Antic Hay Page 5

  ‘There’s nothing I should like better,’ said Gumbril Junior.

  ‘Another great advantage of sunny countries,’ Gumbril Senior pursued, ‘is that one can really live like an aristocrat, in privacy, by oneself. No need to look out on the dirty world or to let the dirty world look in on you. Here’s this great house, for example, looking out on the world through a few dark portholes and a single cavernous doorway. But look inside.’ He held his lamp above the courtyard that was at the heart of the palace. Gumbril Junior leaned and looked, like his father. ‘All the life looks inwards – into a lovely courtyard, a more than Spanish patio. Look there at the treble tiers of arcades, the vaulted cloisters for your cool peripatetic meditations, the central Triton spouting white water into a marble pool, the mosaic work on the floor and flowering up the walls, brilliant against the white stucco. And there’s the archway that leads out into the gardens. And now you must come and have a look at the garden front.’

  He walked round with his lamp to the other side of the table. There was suddenly a crash; the wire had twitched a cathedral from off the table. It lay on the floor in disastrous ruin as though shattered by some appalling cataclysm.

  ‘Hell and death!’ said Gumbril Senior in an outburst of Elizabethan fury. He put down the lamp and ran to see how irreparable the disaster had been. ‘They’re so horribly expensive, these models,’ he explained, as he bent over the ruins. Tenderly he picked up the pieces and replaced them on the table. ‘It might have been worse,’ he said at last, brushing the dust off his hands. ‘Though I’m afraid that dome will never be quite the same again.’ Picking up the lamp once more, he held it high above his head and stood looking out, with a melancholy satisfaction, over his creations. ‘And to think,’ he said after a pause, ‘that I’ve been spending these last days designing model cottages for workmen at Bletchley! I’m in luck to have got the job, of course, but really, that a civilized man should have to do jobs like that! It’s too much. In the old days these creatures built their own hovels, and very nice and suitable they were too. The architects busied themselves with architecture – which is the expression of human dignity and greatness, which is man’s protest, not his miserable acquiescence. You can’t do much protesting in a model cottage at seven hundred pounds a time. A little, no doubt, you can protest a little; you can give your cottage decent proportions and avoid sordidness and vulgarity. But that’s all; it’s really a negative process. You can only begin to protest positively and actively when you abandon the petty human scale and build for giants – when you build for the spirit and the imagination of man, not for his little body. Model cottages, indeed!’

  Mr Gumbril snorted with indignation. ‘When I think of Alberti!’ And he thought of Alberti – Alberti, the noblest Roman of them all, the true and only Roman. For the Romans themselves had lived their own actual lives, sordidly and extravagantly in the middle of a vulgar empire. Alberti and his followers in the Renaissance lived the ideal Roman life. They put Plutarch into their architecture. They took the detestable real Cato, the Brutus of history, and made of them Roman heroes to walk as guides and models before them. Before Alberti there were no true Romans, and with Piranesi’s death the race began to wither towards extinction.

  ‘And when I think of Brunelleschi!’ Gumbril Senior went on to remember with passion the architect who had suspended on eight thin flying ribs of marble the lightest of all domes and the loveliest.

  ‘And when of Michelangelo! The grim, enormous apse . . . And of Wren and of Palladio, when I think of all these –’ Gumbril Senior waved his arms and was silent. He could not put into words what he felt when he thought of them.

  Gumbril Junior looked at his watch. ‘Half-past two,’ he said. ‘Time to go to bed.’

  CHAPTER III

  ‘MISTER GUMBRIL!’ SURPRISE was mingled with delight. ‘This is indeed a pleasure!’ Delight was now the prevailing emotion expressed by the voice that advanced, as yet without a visible source, from the dark recesses of the shop.

  ‘The pleasure, Mr Bojanus, is mine.’ Gumbril closed the shop door behind him.

  A very small man, dressed in a frock-coat, popped out from a canyon that opened, a mere black crevice, between two stratified precipices of mid-season suitings, and advancing into the open space before the door bowed with an old-world grace, revealing a nacreous scalp thinly mantled with long, damp creepers of brown hair.

