Crome Yellow Read online

  “Of course it is,” said Denis. “But it’s a lesson to be learnt gradually. There are the twenty tons of ratiocination to be got rid of first.”

  “I’ve always taken things as they come,” said Anne. “It seems so obvious. One enjoys the pleasant things, avoids the nasty ones. There’s nothing more to be said.”

  “Nothing — for you. But, then, you were born a pagan; I am trying laboriously to make myself one. I can take nothing for granted, I can enjoy nothing as it comes along. Beauty, pleasure, art, women — I have to invent an excuse, a justification for everything that’s delightful. Otherwise I can’t enjoy it with an easy conscience. I make up a little story about beauty and pretend that it has something to do with truth and goodness. I have to say that art is the process by which one reconstructs the divine reality out of chaos. Pleasure is one of the mystical roads to union with the infinite — the ecstasies of drinking, dancing, love-making. As for women, I am perpetually assuring myself that they’re the broad highway to divinity. And to think that I’m only just beginning to see through the silliness of the whole thing! It’s incredible to me that anyone should have escaped these horrors.”

  “It’s still more incredible to me,” said Anne, “that anyone should have been a victim to them. I should like to see myself believing that men are the highway to divinity.” The amused malice of her smile planted two little folds on either side of her mouth, and through their half-closed lids her eyes shone with laughter. “What you need, Denis, is a nice plump young wife, a fixed income, and a little congenial but regular work.”

  “What I need is you.” That was what he ought to have retorted, that was what he wanted passionately to say. He could not say it. His desire fought against his shyness. “What I need is you.” Mentally he shouted the words, but not a sound issued from his lips. He looked at her despairingly. Couldn’t she see what was going on inside him? Couldn’t she understand? “What I need is you.” He would say it, he would — he would.

  “I think I shall go and bathe,” said Anne. “It’s so hot.” The opportunity had passed.

  Chapter V.

  * * *

  Mr. Wimbush had taken them to see the sights of the Home Farm, and now they were standing, all six of them — Henry Wimbush, Mr. Scogan, Denis, Gombauld, Anne, and Mary — by the low wall of the piggery, looking into one of the styes.

  “This is a good sow,” said Henry Wimbush. “She had a litter of fourteen.

  “Fourteen?” Mary echoed incredulously. She turned astonished blue eyes towards Mr. Wimbush, then let them fall onto the seething mass of elan vital that fermented in the sty.

  An immense sow reposed on her side in the middle of the pen. Her round, black belly, fringed with a double line of dugs, presented itself to the assault of an army of small, brownish-black swine. With a frantic greed they tugged at their mother’s flank. The old sow stirred sometimes uneasily or uttered a little grunt of pain. One small pig, the runt, the weakling of the litter, had been unable to secure a place at the banquet. Squealing shrilly, he ran backwards and forwards, trying to push in among his stronger brothers or even to climb over their tight little black backs towards the maternal reservoir.

  “There ARE fourteen,” said Mary. “You’re quite right. I counted. It’s extraordinary.”

  “The sow next door,” Mr. Wimbush went on, “has done very badly. She only had five in her litter. I shall give her another chance. If she does no better next time, I shall fat her up and kill her. There’s the boar,” he pointed towards a farther sty. “Fine old beast, isn’t he? But he’s getting past his prime. He’ll have to go too.”

  “How cruel!” Anne exclaimed.

  “But how practical, how eminently realistic!” said Mr. Scogan. “In this farm we have a model of sound paternal government. Make them breed, make them work, and when they’re past working or breeding or begetting, slaughter them.”

  “Farming seems to be mostly indecency and cruelty,” said Anne.

  With the ferrule of his walking-stick Denis began to scratch the boar’s long bristly back. The animal moved a little so as to bring himself within easier range of the instrument that evoked in him such delicious sensations; then he stood stock still, softly grunting his contentment. The mud of years flaked off his sides in a grey powdery scurf.

  “What a pleasure it is,” said Denis, “to do somebody a kindness. I believe I enjoy scratching this pig quite as much as he enjoys being scratched. If only one could always be kind with so little expense or trouble...”

  A gate slammed; there was a sound of heavy footsteps.

