Antic Hay (35 page)

Rosie held up her hand. ‘You're really horrible,' she said. Coleman smiled at her. Still, she did not go.

‘He who is not with me is against me,' said Coleman. ‘If you can't make up your mind to be with, it's surely better to be positively against than merely negatively indifferent.'

‘Nonsense!' exclaimed Rosie feebly.

‘When I call my lover a nymphomaniacal dog, she runs the penknife into my arm.'

‘Well, do you enjoy it?' asked Rosie.

‘Piercingly,' he answered. ‘It is at once sordid to the last and lowest degree and infinitely and eternally significant.'

Coleman was silent and Rosie too said nothing. Futilely she wished it
had
been Toto instead of this horrible, dangerous Cossack. Mr Mercaptan ought to have warned her. But then, of course, he supposed that she already knew the creature. She looked up at him and found his bright eyes fixed upon her; he was silently laughing.

‘Don't you want to know who I am?' she asked. ‘And how I got here?'

Coleman blandly shook his head. ‘Not in the very least,' he said.

Rosie felt more helpless, somehow, than ever. ‘Why not?' she asked as bravely and impertinently as she could.

Coleman answered with another question. ‘Why should I?'

‘It would be natural curiosity.'

‘But I know all I want to know,' he said. ‘You are a woman, or, at any rate, you have all the female stigmata. Not too sumptuously well-developed, let me add. You have no wooden legs. You have eyelids that flutter up and down over your eyes like a moving shutter in front of a signalling lamp, spelling out in a familiar code the letters: A.M.O.R., and not, unless I am very much mistaken, those others: C.A.S.T.I.T.A.S. You have a mouth that looks as though it knew how to taste and how to bite. You . . .'

Rosie jumped up. ‘I'm going away,' she said.

Coleman leaned back in his chair and hallooed with laughter. ‘Bite, bite, bite,' he said. ‘Thirty-two times.' And he opened and shut his mouth as fast as he could, so that his teeth clicked against one another with a little dry, bony noise. ‘Every mouthful thirty-two times. That's what Mr Gladstone said. And surely Mr Gladstone' – he rattled his sharp, white teeth again – ‘surely Mr Gladstone should know.'

‘Good-bye,' said Rosie from the door.

‘Good-bye,' Coleman called back; and immediately afterwards jumped to his feet and made a dash across the room towards her.

Rosie uttered a cry, slipped through the door and, slamming it behind her, ran across the vestibule and began fumbling with the latches of the outer door. It wouldn't open, it wouldn't open. She was trembling; fear made her feel sick. There was a rattling at the door behind her. There was a whoop of laughter, and then the Cossack's hands were on her arms, his face came peering over her shoulder, and the blond beard dabbled with blood prickled against her neck and face.

‘Oh, don't, don't, don't!' she implored, turning away her head. Then all at once she began violently crying.

‘Tears!' exclaimed Coleman in rapture, ‘genuine tears!' He bent eagerly forward to kiss them away, to drink them as they fell. ‘What an intoxication,' he said, looking up to the ceiling like a chicken that has taken a sip of water; he smacked his lips.

Sobbing uncontrollably, Rosie had never in all her life felt less like a great, fastidious lady.

‘WELL,'
SAID
G
UMBRIL
, ‘here I am again.'

‘Already?' Mrs Viveash had been reduced, by the violence of her headache, to coming home after her luncheon with Piers Cotton for a rest. She had fed her hungry pain on Pyramidon and now she was lying down on the Dufy-upholstered sofa at the foot of her full-length portrait by Jacques-Emile Blanche. Her head was not much better, but she was bored. When the maid had announced Gumbril, she had given word that he was to be let in. ‘I'm very ill,' she went on expiringly. ‘Look at me,' she pointed to herself, ‘and me again.' She waved her hand towards the sizzling brilliance of the portrait. ‘Before and after. Like the advertisements, you know. Every picture tells a story.' She laughed faintly, then made a little grimace and, sucking in the breath between her lips, she put her hand to her forehead.

‘My poor Myra.' Gumbril pulled up a chair to the sofa and sat there like a doctor at his patient's bedside. ‘But before and after what?' he asked, almost professionally.

Mrs Viveash gave an all but imperceptible shrug. ‘I don't know,' she said.

‘Not influenza, I hope?'

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘Not love, by any chance?'

Mrs Viveash did not venture another laugh; she contented herself with smiling agonizingly.

‘That would have been a just retribution,' Gumbril went on, ‘after what you've done to me.'

