Antic Hay (33 page)

Rosie looked up at him and laughed. ‘What put that into your head?' she asked. ‘
I
'm perfectly happy.'

Shearwater was left a little at a loss. ‘Well, I'm very glad to hear it,' he said. ‘I only thought . . . that perhaps
you
might think . . . that
I
rather neglected you.'

Rosie laughed again. ‘What is all this about?' she said.

‘I have it rather on my conscience,' said Shearwater. ‘I begin to see . . . something has made me see . . . that I've not . . . I don't treat you very well . . .'

‘But I don't n-notice it, I assure you,' put in Rosie, still smiling.

‘I leave you out too much,' Shearwater went on with a kind of desperation, running his fingers through his thick black hair. ‘We don't share enough together. You're too much outside my life.'

‘But after all,' said Rosie, ‘we are a civ-vilized couple. We don't want to live in one another's pockets, do we?'

‘No, but we're really no more than strangers,' said Shearwater. ‘That isn't right. And it's my fault. I've never tried to get into touch with your life. But you did your best to understand mine . . . at the beginning of our marriage.'

‘Oh,
then-n
!' said Rosie, laughing. ‘You found out what a little idiot I was.'

‘Don't make a joke of it,' said Shearwater. ‘It isn't a joke. It's very serious. I tell you, I've come to see how stupid and inconsiderate and un-understanding I've been with you. I've come to see quite suddenly. The fact is,' he went on with a rush, like an uncorked fountain, ‘I've been seeing a woman recently whom I like very much, and who doesn't like me.' Speaking of Mrs Viveash, unconsciously he spoke her language. For Mrs Viveash people always euphemistically ‘liked' one another rather a lot, even when it was a case of the most frightful and excruciating passion, the most complete abandonments. ‘And somehow that's made me see a lot of things which I'd been blind to before – blind deliberately, I suppose. It's made me see, among other things, that I've really been to blame towards you, Rosie.'

Rosie listened with an astonishment which she perfectly disguised. So James was embarking on his little affairs, was he? It seemed incredible, and also, as she looked at her husband's face – the face, behind its bristling manly mask, of a harassed baby – also rather pathetically absurd. She wondered who it could be. But she displayed no curiosity. She would find out soon enough.

‘I'm sorry you should have been unhappy about it,' she said.

‘It's finished now.' Shearwater made a decided little gesture.

‘Ah, no!' said Rosie. ‘You should persevere.' She looked at him, smiling.

Shearwater was taken aback by this display of easy detachment. He had imagined the conversation so very differently, as something so serious, so painful and, at the same time, so healing and soothing, that he did not know how to go on. ‘But I thought,' he said hesitatingly, ‘that you . . . that we . . . after this experience . . . I would try to get closer to you . . .' (Oh, it sounded ridiculous!) . . . ‘We might start again, from a different place, so to speak.'

‘But,
cher ami
,' protested Rosie, with the inflection and in the preferred tongue of Mr Mercaptan, ‘you can't seriously expect us to do the Darby and Joan business, can you? You're distressing yourself quite unnecessarily on my account. I don't find you neglect me or anything like it. You have your life – naturally. And I have mine. We don't get in one another's way.'

‘But do you think that's the ideal sort of married life?' asked Shearwater.

‘It's obviously the most civ-vilized,' Rosie answered, laughing.

Confronted by Rosie's civilization, Shearwater felt helpless.

‘Well, if you don't want,' he said. ‘I'd hoped . . . I'd thought . . .'

He went back to his study to think things over. The more he thought them over, the more he blamed himself. And incessantly the memory of Mrs Viveash tormented him.

AFTER LEAVING MR MERCAPTAN,
Lypiatt had gone straight home. The bright day seemed to deride him. With its shining red omnibuses, its parasols, its muslin girls, its young-leaved trees, its bands at the street corners, it was too much of a garden party to be tolerable. He wanted to be alone. He took a cab back to the studio. He couldn't afford it, of course; but what did that matter, what did that matter now?