  “Morning, Rowley!” said Henry Wimbush.

  “Morning, sir,” old Rowley answered. He was the most venerable of the labourers on the farm — a tall, solid man, still unbent, with grey side-whiskers and a steep, dignified profile. Grave, weighty in his manner, splendidly respectable, Rowley had the air of a great English statesman of the mid-nineteenth century. He halted on the outskirts of the group, and for a moment they all looked at the pigs in a silence that was only broken by the sound of grunting or the squelch of a sharp hoof in the mire. Rowley turned at last, slowly and ponderously and nobly, as he did everything, and addressed himself to Henry Wimbush.

  “Look at them, sir,” he said, with a motion of his hand towards the wallowing swine. “Rightly is they called pigs.”

  “Rightly indeed,” Mr. Wimbush agreed.

  “I am abashed by that man,” said Mr. Scogan, as old Rowley plodded off slowly and with dignity. “What wisdom, what judgment, what a sense of values! ‘Rightly are they called swine.’ Yes. And I wish I could, with as much justice, say, ‘Rightly are we called men.’”

  They walked on towards the cowsheds and the stables of the carthorses. Five white geese, taking the air this fine morning, even as they were doing, met them in the way. They hesitated, cackled; then, converting their lifted necks into rigid, horizontal snakes, they rushed off in disorder, hissing horribly as they went. Red calves paddled in the dung and mud of a spacious yard. In another enclosure stood the bull, massive as a locomotive. He was a very calm bull, and his face wore an expression of melancholy stupidity. He gazed with reddish-brown eyes at his visitors, chewed thoughtfully at the tangible memories of an earlier meal, swallowed and regurgitated, chewed again. His tail lashed savagely from side to side; it seemed to have nothing to do with his impassive bulk. Between his short horns was a triangle of red curls, short and dense.

  “Splendid animal,” said Henry Wimbush. “Pedigree stock. But he’s getting a little old, like the boar.”

  “Fat him up and slaughter him,” Mr. Scogan pronounced, with a delicate old-maidish precision of utterance.

  “Couldn’t you give the animals a little holiday from producing children?” asked Anne. “I’m so sorry for the poor things.”

  Mr. Wimbush shook his head. “Personally,” he said, “I rather like seeing fourteen pigs grow where only one grew before. The spectacle of so much crude life is refreshing.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say so,” Gombauld broke in warmly. “Lots of life: that’s what we want. I like pullulation; everything ought to increase and multiply as hard as it can.”

  Gombauld grew lyrical. Everybody ought to have children — Anne ought to have them, Mary ought to have them — dozens and dozens. He emphasised his point by thumping with his walking-stick on the bull’s leather flanks. Mr. Scogan ought to pass on his intelligence to little Scogans, and Denis to little Denises. The bull turned his head to see what was happening, regarded the drumming stick for several seconds, then turned back again satisfied, it seemed, that nothing was happening. Sterility was odious, unnatural, a sin against life. Life, life, and still more life. The ribs of the placid bull resounded.

  Standing with his back against the farmyard pump, a little apart, Denis examined the group. Gombauld, passionate and vivacious, was its centre. The others stood round, listening — Henry Wimbush, calm and polite beneath his grey bowler; Mary, with parted lips and eyes that shone with the i
ndignation of a convinced birth-controller. Anne looked on through half-shut eyes, smiling; and beside her stood Mr. Scogan, bolt upright in an attitude of metallic rigidity that contrasted strangely with that fluid grace of hers which even in stillness suggested a soft movement.

  Gombauld ceased talking, and Mary, flushed and outraged, opened her mouth to refute him. But she was too slow. Before she could utter a word Mr. Scogan’s fluty voice had pronounced the opening phrases of a discourse. There was no hope of getting so much as a word in edgeways; Mary had perforce to resign herself.

  “Even your eloquence, my dear Gombauld,” he was saying —“even your eloquence must prove inadequate to reconvert the world to a belief in the delights of mere multiplication. With the gramophone, the cinema, and the automatic pistol, the goddess of Applied Science has presented the world with another gift, more precious even than these — the means of dissociating love from propagation. Eros, for those who wish it, is now an entirely free god; his deplorable associations with Lucina may be broken at will. In the course of the next few centuries, who knows? the world may see a more complete severance. I look forward to it optimistically. Where the great Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward, Swan of Lichfield, experimented — and, for all their scientific ardour, failed — our descendants will experiment and succeed. An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.”

