Crome Yellow Read online

  “I’ll tell you.” She pulled up a brown varnished chair and sat down. In the village of Crome, it seemed, Sodom and Gomorrah had come to a second birth.

  Chapter X.

  * * *

  Denis did not dance, but when ragtime came squirting out of the pianola in gushes of treacle and hot perfume, in jets of Bengal light, then things began to dance inside him. Little black nigger corpuscles jigged and drummed in his arteries. He became a cage of movement, a walking palais de danse. It was very uncomfortable, like the preliminary symptoms of a disease. He sat in one of the window-seats, glumly pretending to read.

  At the pianola, Henry Wimbush, smoking a long cigar through a tunnelled pillar of amber, trod out the shattering dance music with serene patience. Locked together, Gombauld and Anne moved with a harmoniousness that made them seem a single creature, twoheaded and four-legged. Mr. Scogan, solemnly buffoonish, shuffled round the room with Mary. Jenny sat in the shadow behind the piano, scribbling, so it seemed, in a big red notebook. In arm-chairs by the fireplace, Priscilla and Mr. Barbecue-Smith discussed higher things, without, apparently, being disturbed by the noise on the Lower Plane.

  “Optimism,” said Mr. Barbecue-Smith with a tone of finality, speaking through strains of the “Wild, Wild Women” —“optimism is the opening out of the soul towards the light; it is an expansion towards and into God, it is a h-piritual self-unification with the Infinite.”

  “How true!” sighed Priscilla, nodding the baleful splendours of her coiffure.

  “Pessimism, on the other hand, is the contraction of the soul towards darkness; it is a focusing of the self upon a point in the Lower Plane; it is a h-piritual slavery to mere facts; to gross physical phenomena.”

  “They’re making a wild man of me.” The refrain sang itself over in Denis’s mind. Yes, they were; damn them! A wild man, but not wild enough; that was the trouble. Wild inside; raging, writhing — yes, “writhing” was the word, writhing with desire. But outwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly — baa, baa, baa.

  There they were, Anne and Gombauld, moving together as though they were a single supple creature. The beast with two backs. And he sat in a corner, pretending to read, pretending he didn’t want to dance, pretending he rather despised dancing. Why? It was the baa-baa business again.

  Why was he born with a different face? Why WAS he? Gombauld had a face of brass — one of those old, brazen rams that thumped against the walls of cities till they fell. He was born with a different face — a woolly face.

  The music stopped. The single harmonious creature broke in two. Flushed, a little breathless, Anne swayed across the room to the pianola, laid her hand on Mr. Wimbush’s shoulder.

  “A waltz this time, please, Uncle Henry,” she said.

  “A waltz,” he repeated, and turned to the cabinet where the rolls were kept. He trod off the old roll and trod on the new, a slave at the mill, uncomplaining and beautifully well bred. “Rum; Tum; Rum-ti-ti; Tum-ti-ti...” The melody wallowed oozily along, like a ship moving forward over a sleek and oily swell. The fourlegged creature, more graceful, more harmonious in its movements than ever, slid across the floor. Oh, why was he born with a different face?

  “What are you reading?”

  He looked up, startled. It was Mary. She had broken from the uncomfortable embrace of Mr. Scogan, who had now seized on Jenny for his victim.

  “What are you reading?”

  “I don’t know,” said Denis truthfully. He looked at the title page; the book was called “The Stock Breeder’s Vade Mecum.”

  “I think you are so sensible to sit and read quietly,” said Mary, fixing him with her china eyes. “I don’t know why one dances. It’s so boring.”

  Denis made no reply; she exacerbated him. From the arm-chair by the fireplace he heard Priscilla’s deep voice.

  “Tell me, Mr Barbecue-Smith — you know all about science, I know —“ A deprecating noise came from Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s chair. “This Einstein theory. It seems to upset the whole starry universe. It makes me so worried about my horoscopes. You see...”

  Mary renewed her attack. “Which of the contemporary poets do you like best?” she asked. Denis was filled with fury. Why couldn’t this pest of a girl leave him alone? He wanted to listen to the horrible music, to watch them dancing — oh, with what grace, as though they had been made for one another! — to savour his misery in peace. And she came and put him through this absurd catechism! She was like “Mangold’s Questions”: “What are the three diseases of wheat?” —“Which of the contemporary poets do you like best?”

  “Blight, Mildew, and Smut,” he replied, with the laconism of one who is absolutely certain of his own mind.

  It was several hours before Denis managed to go to sleep that night. Vague but agonising miseries possessed his mind. It was not only Anne who made him miserable; he was wretched about himself, the future, life in general, the universe. “This adolescence business,” he repeated to himself every now and then, “is horribly boring. But the fact that he knew his disease did not help him to cure it.

  After kicking all the clothes off the bed, he got up and sought relief in composition. He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words. At the end of an hour, nine more or less complete lines emerged from among the blots and scratchings.

  “I do not know what I desire When summer nights are dark and still, When the wind’s many-voiced quire Sleeps among the muffled branches. I long and know not what I will: And not a sound of life or laughter stanches Time’s black and silent flow. I do not know what I desire, I do not know.”