The cab drove slowly and as though with reluctance down the dirty mews. He paid it off, opened his little door between the wide stable doors, climbed the steep ladder of his stairs and was at home. He sat down and tried to think.

‘Death, death, death, death,' he kept repeating to himself, moving his lips as though he were praying. If he said the word often enough, if he accustomed himself completely to the idea, death would come almost by itself; he would know it already, while he was still alive, he would pass almost without noticing out of life into death. Into death, he thought, into death. Death like a well. The stone falls, falls, second after second; and at last there is a sound, a far-off, horrible sound of death and then nothing more. The well at Carisbrooke, with a donkey to wind the wheel that pulls up the bucket of water, of icy water . . . He thought for a long time of the well of death.

Outside in the mews a barrel-organ struck up the tune of ‘Where do flies go in the winter-time?' Lypiatt lifted his head to listen. He smiled to himself. ‘Where
do
flies go?' The question asked itself with a dramatic, a tragical appositeness. At the end of everything – the last ludicrous touch. He saw it all from outside. He pictured himself sitting there alone, broken. He looked at his hand lying limp on the table in front of him. It needed only the stigma of the nail to make it the hand of a dead Christ.

There, he was making literature of it again. Even now. He buried his face in his hands. His mind was full of twisted darkness, of an unspeakable, painful confusion. It was too difficult, too difficult.

The inkpot, he found when he wanted to begin writing, contained nothing but a parched black sediment. He had been meaning for days past to get some more ink; and he had always forgotten. He would have to write in pencil.

‘Do you remember,' he wrote, ‘do you remember, Myra, that time we went down into the country – you remember – under the Hog's Back at that little inn they were trying to make pretentious? “Hotel Bull” – do you remember? How we laughed over the Hotel Bull! And how we liked the country outside its doors! All the world in a few square miles. Chalk-pits and blue butterflies on the Hog's Back. And at the foot of the hill, suddenly, the sand; the hard, yellow sand with those queer caves, dug when and by what remote villains at the edge of the Pilgrims' Way? the fine grey sand on which the heather of Puttenham Common grows. And the flagstaff and the inscription marking the place where Queen Victoria stood to look at the view. And the enormous sloping meadows round Compton and the thick, dark woods. And the lakes, the heaths, the Scotch firs at Cutt Mill. The forests of Shackleford. There was everything. Do you remember how we enjoyed it all? I did, in any case. I was happy during those three days. And I loved you, Myra. And I thought you might, you might perhaps, some day, love me. You didn't. And my love has only brought me unhappiness. Perhaps it has been my fault. Perhaps I ought to have known how to make you give me happiness. You remember that wonderful sonnet of Michelangelo's, where he says that the loved woman is like a block of marble from which the artist knows how to cut the perfect statue of his dreams. If the statue turns out a bad one, if it's death instead of love that the lover gets – why, the fault lies in the artist and in the lover, not in the marble, not in the beloved.