  “It sounds lovely,” said Anne.

  “The distant future always does.”

  Mary’s china blue eyes, more serious and more astonished than ever, were fixed on Mr. Scogan. “Bottles?” she said. “Do you really think so? Bottles...”

  Chapter VI.

  * * *

  Mr. Barbecue-Smith arrived in time for tea on Saturday afternoon. He was a short and corpulent man, with a very large head and no neck. In his earlier middle age he had been distressed by this absence of neck, but was comforted by reading in Balzac’s “Louis Lambert” that all the world’s great men have been marked by the same peculiarity, and for a simple and obvious reason: Greatness is nothing more nor less than the harmonious functioning of the faculties of the head and heart; the shorter the neck, the more closely these two organs approach one another; argal...It was convincing.

  Mr. Barbecue-Smith belonged to the old school of journalists. He sported a leonine head with a greyish-black mane of oddly unappetising hair brushed back from a broad but low forehead. And somehow he always seemed slightly, ever so slightly, soiled. In younger days he had gaily called himself a Bohemian. He did so no longer. He was a teacher now, a kind of prophet. Some of his books of comfort and spiritual teaching were in their hundred and twentieth thousand.

  Priscilla received him with every mark of esteem. He had never been to Crome before; she showed him round the house. Mr. Barbecue-Smith was full of admiration.

  “So quaint, so old-world,” he kept repeating. He had a rich, rather unctuous voice.

  Priscilla praised his latest book. “Splendid, I thought it was,” she said in her large, jolly way.

  “I’m happy to think you found it a comfort,” said Mr. BarbecueSmith.

  “Oh, tremendously! And the bit about the Lotus Pool — I thought that so beautiful.”

  “I knew you would like that. It came to me, you know, from without.” He waved his hand to indicate the astral world.

  They went out into the garden for tea. Mr. Barbecue-Smith was duly introduced.

  “Mr. Stone is a writer too,” said Priscilla, as she introduced Denis.

  “Indeed!” Mr. Barbecue-Smith smiled benignly, and, looking up at Denis with an expression of Olympian condescension, “And what sort of things do you write?”

  Denis was furious, and, to make matters worse, he felt himself blushing hotly. Had Priscilla no sense of proportion? She was putting them in the same category — Barbecue-Smith and himself. They were both writers, they both used pen and ink. To Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s question he answered, “Oh, nothing much, nothing,” and looked away.

  “Mr. Stone is one of our younger poets.” It was Anne’s voice. He scowled at her, and she smiled back exasperatingly.

  “Excellent, excellent,” said Mr. Barbecue-Smith, and he squeezed Denis’s arm encouragingly. “The Bard’s is a noble calling.”

  As soon as tea was over Mr. Barbecue-Smith excused himself; he had to do some writing before dinner. Priscilla quite understood. The prophet retired to his chamber.

  Mr. Barbecue-Smith came down to the drawing-room at ten to eight. He was in a good humour, and, as he descended the stairs, he smiled to himself and rubbed his large white hands together. In the drawing-room someone was playing softly and ramblingly on the piano. He wondered who it could be. One of the young ladies, perhaps. But no, it was only Denis, who got up hurriedly and with some embarrassment as he came into the room.

  “Do go on, do go on,” said Mr. Barbecue-Smith. “I am very fond of music.”

  “Then I couldn’t possibly go on,” Denis replied. “I only make noises.”

  There was a silence. Mr. Barbecue-Smith stood with his back to the hearth, warming himself at the memory of last winter’s fires. He could not control his interior satisfaction, but still went on smiling to himself. At last he turned to Denis.

  “You write,” he asked, “don’t you?”

  “Well, yes — a little, you know.”

  “How many words do you find you can write in an hour?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever counted.”

  “Oh, you ought to, you ought to. It’s most important.”

  Denis exercised his memory. “When I’m in good form,” he said, “I fancy I do a twelve-hundred-word review in about four hours. But sometimes it takes me much longer.”

