Antic Hay (5 page)

‘My dear fellow, what on earth are you doing here?' Gumbril Senior jumped up excitedly at his son's entrance. The light silky hair floated up with the movement, turned for a moment into a silver aureole, then subsided again. Mr Porteous stayed where he was, calm, solid and undishevelled as a seated pillar-box. He wore a monocle on a black ribbon, a black stock tie that revealed above its double folds a quarter of an inch of stiff white collar, a double-breasted black coat, a pair of pale checked trousers and patten-leather boots with cloth tops. Mr Porteous was very particular about his appearance. Meeting him casually for the first time, one would not have guessed that Mr Porteous was an expert on Late Latin poetry; and he did not mean that you should guess. Thin-limbed, bent and agile in his loose, crumpled clothes, Gumbril Senior had the air, beside Mr Porteous, of a strangely animated scarecrow.

‘What on earth?' the old gentleman repeated his question.

Gumbril Junior shrugged his shoulders. ‘I was bored, I decided to cease being a schoolmaster.' He spoke with a fine airy assumption of carelessness. ‘How are you, Mr Porteous?'

‘Thank you, invariably well.'

‘Well, well,' said Gumbril Senior, sitting down again, ‘I must say I'm not surprised. I'm only surprised that you stood it, not being a born pedagogue, for as long as you did. What ever induced you to think of turning usher, I can't imagine.' He looked at his son first through his spectacles, then over the top of them; the motives of the boy's conduct revealed themselves to neither vision.

‘What else was there for me to do?' asked Gumbril Junior, pulling up a chair towards the fire. ‘You gave me a pedagogue's education and washed your hands of me. No opportunities, no openings. I had no alternative. And now you reproach me.'

Mr Gumbril made an impatient gesture. ‘You're talking nonsense,' he said. ‘The only point of the kind of education you had is this, it gives a young man leisure to find out what he's interested in. You apparently weren't sufficiently interested in anything –'

‘I am interested in everything,' interrupted Gumbril Junior.

‘Which comes to the same thing,' said his father parenthetically, ‘as being interested in nothing.' And he went on from the point at which he had been interrupted. ‘You weren't sufficiently interested in anything to want to devote yourself to it. That was why you sought the last refuge of feeble minds with classical educations, you became a schoolmaster.'

‘Come, come,' said Mr Porteous. ‘I do a little teaching myself; I must stand up for the profession.'

Gumbril Senior let go his beard and brushed back the hair that the wind of his own vehemence had brought tumbling into his eyes. ‘I don't denigrate the profession,' he said. ‘Not at all. It would be an excellent profession if every one who went into it were as much interested in teaching as you are in your job, Porteous, or I in mine. It's these undecided creatures like Theodore, who ruin it by drifting in. Until all teachers are geniuses and enthusiasts, nobody will learn anything, except what they teach themselves.'

‘Still,' said Mr Porteous, ‘I wish I hadn't had to learn so much by myself. I wasted a lot of time finding out how to set to work and where to discover what I wanted.'

Gumbril Junior was lighting his pipe. ‘I have come to the conclusion,' he said, speaking in little jerks between each suck of the flame into the bowl, ‘that most people . . . ought never . . . to be taught anything at all.' He threw away the match. ‘Lord have mercy upon us, they're dogs. What's the use of teaching them anything except to behave well, to work and obey? Facts, theories, the truth about the universe – what good are those to them? Teach them to understand – why, it only confuses them; makes them lose hold of the simple real appearance. Not more than one in a hundred can get any good out of a scientific or literary education.'

‘And you're one of the ones?' asked his father.

‘That goes without saying,' Gumbril Junior replied.

‘I think you mayn't be so far wrong,' said Mr Porteous. ‘When I think of my own children, for example . . .' he sighed, ‘I thought they'd be interested in the things that interested me; they don't seem to be interested in anything but behaving like little apes – not very anthropoid ones either, for that matter. At my eldest boy's age I used to sit up most of the night reading Latin texts. He sits up – or rather stands, reels, trots up – dancing and drinking. Do you remember St Bernard? “Vigilet tota nocte luxuriosus non solum patienter” (the ascetic and the scholar only watch patiently); “sed et libenter, ut suam expleat voluptatem.” What the wise man does out of a sense of duty, the fool does for fun. And I've tried very hard to make him like Latin.'