  ‘And to what, may I ask, do I owe this pleasure, sir?’ Mr Bojanus looked up archly with a sideways cock of his head that tilted the rigid points of his waxed moustache. The fingers of his right hand were thrust into the bosom of his frock-coat and his toes were turned out in the dancing-master’s First Position. ‘A light spring great-coat, is it? Or a new suit? I notice,’ his eye travelled professionally up and down Gumbril’s long, thin form, ‘I notice that the garments you are wearing at present, Mr Gumbril, look – how shall I say? – well, a trifle negleejay, as the French would put it, a trifle negleejay.’

  Gumbril looked down at himself. He resented Mr Bojanus’s negleejay, he was pained and wounded by the aspersion. Negleejay? And he had fancied that he really looked rather elegant and distinguished (but, after all, he always looked like that, even in rags) – no, that he looked positively neat, like Mr Porteous, positively soldierly in his black jacket and his musical-comedy trousers and his patent-leather shoes. And the black felt hat – didn’t that add just the foreign, the Southern touch which saved the whole composition from banality? He regarded himself, trying to see his clothes – garments, Mr Bojanus had called them; garments, good Lord! – through the tailor’s expert eyes. There were sagging folds about the overloaded pockets, there was a stain on his waistcoat, the knees of his trousers were baggy and puckered like the bare knees of Hélène Fourmont in Rubens’s fur-coat portrait at Vienna. Yes, it was all horribly negleejay. He felt depressed; but looking at Mr Bojanus’s studied and professional correctness, he was a little comforted. That frockcoat, for example. It was like something in a very modern picture – such a smooth, unwrinkled cylinder about the chest, such a sense of pure and abstract conic-ness in the sleekly rounded skirts! Nothing could have been less negleejay. He was reassured.

  ‘I want you,’ he said at last, clearing his throat importantly, ‘to make me a pair of trousers to a novel specification of my own. It’s a new idea.’ And he gave a brief description of Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.

  Mr Bojanus listened with attention.

  ‘I can make them for you,’ he said, when the description was finished. ‘I can make them for you – if you really wish, Mr Gumbril,’ he added.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Gumbril.

  ‘And do you intend, may I ask, Mr Gumbril, to wear these . . . these garments?’

  Guiltily, Gumbril denied himself. ‘Only to demonstrate the idea, Mr Bojanus. I am exploiting the invention commercially, you see.’

  ‘Commercially? I see, Mr Gumbril.’

  ‘Perhaps you would like a share,’ suggested Gumbril.

  Mr Bojanus shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t do for my cleeantail, I fear, Mr Gumbril. You could ‘ardly expect the Best People to wear such things.’

  ‘Couldn’t you?’

  Mr Bojanus went on shaking his head. ‘I know them,’ he said, ‘I know the Best People. Well.’ And he added with an irrelevance that was, perhaps, only apparent, ‘Between ourselves, Mr Gumbril, I am a great admirer of Lenin . . .’

  ‘So am I,’ said Gumbril, ‘theoretically. But then I have so little to lose to Lenin. I can afford to admire him. But you, Mr Bojanus, you, the prosperous bourgeois – oh, purely in the economic sense of the word, Mr Bojanus . . .’

  Mr Bojanus accepted the explanation with one of his old-world bows.

  ‘. . . you would be among the first to suffer if an English Lenin were to start his activities here.’

  ‘There, Mr Gumbril, if I may be allowed to say so, you are wrong.’ Mr Bojanus removed his hand from his bosom and employed it to emphasize the points of his disc
ourse. ‘When the revolution comes, Mr Gumbril – the great and necessary revolution, as Alderman Beckford called it – it won’t be the owning of a little money that’ll get a man into trouble. It’ll be his class-habits, Mr Gumbril, his class-speech, his class-education. It’ll be Shibboleth all over again, Mr Gumbril; mark my words. The Red Guards will stop people in the street and ask them to say some such word as “towel”. If they call it “towel”, like you and your friends, Mr Gumbril, why then . . .’ Mr Bojanus went through the gestures of pointing a rifle and pulling the trigger; he clicked his tongue against his teeth to symbolize the report . . . ‘That’ll be the end of them. But if they say “tèaul”, like the rest of us, Mr Gumbril, it’ll be: “Pass Friend and Long Live the Proletariat.” Long live Tèaul.’

  ‘I’m afraid you may be right,’ said Gumbril.

  ‘I’m convinced of it,’ said Mr Bojanus. ‘It’s my clients, Mr Gumbril, it’s the Best People that the other people resent. It’s their confidence, their ease, it’s the habit their money and their position give them of ordering people about, it’s the way they take their place in the world for granted, it’s their prestige, which the other people would like to deny, but can’t – it’s all that, Mr Gumbril, that’s so galling.’