Yes, it was my
basso ingegno
: my low genius which did not know how to draw love from you, nor beauty from the materials of which art is made. Ah, now you'll smile to yourself and say: Poor Casimir, he has come to admit that at last? Yes, yes, I have come to admit everything. That I couldn't paint, I couldn't write, I couldn't make music. That I was a charlatan and a quack. That I was a ridiculous actor of heroic parts who deserved to be laughed at – and
was
laughed at. But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what's going on in his heart and mind. You could turn Hamlet into an epigrammatic farce with an inimitable scene when he takes his adored mother in adultery. You could make the wittiest Guy de Maupassant short story out of the life of Christ, by contrasting the mad rabbi's pretensions with his abject fate. It's a question of the point of view. Every one's a walking farce and a walking tragedy at the same time. The man who slips on a banana-skin and fractures his skull describes against the sky, as he falls, the most richly comical arabesque. And you, Myra – what do you suppose the unsympathetic gossips say of you? What sort of a farce of the Boulevards is your life in their eyes? For me, Myra, you seem to move all the time through some nameless and incomprehensible tragedy. For them you are what? Merely any sort of wanton, with amusing adventures. And what am I? A charlatan, a quack, a pretentious, boasting, rhodomontading imbecile, incapable of painting anything but vermouth posters. (Why did that hurt so terribly? I don't know. There was no reason why you shouldn't think so if you wanted to.) I was all that – and grotesquely laughable. And very likely your laughter was justified, your judgment was true. I don't know. I can't tell. Perhaps I am a charlatan. Perhaps I'm insincere; boasting to others, deceiving myself. I don't know, I tell you. Everything is confusion in my mind now. The whole fabric seems to have tumbled to pieces; it lies in a horrible chaos. I can make no order within myself. Have I lied to myself? have I acted and postured the Great Man to persuade myself that I am one? have I something in me, or nothing? have I ever achieved anything of worth, anything that rhymed with my conceptions, my dreams (for those were fine; of that, I
am
certain)? I look into the chaos that is my soul and, I tell you, I don't know, I don't know. But what I do know is that I've spent nearly twenty years now playing the charlatan at whom you all laugh. That I've suffered, in mind and in body too – almost from hunger, sometimes – in order to play it. That I've struggled, that I've exultantly climbed to the attack, that I've been thrown down – ah, many times! – that I've picked myself up and started again. Well, I suppose all that's ludicrous, if you like to think of it that way. It is ludicrous that a man should put himself to prolonged inconvenience for the sake of something which doesn't really exist at all. It's exquisitely comic, I can see. I can see it in the abstract, so to speak. But in this particular case, you must remember I'm not a dispassionate observer. And if I am overcome now, it is not with laughter. It is with an indescribable unhappiness, with the bitterness of death itself. Death, death, death. I repeat the word to myself, again and again. I think of death, I try to imagine it, I hang over it, looking down, where the stones fall and fall and there is one horrible noise, and then silence again; looking down into the well of death. It is so deep that there is no glittering eye of water to be seen at the bottom. I have no candle to send down. It is horrible, but I do not want to go on living. Living would be worse than . . .'

Lypiatt was reaching out for another sheet of paper when he was startled to hear the sound of feet on the stairs. He turned towards the door. His heart beat with violence. He was filled with a stranger sense of apprehension. In terror he awaited the approach of some unknown and terrible being. The feet of the angel of death were on the stairs. Up, up, up. Lypiatt felt himself trembling as the sound came nearer. He knew for certain that in a few seconds he was going to die. The hangmen had already pinioned him; the soldiers of the firing squad had already raised their rifles. One, two, . . . he thought of Mrs Viveash standing, bare-headed, the wind blowing in her hair, at the foot of the flagstaff from the site of which Queen Victoria had admired the distant view of Selborne; he thought of her dolorously smiling; he remembered that once she had taken his head between her two hands and kissed him: ‘Because you're such a golden ass', she had said, laughing. Three . . . There was a little tap at the door. Lypiatt pressed his hand over his heart. The door opened.

A small, bird-like man with a long, sharp nose and eyes as round and black and shining as buttons stepped into the room.

‘Mr Lydgate, I presume?' he began. Then looked at a card on which a name and address were evidently written. ‘Lypiatt, I mean. A thousand pardons. Mr Lypiatt, I presume?'

Lypiatt leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. His face was as white as paper. He breathed hard and his temples were wet with sweat, as though he had been running.

‘I found the door down below open, so I came straight up. I hope you'll excuse . . .' The stranger smiled apologetically.

‘Who are you?' Lypiatt asked, reopening his eyes. His heart was still beating hard; after the storm it calmed itself slowly. He drew back from the brink of the fearful well; the time had not yet come to plunge.

‘My name,' said the stranger, ‘is Boldero, Herbert Boldero. Our mutual friend Mr Gumbril, Mr Theodore Gumbril, junior,' he made it more precise, ‘suggested that I might come and see you about a little matter in which he and I are interested and in which perhaps you, too, might be interested.'