapped deprecatingly with his hand. ‘I
merely
suggested,' he said, ‘that you protest
too
much. You defeat your own ends; you lose emphasis by trying to be over-emphatic. All this
folie de grandeur,
all this hankering after
terribiltà
–' sagely Mr Mercaptan shook his head, ‘it's led so
many
people astray. And, in any case, you can't
really
expect
me
to find it very sympathetic.' Mr Mercaptan uttered a little laugh and looked affectionately round his boudoir, his retired and perfumed poutery within whose walls so much civilization had finely flowered. He looked at his magnificent sofa, gilded and carved, upholstered in white satin, and so deep – for it was a great square piece of furniture, almost as broad as it was long – that when you sat right back, you had of necessity to lift your feet from the floor and recline at length. It was under the white satin that Crébillon's spirit found, in these late degenerate days, a sympathetic home. He looked at his exquisite Condor fans over the mantelpiece; his lovely Marie Laurencin of two young girls, pale-skinned and berry-eyed, walking embraced in a shallow myopic landscape amid a troop of bounding heraldic dogs. He looked at his cabinet of
bibelots
in the corner where the nigger mask and the superb Chinese phallus in sculptured rock crystal contrasted so amusingly with the Chelsea china, the little ivory Madonna, which might be a fake, but in any case was quite as good as any mediaeval French original, and the Italian medals. He looked at his comical writing-desk in shining black papier mâché and mother-of-pearl; he looked at his article on the ‘Jus Primae Noctis', black and neat on the page, with the red corrections attesting his tireless search for, and his, he flattered himself, almost invariable discovery of, the inevitable word. No, really, one couldn't expect
him
to find Lypiatt's notions very sympathetic.

‘But I don't expect you to,' said Lypiatt, ‘and, good God! I don't want you to. But you call me insincere. That's what I can't and won't stand. How dare you do that?' His voice was growing louder.

Once more Mr Mercaptan deprecatingly flapped. ‘At the most,' he corrected, ‘I said that there was a certain look of insincerity about some of the pictures. Hardly avoidable, indeed, in work of this kind.'

Quite suddenly, Lypiatt lost his self-control. All the accumulated anger and bitterness of the last days burst out. His show had been a hopeless failure. Not a picture sold, a press that was mostly bad, or, when good, that had praised for the wrong, the insulting reasons. ‘Bright and effective work.' ‘Mr Lypiatt would make an excellent stage designer.' Damn them! damn them! And then, when the dailies had all had their yelp, here was Mercaptan in the
Weekly World
taking him as a text for what was practically an essay on insincerity in art. ‘How dare you?' he furiously shouted. ‘You – how dare you talk about sincerity? What can you know about sincerity, you disgusting little bug!' And avenging himself on the person of Mr Mercaptan against the world that had neglected him, against the fate that had denied him his rightful share of talent, Lypiatt sprang up and, seizing the author of the ‘Jus Primae Noctis' by the shoulders, he shook him, he bumped him up and down in his chair, he cuffed him over the head. ‘How can you have the impudence,' he asked, letting go of his victim, but still standing menacingly over him, ‘to touch anything that even attempts to be decent and big?' All these years, these wretched years of poverty and struggle and courageous hope and failure and repeated disappointment; and now this last failure, more complete than all. He was trembling with anger; at least one forgot unhappiness while one was angry.

Mr Mercaptan had recovered from his first terrified surprise. ‘Really,
really,'
he repeated, ‘
too
barbarous. Scuffling like hobbledehoys.'

‘If you knew,' Lypiatt began; but he checked himself. If you knew, he was going to say, what those things had cost me, what they meant, what thought, what passion – But how could Mercaptan understand? And it would sound as though he were appealing to this creature's sympathy. ‘Bug!' he shouted instead, ‘bug!' And he struck out again with the flat of his hand. Mr Mercaptan put up his hands and ducked away from the slaps, blinking.

‘Really,' he protested, ‘
really
 . . .'

Insincere? Perhaps it was half true. Lypiatt seized his man more furiously than before and shook him, shook him. ‘And then that vile insult about the vermouth advertisement,' he cried out. That had rankled. Those flaring, vulgar posters! ‘You thought you could mock me and spit at me with impunity, did you? I've stood it so long, you thought I'd always stand it? Was that it? But you're mistaken.' He lifted his fist. Mr Mercaptan cowered away, raising his arm to protect his head. ‘Vile bug of a coward,' said Lypiatt, ‘why don't you defend yourself like a man? You can only be dangerous with words. Very witty and spiteful and cutting about those vermouth posters, wasn't it? But you wouldn't dare to fight me if I challenged you.'

‘Well, as a matter of
fact,'
said Mr Mercaptan, peering up from under his defences, ‘I didn't invent
that
particular piece of criticism. I borrowed the
apéritif.'
He laughed feebly, more canary than bull.

‘You borrowed it, did you?' Lypiatt contemptuously repeated. ‘And who from may I ask?' Not that it interested him in the least to know.

‘Well, if you really
want
to know,' said Mr Mercaptan, ‘it was from our friend Myra Viveash.'