‘Well, in any case,' said Gumbril Junior, ‘you didn't try to feed him on history. That's the real unforgivable sin. And that's what I've been doing, up till this evening – encouraging boys of fifteen and sixteen to specialize in history, hours and hours a week, making them read bad writers' generalizations about subjects on which only our ignorance allows us to generalize; teaching them to reproduce these generalizations in horrid little “Essays” of their own; rotting their minds, in fact, with a diet of soft vagueness; scandalous it was. If these creatures are to be taught anything, it should be something hard and definite. Latin – that's excellent. Mathematics, physical science. Let them read history for amusement, certainly. But for Heaven's sake don't make it the staple of education!' Gumbril Junior spoke with the greatest earnestness, as though he were an inspector of schools, making a report. It was a subject on which, at the moment, he felt very profoundly; he felt profoundly on all subjects while he was talking about them. ‘I wrote a long letter to the Headmaster about the teaching of history this evening,' he added. ‘It's most important.' He shook his head thoughtfully, ‘Most important.'

‘Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus,' said Mr Porteous, in the words of St Peter Damianus.

‘Very true,' Gumbril Senior applauded. ‘And talking about bad times, Theodore, what do you propose to do now, may I ask?'

‘I mean to begin by making some money.'

Gumbril Senior put his hands on his knees, bent forward and laughed, ‘Ha, ha, ha!' He had a profound bell-like laugh that was like the croaking of a very large and melodious frog. ‘You won't,' he said, and shook his head till the hair fell into his eyes. ‘You won't,' and he laughed again.

‘To make money,' said Mr Porteous, ‘one must be really interested in money.'

‘And he's not,' said Gumbril Senior. ‘None of us are.'

‘When I was still uncommonly hard up,' Mr Porteous continued, ‘we used to lodge in the same house with a Russian Jew, who was a furrier. That man was interested in money, if you like. It was a passion, an enthusiasm, an ideal. He could have led a comfortable, easy life, and still have made enough to put by something for his old age. But for his high abstract ideal of money he suffered more than Michelangelo ever suffered for his art. He used to work nineteen hours a day, and the other five he slept, lying under his bench, in the dirt, breathing into his lungs the stink and the broken hairs. He is now very rich indeed and does nothing with his money, doesn't want to do anything, doesn't know what one does do with it. He desires neither power nor pleasure. His desire for lucre is purely disinterested. He reminds me of Browning's “Grammarian”. I have a great admiration for him.'

Mr Porteous's own passion had been for the poems of Notker Balbulus and St Bernard. It had taken him nearly twenty years to get himself and his family out of the house where the Russian furrier used to lodge. But Notker was worth it, he used to say; Notker was worth even the weariness and the pallor of a wife who worked beyond her strength, even the shabbiness of ill-dressed and none too well-fed children. He had readjusted his monocle and gone on. But there had been occasions when it needed more than the monocle and the careful, distinguished clothes to keep up his morale. Still, those times were over now; Notker had brought him at last a kind of fame – even, indirectly, a certain small prosperity.

Gumbril Senior turned once more towards his son. ‘And how do you propose,' he asked, ‘to make this money?'

Gumbril Junior explained. He had thought it all out in the cab on the way from the station. ‘It came to me this morning,' he said, ‘in chapel, during service.'

‘Monstrous,' put in Gumbril Senior, with a genuine indignation, ‘monstrous these medieval survivals in schools! Chapel, indeed!'

‘It came,' Gumbril Junior went on, ‘like an apocalypse, suddenly, like a divine inspiration. A grand and luminous idea came to me – the idea of Gumbril's Patent Small-Clothes.'

‘And what are Gumbril's Patent Small-Clothes?'

‘A boon to those whose occupation is sedentary'; Gumbril Junior had already composed his prospectus and his first advertisements: ‘a comfort to all travellers, civilization's substitute for steatopygism, indispensable to first-nighters, the concert-goers' friend, the . . .'