  Gumbril nodded. He himself had envied his securer friends their power of ignoring the humanity of those who were not of their class. To do that really well, one must always have lived in a large house full of clockwork servants; one must never have been short of money, never at a restaurant ordered the cheaper thing instead of the more delicious; one must never have regarded a policeman as anything but one’s paid defender against the lower orders, never for a moment have doubted one’s divine right to do, within the accepted limits, exactly what one liked without a further thought to anything or any one but oneself and one’s own enjoyment. Gumbril had been brought up among these blessed beings; but he was not one of them. Alas? or fortunately? He hardly knew which.

  ‘And what good do you expect the revolution to do, Mr Bojanus?’ he asked at last.

  Mr Bojanus replaced his hand in his bosom. ‘None whatever, Mr Gumbril,’ he said. ‘None whatever.’

  ‘But Liberty,’ Gumbril suggested, ‘equality and all that. What about those, Mr Bojanus?’

  Mr Bojanus smiled up at him tolerantly and kindly, as he might have smiled at some one who had suggested, shall we say, that evening trousers should be turned up at the bottom. ‘Liberty, Mr Gumbril?’ he said; ‘you don’t suppose any serious-minded person imagines a revolution is going to bring liberty, do you?’

  ‘The people who make the revolution always seem to ask for liberty.’

  ‘But do they ever get it, Mr Gumbril?’ Mr Bojanus cocked his head playfully and smiled. ‘Look at ’istory, Mr Gumbril, look at ’istory. First it’s the French Revolution. They ask for political liberty. And they gets it. Then comes the Reform Bill, then Forty-Eight, then all the Franchise Acts and Votes for Women – always more and more political liberty. And what’s the result, Mr Gumbril? Nothing at all. Who’s freer for political liberty? Not a soul, Mr Gumbril. There was never a greater swindle ’atched in the ‘ole of ’istory. And when you think ’ow those poor young men like Shelley talked about it – it’s pathetic,’ said Mr Bojanus, shaking his head, ‘reelly pathetic. Political liberty’s a swindle because a man doesn’t spend his time being political. He spends it sleeping, eating, amusing himself a little and working – mostly working. When they’d got all the political liberty they wanted – or found they didn’t want – they began to understand this. And so now it’s all for the industrial revolution, Mr Gumbril. But bless you, that’s as big a swindle as the other. How can there ever be liberty under any system? No amount of profit-sharing or self-government by the workers, no amount of hyjeenic conditions or cocoa villages or recreation grounds can get rid of the fundamental slavery – the necessity of working. Liberty? why, it doesn’t exist! There’s no liberty in this world; only gilded caiges. And then, Mr Gumbril, even suppose you could somehow get rid of the necessity of working, suppose a man’s time were all leisure. Would he be free then? I say nothing of the natural slavery of eating and sleeping and all that, Mr Gumbril; I say nothing of that, because that, if I may say so, would be too ‘air-splitting and metaphysical. But what I do ask you is this,’ and Mr Bojanus wagged his forefinger almost menacingly at the sleeping partner in this dialogue: ‘would a man with unlimited leisure be free, Mr Gumbril? I say he would not. Not unless he ’appened to be a man like you or me, Mr Gumbril, a man of sense, a man of independent judgment. An ordinary man would not be free. Because he wouldn’t know how to occupy his leisure except in some way that would be forced on ’im by other people. People don’t know ’ow to entertain themselves now; they leave it to other people to do it for them. They swallow what’s given them. They ’ave to swallow it, whether they like it or not. Cinemas, newspapers, magazines, gramophones, football matches, wireless, telephones – take them or leave them, if you want to amuse yourself. The ordinary man can’t leave them. He takes; and what’s that but slavery? And so you see, Mr Gumbril,’ Mr Bojanus smiled with a kind of roguish triumph, ‘you see that even in the ‘ypothetical case of a man with indefinite leisure, there still would be no freedom . . . And the case, as I have said, is purely ‘ypothetical; at any rate so far as concerns the sort of people who want a revolution. And as for the sort of people who do enjoy leisure, even now – why I think, Mr Gumbril, you and I know enough about the Best People to know that freedom, except possibly sexual freedom, is not their strongest point. And sexual freedom – what’s that?’ Mr Bojanus dramatically inquired. ‘You and I, Mr Gumbril,’ he answered confidentially, ‘we know. It’s an ’orrible, ’ideous slavery. That’s what it is. Or am I wrong, Mr Gumbril?’