Lypiatt stood for a moment without speaking, then putting his menacing hand in his pocket, he turned away. ‘Oh!' he said non-committally, and was silent again.

Relieved, Mr Mercaptan sat up in his chair; with the palm of his right hand he smoothed his dishevelled head.

Airily, outside in the sunshine, Rosie walked down Sloane Street, looking at the numbers on the doors of the houses. A hundred and ninety-nine, two hundred, two hundred and one – she was getting near now. Perhaps all the people who passed, strolling so easily and elegantly and disengagedly along, perhaps they all of them carried behind their eyes a secret, as delightful and amusing as hers. Rosie liked to think so; it made life more exciting. How nonchalantly distinguished, Rosie reflected, she herself must look. Would any one who saw her now, sauntering along like this, would any one guess that, ten houses farther down the street, a young poet, or at least very nearly a young poet, was waiting, on the second floor, eagerly for her arrival? Of course they wouldn't and couldn't guess! That was the fun and the enormous excitement of the whole thing. Formidable in her light-hearted detachment, formidable in the passion which at will she could give rein to and check again, the great lady swam beautifully along through the sunlight to satisfy her caprice. Like Diana, she stooped over the shepherd boy. Eagerly the starving young poet waited, waited in his garret. Two hundred and twelve, two hundred and thirteen. Rosie looked at the entrance and was reminded that the garret couldn't after all be very sordid, nor the young poet absolutely starving. She stepped in and, standing in the hall, looked at the board with the names. Ground floor: Mrs Budge. First floor: F. de M. Rowbotham. Second floor: P. Mercaptan.

P. Mercaptan . . . But it was a charming name, a romantic name, a real young poet's name! Mercaptan – she felt more than ever pleased with her selection. The fastidious lady could not have had a happier caprice. Mercaptan . . . Mercaptan . . . She wondered what the P. stood for. Peter, Philip, Patrick, Pendennis even? She could hardly have guessed that Mr Mercaptan's father, the eminent bacteriologist, had insisted, thirty-four years ago, on calling his first-born ‘Pasteur'.

A little tremulous, under her outward elegant calm, Rosie mounted the stairs. Twenty-five steps to the first floor – one flight of thirteen, which was rather disagreeably ominous, and one of twelve. Then two flights of eleven, and she was on the second landing, facing a front door, a bell-push like a round eye, a brass name-plate. For a great lady thoroughly accustomed to this sort of thing, she felt her heart beating rather unpleasantly fast. It was those stairs, no doubt. She halted a moment, took two deep breaths, then pushed the bell.

The door was opened by an aged servant of the most forbiddingly respectable appearance.

‘Mr Mercaptan at home?'

The person at the door burst at once into a long, rambling, angry complaint, but precisely about what Rosie could not for certain make out. Mr Mercaptan had left orders, she gathered, that he wasn't to be disturbed. But some one had come and disturbed him, ‘fairly shoved his way in, so rude and inconsiderate,' all the same. And now he'd been once disturbed, she didn't see why he shouldn't be disturbed again. But she didn't know what things were coming to if people fairly shoved their way in like that. Bolshevism, she called it.

Rosie murmured her sympathies, and was admitted into a dark hall. Still querulously denouncing the Bolsheviks who came shoving in, the person led the way down a corridor and throwing open a door, announced, in a tone of grievance: ‘A lady to see you, Master Paster' – for Mrs Goldie was an old family retainer, and one of the few who knew the secret of Mr Mercaptan's Christian name, one of the fewer still who were privileged to employ it. Then, as soon as Rosie had stepped across the threshold, she cut off her retreat with a bang and went off, muttering all the time, towards her kitchen.

It certainly wasn't a garret. Half a glance, the first whiff of potpourri, the feel of the carpet beneath her feet, had been enough to prove that. But it was not the room which occupied Rosie's attention, it was its occupants. One of them, thin, sharp-featured and, in Rosie's very young eyes, quite old, was standing with an elbow on the mantelpiece. The other, sleeker and more genial in appearance, was sitting in front of a writing-desk near the window. And neither of them – Rosie glanced desperately from one to the other, hoping vainly that she might have overlooked a blond beard – neither of them was Toto.

The sleek man at the writing-desk got up, advanced to meet her.

‘An unexpected pleasure,' he said, in a voice that alternately boomed and fluted. ‘Too delightful! But to what do I owe –?
Who,
may I ask –?'

He had held out his hand; automatically Rosie proffered hers. The sleek man shook it with cordiality, almost with tenderness.

‘I . . . I think I must have made a mistake,' she said. ‘Mr Mercaptan . . .?'

The sleek man smiled. ‘I am Mr Mercaptan.'

‘You live on the second floor?'

‘I never laid claims to being a mathematician,' said the sleek man, smiling as though to applaud himself, ‘but I have always calculated that . . .' he hesitated . . . ‘
enfin, que ma demeure se
trouve, en effet
, on the second floor. Lypiatt will bear me out, I'm sure.' He turned to the thin man, who had not moved from the fireplace, but had stood all the time motionlessly, his elbow on the mantelpiece, looking gloomily at the ground.