‘Lectulus Dei floridus,' intoned Mr Porteous.

Your Small-Clothes sound to me very like one of my old litanies, Theodore.'

‘We want scientific descriptions, not litanies,' said Gumbril Senior. ‘What
are
Gumbril's Patent Small-Clothes?'

‘Scientifically, then,' said Gumbril Junior, ‘my Patent Small-Clothes may be described as trousers with a pneumatic seat, inflateable by means of a tube fitted with a valve; the whole constructed of stout seamless red rubber, enclosed between two layers of cloth.'

‘I must say,' said Gumbril Senior in a tone of somewhat grudging approbation, ‘I have heard of worse inventions. You are too stout, Porteous, to be able to appreciate the idea. We Gumbrils are all a bony lot.'

‘When I have taken out a patent for my invention,' his son went on, very business-like and cool, ‘I shall either sell it to some capitalist, or I shall exploit it commercially myself. In either case, I shall make money, which is more, I may say, than you or any other Gumbril have ever done.'

‘Quite right,' said Gumbril Senior, ‘quite right'; and he laughed very cheerfully. ‘And nor will you. You can be grateful to your intolerable Aunt Flo for having left you that three hundred a year. You'll need it. But if you really want a capitalist,' he went on, ‘I have exactly the man for you. He's a man who has a mania for buying Tudor houses and making them more Tudor than they are. I've pulled half a dozen of the wretched things to pieces and put them together again differently for him.'

‘He doesn't sound much good to me,' said his son.

‘Ah, but that's only his vice. Only his amusement. His business,' Gumbril Senior hesitated.

‘Well, what is his business?'

‘Well, it seems to be everything. Patent medicine, trade newspapers, bankrupt tobacconist's stock – he's talked to me about those and heaps more. He seems to flit like a butterfly in search of honey, or rather money.'

‘And he makes it?'

‘Well, he pays my fees and he buys more Tudor houses, and he gives me luncheons at the Ritz. That's all I know.'

‘Well, there's no harm in trying.'

‘I'll write to him,' said Gumbril Senior. ‘His name is Boldero. He'll either laugh at your idea or take it and give you nothing for it. Still,' he looked at his son over the top of his spectacles, ‘if by any conceivable chance you ever should become rich; if, if, if . . .' And he emphasized the remoteness of the conditional by raising his eyebrows a little higher, by throwing out his hands in a dubious gesture a little farther at every repetition of the word, ‘if – why, then I've got exactly the thing for you. Look at this really delightful little idea I had this afternoon.' He put his hand in his coat pocket and after some sorting and sifting produced a sheet of squared paper on which was roughly drawn the elevation of a house. ‘For any one with eight or ten thousand to spend, this would be – this would be . . .' Gumbril Senior smoothed his hair and hesitated, searching for something strong enough to say of his little idea. ‘Well, this would be much too good for most of the greasy devils who do have eight or ten thousand to spend.'

He passed the sheet to Gumbril Junior, who held it out so that both Mr Porteous and himself could look at it. Gumbril Senior got up from his chair and, standing behind them, leant over to elucidate and explain.

‘You see the idea,' he said, anxious lest they should fail to understand. ‘A central block of three stories, with low wings of only one, ending in pavilions with a second floor. And the flat roofs of the wings are used as gardens – you see? – protected from the north by a wall. In the east wing there is the kitchen and the garage, with the maids' rooms in the pavilion at the end. The west is a library, and it has an arcaded loggia along the front. And instead of a solid superstructure corresponding to the maids' rooms, there's a pergola with brick piers. You see? And in the main block there's a Spanish sort of balcony along the whole length at first-floor level; that gives a good horizontal line. And you get the perpendiculars with coigns and raised panels. And the roof's hidden by a balustrade, and there are balustrades along the open sides of the roof gardens on the wings. All in brick it is. This is the garden front; the entrance front will be admirable too. Do you like it?'

Gumbril Junior nodded. ‘Very much,' he said.

His father sighed and taking the sketch put it back in his pocket. ‘You must hurry up with your ten thousand,' he said. ‘And you, Porteous, and you. I've been waiting so long to build your splendid house.'