  ‘Quite right, quite right, Mr Bojanus,’ Gumbril hastened to reply.

  ‘From all of which,’ continued Mr Bojanus, ‘it follows that, except for a few, a very few people like you and me, Mr Gumbril, there’s no such thing as liberty. It’s an ’oax, Mr Gumbril. An ’orrible plant. And if I may be allowed to say so,’ Mr Bojanus lowered his voice, but still spoke with emphasis, ‘a bloody swindle.’

  ‘But in that case, Mr Bojanus, why are you so anxious to have a revolution?’ Gumbril inquired.

  Thoughtfully, Mr Bojanus twisted to a finer point his waxed moustaches. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘it would be a nice change. I was always one for change and a little excitement. And then there’s the scientific interest. You never quite know ’ow an experiment will turn out, do you, Mr Gumbril? I remember when I was a boy, my old dad – a great gardener he was, a regular floriculturist, you might say, Mr Gumbril – he tried the experiment of grafting a sprig of Gloire de Dijon on to a black currant bush. And, would you believe it? the roses came out black, coal black, Mr Gumbril. Nobody would ever have guessed that if the thing had never been tried. And that’s what I say about the revolution. You don’t know what’ll come of it till you try. Black roses, blue roses –’oo knows, Mr Gumbril, ’oo knows?’

  ‘Who indeed?’ Gumbril looked at his watch. ‘About those trousers . . .’ he added.

  ‘Those garments,’ corrected Mr Bojanus. ‘Ah, yes. Should we say next Tuesday?’

  ‘Let us say next Tuesday.’ Gumbril opened the shop door. ‘Good morning, Mr Bojanus.’

  Mr Bojanus bowed him out, as though he had been a prince of the blood.

  The sun was shining and at the end of the street between the houses the sky was blue. Gauzily the distances faded to a soft, rich indistinctness; there were veils of golden muslin thickening down the length of every vista. On the trees in the Hanover Square gardens the young leaves were still so green that they seemed to be alight, green fire, and the sooty trunks looked blacker and dirtier than ever. It would have been a pleasant and apposite thing if a cuckoo had started calling. But though the cuckoo was silent it was a happy day. A day, Gumbril reflected, as he strolled idly along, to be in love.

  From the world of tailors Gum
bril passed into that of the artificial-pearl merchants, and with a still keener appreciation of the amorous qualities of this clear spring day, he began a leisured march along the perfumed pavements of Bond Street. He thought with a profound satisfaction of those sixty-three papers on the Risorgimento. How pleasant it was to waste time! And Bond Street offered so many opportunities for wasting it agreeably. He trotted round the Spring Exhibition at the Grosvenor and came out, a little regretting, he had to confess, his eighteenpence for admission. After that, he pretended that he wanted to buy a grand piano. When he had finished practising his favourite passages on the magnificent instrument to which they obsequiously introduced him, he looked in for a few moments at Sotheby’s, sniffed among the ancient books and strolled on again, admiring the cigars, the lucid scent-bottles, the socks, the old masters, the emerald necklaces – everything, in fact, in all the shops he passed.

  ‘Forthcoming Exhibition of Works by Casimir Lypiatt.’ The announcement caught his eye. And so poor old Lypiatt was on the warpath again, he reflected, as he pushed open the doors of the Albemarle Galleries. Poor old Lypiatt! Dear old Lypiatt, even. He liked Lypiatt. Though he had his defects. It would be fun to see him again.

  Gumbril found himself in the midst of a dismal collection of etchings. He passed them in review, wondering why it was that, in these hard days when no painter can sell a picture, almost any dull fool who can scratch a conventional etcher’s view of two boats, a suggested cloud and the flat sea should be able to get rid of his prints by the dozen and at guineas apiece. He was interrupted in his speculations by the approach of the assistant in charge of the gallery. He came up shyly and uncomfortably, but with the conscientious determination of one ambitious to do his duty and make good. He was a very young man with pale hair, to which heavy oiling had given a curious greyish colour, and a face of such childish contour and so imberb that he looked like a little boy playing at grown-ups. He had only been at this job a few weeks, and he found it very difficult.