‘What have I done to you?' Mrs Viveash asked, opening wide her pale-blue eyes.

‘Merely wrecked my existence.'

‘But you're being childish, Theodore. Say what you mean without these grand, silly phrases.' The dying voice spoke with impatience.

‘Well, what I mean,' said Gumbril, ‘is merely this. You prevented me from going to see the only person I ever really wanted to see in my life. And yesterday, when I tried to see her, she was gone. Vanished. And here am I left in the vacuum.'

Mrs Viveash shut her eyes. ‘We're all in the vacuum,' she said. ‘You'll still have plenty of company, you know.' She was silent for a moment. ‘Still, I'm sorry,' she added. ‘Why didn't you tell me? And why didn't you just pay no attention to me and go all the same?'

‘I didn't tell you,' Gumbril answered, ‘because, then, I didn't know. And I didn't go because I didn't want to quarrel with you.'

‘Thank you,' said Mrs Viveash, and patted his hand. ‘But what are you going to do about it now? Not quarrelling with me is only a rather negative satisfaction, I'm afraid.'

‘I propose to leave the country to-morrow morning,' said Gumbril.

‘Ah, the classical remedy . . . But not to shoot big game, I hope?' She thought of Viveash among the Tikki-tikkis and the tsetses. He was a charming creature; charming, but . . . but what?

‘Good heavens!' exclaimed Gumbril. ‘What do you take me for? Big game!' He leaned back in his chair and began to laugh, heartily, for the first time since he had returned from Robertsbridge, yesterday evening. He had felt then as though he would never laugh again. ‘Do you see me in a pith helmet, with an elephant gun?'

Mrs Viveash put her hand to her forehead. ‘I see you, Theodore,' she said, ‘but I try to think you would look quite normal; because of my head.'

‘I go to Paris first,' said Gumbril. ‘After that, I don't know. I shall go wherever I think people will buy pneumatic trousers. I'm travelling on business.'

This time, in spite of her head, Mrs Viveash laughed.

‘I thought of giving myself a farewell banquet,' Gumbril went on. ‘We'll go round before dinner, if you're feeling well enough, that is, and collect a few friends. Then, in a profoundest gloom, we'll eat and drink. And in the morning, unshaved, exhausted and filled with disgust, I shall take the train from Victoria, feeling thankful to get out of England.'

‘We'll do it,' said Mrs Viveash faintly and indomitably from the sofa that was almost genuinely a death-bed. ‘And, meanwhile, we'll have a second brew of tea and you shall talk to me.'

The tannin was brought in. Gumbril settled down to talk and Mrs Viveash to listen – to listen and from time to time to dab her brows with eau-de-Cologne, to take a sniff of hartshorn.

Gumbril talked. He talked of the marriage ceremonies of octopuses, of the rites intricately consummated in the submarine green grottos of the Indian Ocean. Given a total of sixteen arms, how many permutations and combinations of caresses? And in the middle of each bunch of arms a mouth like the beak of a macaw.

On the backside of the moon, his friend Umbilikoff, the mystic, used to assure him, the souls of the dead in the form of little bladders – like so much swelled sago – are piled up and piled up till they squash and squeeze one another with an excruciating and ever-growing pressure. In the exoteric world this squeezing on the moon's backside is known, erroneously, as hell. And as for the constellation, Scorpio – he was the first of all constellations to have a proper sort of backbone. For by an effort of the will he ingurgitated his external armour, he compressed and rebuilt it within his body and so became the first vertebrate. This, you may well believe, was a notable day in cosmic history.

The rents in these new buildings in Regent Street and Piccadilly run to as much as three or four pounds a square foot. Meanwhile, all the beauty imagined by Nash has departed, and chaos and barbarism once more reign supreme, even in Regent Street. The ghost of Gumbril Senior stalked across the room.

Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who lives on roast-beef, water and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the beef-eater are lived only in time. ‘I can tell you all about heroin,' said Mrs Viveash.

Lady Capricorn, he understood, was still keeping open bed. How Rubens would have admired those silk cushions, those gigantic cabbage roses, those round pink pearls of hers, vaster than those that Captain Nemo discovered in the immemorial oyster! And the warm dry rustle of flesh over flesh as she walks, moving first one leg, then advancing the other.

Talking of octopuses, the swim-bladders of deep-sea fishes are filled with almost absolutely pure oxygen.
C'est la vie
– Gumbril shrugged his shoulders.