  Mr. Barbecue-Smith nodded. “Yes, three hundred words an hour at your best.” He walked out into the middle of the room, turned round on his heels, and confronted Denis again. “Guess how many words I wrote this evening between five and half-past seven.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “No, but you must guess. Between five and half-past seven — that’s two and a half hours.”

  “Twelve hundred words,” Denis hazarded.

  “No, no, no.” Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s expanded face shone with gaiety. “Try again.”

  “Fifteen hundred.”

  “No.”

  “I give it up,” said Denis. He found he couldn’t summon up much interest in Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s writing.

  “Well, I’ll tell you. Three thousand eight hundred.”

  Denis opened his eyes. “You must get a lot done in a day,” he said.

  Mr. Barbecue-Smith suddenly became extremely confidential. He pulled up a stool to the side of Denis’s arm-chair, sat down in it, and began to talk softly and rapidly.

  “Listen to me,” he said, laying his hand on Denis’s sleeve. “You want to make your living by writing; you’re young, you’re inexperienced. Let me give you a little sound advice.”

  What was the fellow going to do? Denis wondered: give him an introduction to the editor of “John o’ London’s Weekly”, or tell him where he could sell a light middle for seven guineas? Mr. Barbecue-Smith patted his arm several times and went on.

  “The secret of writing,” he said, breathing it into the young man’s ear —“the secret of writing is Inspiration.”

  Denis looked at him in astonishment.

  “Inspiration...” Mr. Barbecue-Smith repeated.

  “You mean the native wood-note business?”

  Mr. Barbecue-Smith nodded.

  “Oh, then I entirely agree with you,” said Denis. “But what if one hasn’t got Inspiration?”

  “That was precisely the question I was waiting for,” said Mr
. Barbecue-Smith. “You ask me what one should do if one hasn’t got Inspiration. I answer: you have Inspiration; everyone has Inspiration. It’s simply a question of getting it to function.”

  The clock struck eight. There was no sign of any of the other guests; everybody was always late at Crome. Mr. Barbecue-Smith went on.

  “That’s my secret,” he said. “I give it you freely.” (Denis made a suitably grateful murmur and grimace.) “I’ll help you to find your Inspiration, because I don’t like to see a nice, steady young man like you exhausting his vitality and wasting the best years of his life in a grinding intellectual labour that could be completely obviated by Inspiration. I did it myself, so I know what it’s like. Up till the time I was thirty-eight I was a writer like you — a writer without Inspiration. All I wrote I squeezed out of myself by sheer hard work. Why, in those days I was never able to do more than six-fifty words an hour, and what’s more, I often didn’t sell what I wrote.” He sighed. “We artists,” he said parenthetically, “we intellectuals aren’t much appreciated here in England.” Denis wondered if there was any method, consistent, of course, with politeness, by which he could dissociate himself from Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s “we.” There was none; and besides, it was too late now, for Mr. Barbecue-Smith was once more pursuing the tenor of his discourse.

  “At thirty-eight I was a poor, struggling, tired, overworked, unknown journalist. Now, at fifty...” He paused modestly and made a little gesture, moving his fat hands outwards, away from one another, and expanding his fingers as though in demonstration. He was exhibiting himself. Denis thought of that advertisement of Nestle’s milk — the two cats on the wall, under the moon, one black and thin, the other white, sleek, and fat. Before Inspiration and after.

  “Inspiration has made the difference,” said Mr. Barbecue-Smith solemnly. “It came quite suddenly — like a gentle dew from heaven.” He lifted his hand and let it fall back on to his knee to indicate the descent of the dew. “It was one evening. I was writing my first little book about the Conduct of Life — ‘Humble Heroisms’. You may have read it; it has been a comfort — at least I hope and think so — a comfort to many thousands. I was in the middle of the second chapter, and I was stuck. Fatigue, overwork — I had only written a hundred words in the last hour, and I could get no further. I sat biting the end of my pen and looking at the electric light, which hung above my table, a little above and in front of me.” He indicated the position of the lamp with elaborate care. “Have you ever looked at a bright light intently for a long time?” he asked, turning to Denis. Denis didn’t think he had. “You can hypnotise yourself that way,” Mr. Barbecue-Smith went on.