In Alpine pastures the grasshoppers start their flight, whizzing like clockwork grasshoppers. And these brown invisible ones reveal themselves suddenly as they skim above the flowers – a streak of blue lightning, a trailing curve of scarlet. Then the overwing shuts down over the coloured wing below and they are more invisible fiddlers rubbing their thighs, like Lady Capricorn, at the foot of the towering flowers.

Forgers give patina to their mediaeval ivories by lending them to stout young Jewesses to wear for a few months hanging, like an amulet, between their breasts.

In Italian cemeteries the family vaults are made of glass and iron, like greenhouses.

Sir Henry Griddle has finally married the hog-faced gentlewoman.

Piero della Francesca's fresco of the Resurrection at San Sepolcro is the most beautiful picture in the world, and the hotel there is far from bad. Scriabine =
le
Tschaikovsky
de nos jours.
The dullest landscape painter is Marchand. The best poet . . .

‘You bore me,' said Mrs Viveash.

‘Must I talk of love, then?' asked Gumbril.

‘It looks like it,' Mrs Viveash answered, and closed her eyes.

Gumbril told the anecdote about Jo Peters, Connie Asticot and Jim Baum. The anecdote of Lola Knopf and the Baroness Gnomon. Of Margherita Radicofani, himself, and the Pastor Meyer. Of Lord Cavey and little Toby Nobes. When he had finished these, he saw that Mrs Viveash had gone to sleep.

He was not flattered. But a little sleep would do her headache, he reflected, a world of good. And knowing that if he ceased to speak, she would probably be woken by the sudden blankness of the silence, he went on quietly talking to himself.

‘When I'm abroad this time,' he soliloquized, ‘I shall really begin writing my autobiography. There's nothing like a hotel bedroom to work in.' He scratched his head thoughtfully and even picked his nose, which was one of his bad habits, when he was alone. ‘People who know me,' he went on, ‘will think that what I write about the governess cart and my mother and the flowers and so on is written merely because I know in here,' he scratched his head a little harder to show himself that he referred to his brain, ‘that that's the sort of thing one ought to write about. They'll think I'm a sort of dingy Romain Rolland, hopelessly trying to pretend that I feel the emotions and have the great spiritual experiences, which the really important people do feel and have. And perhaps they'll be right. Perhaps the Life of Gumbril will be as manifestly an
ersatz
as the Life of Beethoven. On the other hand, they may be astonished to find that it's the genuine article. We shall see.' Gumbril nodded his head slowly, while he transferred two pennies from his right-hand trouser pocket to his left-hand trouser pocket. He was somewhat distressed to find that these coppers had been trespassing among the silver. Silver was for the right-hand, copper for the left. It was one of the laws which it was extremely unlucky to infringe. ‘I have a premonition,' he went on, ‘that one of these days I may become a saint. An unsuccessful flickering sort of saint, like a candle beginning to go out. As for love – m'yes, m'yes. And as for the people I have met – I shall point out that I have known most of the eminent men in Europe, and that I have said of all of them what I said after my first love affair: Is that all?'

‘Did you really say that about your first love affair?' asked Mrs Viveash, who had woken up again.

‘Didn't you?'

‘No. I said: This
is
all – everything, the universe. In love, it's either all or nothing at all.' She shut her eyes and almost immediately went to sleep again.

Gumbril continued his lullaby-soliloquy.

‘“This charming little book.” . . .
The Scotsman.
“This farrago of obscenity, slander and false psychology.” . . .
Darlington Echo.
“Mr Gumbril's first cousin is St Francis Xavier, his second cousin is the Earl of Rochester, his third cousin is the Man of Feeling, his fourth cousin is David Hume.” . . .
Court Journal.'
Gumbril was already tired of this joke. ‘When I consider how my light is spent,' he went on, ‘when I consider! . . . Herr Jesu, as Fraulein Nimmernein used to exclaim at the critical moment. Consider, dear cow, consider. This is not the time of year for grass to grow. Consider, dear cow, consider, consider.' He got up from his chair and tiptoed across the room to the writing-table. An Indian dagger lay next to the blotting-pad; Mrs Viveash used it as a paper-knife. Gumbril picked it up, executed several passes with it. ‘Thumb on the blade,' he said, ‘and strike upwards. On guard. Lunge. To the hilt it penetrates. Poniard at the tip' – he ran the blade between his fingers – ‘caress by the time it reaches the hilt. Z-zip.' He put down the knife and stopping for a moment to make a grimace at himself in the mirror over the mantelpiece, he went back to his chair.