  He read it through aloud; then threw the scribbled sheet into the waste-paper basket and got into bed again. In a very few minutes he was asleep.

  Chapter XI.

  * * *

  Mr. Barbecue-Smith was gone. The motor had whirled him away to the station; a faint smell of burning oil commemorated his recent departure. A considerable detachment had come into the courtyard to speed him on his way; and now they were walking back, round the side of the house, towards the terrace and the garden. They walked in silence; nobody had yet ventured to comment on the departed guest.

  “Well?” said Anne at last, turning with raised inquiring eyebrows to Denis.

  “Well?” It was time for someone to begin.

  Denis declined the invitation; he passed it on to Mr Scogan. “Well?” he said.

  Mr. Scogan did not respond; he only repeated the question, “Well?”

  It was left for Henry Wimbush to make a pronouncement. “A very agreeable adjunct to the week-end,” he said. His tone was obituary.

  They had descended, without paying much attention where they were going, the steep yew-walk that went down, under the flank of the terrace, to the pool. The house towered above them, immensely tall, with the whole height of the built-up terrace added to its own seventy feet of brick facade. The perpendicular lines of the three towers soared up, uninterrupted, enhancing the impression of height until it became overwhelming. They paused at the edge of the pool to look back.

  “The man who built this house knew his business,” said Denis. “He was an architect.”

  “Was he?” said Henry Wimbush reflectively. “I doubt it. The builder of this house was Sir Ferdinando Lapith, who flourished during the reign of Elizabeth. He inherited the estate from his father, to whom it had been granted at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries; for Crome was originally a cloister of monks and this swimming-pool their fish-pond. Sir Ferdinando was not content merely to adapt the old monastic buildings to his own purposes; but using them as a stone quarry for his barns and byres and outhouses, he built for himself a grand new house of brick — the house you see now.”

  He waved his hand in the direction of the house and was silent. severe, imposing, almost menacing, Crome loomed down on them.

  “The great thing about Crome,” said Mr. Scogan, seizing the opportunity to speak, “is the fact that it’s so unmistakably and aggressively a work of art. It
makes no compromise with nature, but affronts it and rebels against it. It has no likeness to Shelley’s tower, in the ‘Epipsychidion,’ which, if I remember rightly —

  “’Seems not now a work of human art, But as it were titanic, in the heart Of earth having assumed its form and grown Out of the mountain, from the living stone, Lifting itself in caverns light and high.’

  No, no, there isn’t any nonsense of that sort about Crome. That the hovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown out of the earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, and suitable. But the house of an intelligent, civilised, and sophisticated man should never seem to have sprouted from the clods. It should rather be an expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish life. Since the days of William Morris that’s a fact which we in England have been unable to comprehend. Civilised and sophisticated men have solemnly played at being peasants. Hence quaintness, arts and crafts, cottage architecture, and all the rest of it. In the suburbs of our cities you may see, reduplicated in endless rows, studiedly quaint imitations and adaptations of the village hovel. Poverty, ignorance, and a limited range of materials produced the hovel, which possesses undoubtedly, in suitable surroundings, its own ‘as it were titanic’ charm. We now employ our wealth, our technical knowledge, our rich variety of materials for the purpose of building millions of imitation hovels in totally unsuitable surroundings. Could imbecility go further?”

  Henry Wimbush took up the thread of his interrupted discourse. “All that you say, my dear Scogan,” he began, “is certainly very just, very true. But whether Sir Ferdinando shared your views about architecture or if, indeed, he had any views about architecture at all, I very much doubt. In building this house, Sir Ferdinando was, as a matter of fact, preoccupied by only one thought — the proper placing of his privies. Sanitation was the one great interest of his life. In 1573 he even published, on this subject, a little book — now extremely scarce — called, ‘Certaine Priuy Counsels’ by ‘One of Her Maiestie’s Most Honourable Priuy Counsels, F.L. Knight’, in which the whole matter is treated with great learning and elegance. His guiding principle in arranging the sanitation of a house was to secure that the greatest possible distance should separate the privy from the sewage arrangements. Hence it followed inevitably that the privies were to be placed at the top of the house, being connected by vertical shafts with pits or channels in the ground. It must not be thought that Sir Ferdinando was moved only by material and merely sanitary considerations; for the placing of his privies in an exalted position he had also certain excellent spiritual reasons. For, he argues in the third chapter of his ‘Priuy Counsels’, the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying them we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe. To counteract these degrading effects he advised that the privy should be in every house the room nearest to heaven, that it should be well provided with windows commanding an extensive and noble prospect, and that the walls of the chamber should be lined with bookshelves containing all the ripest products of human wisdom, such as the Proverbs of Solomon, Boethius’s ‘Consolations of Philosophy’, the apophthegms of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the ‘Enchiridion’ of Erasmus, and all other works, ancient or modern, which testify to the nobility of the human soul. In Crome he was able to put his theories into practice. At the top of each of the three projecting towers he placed a privy. From these a shaft went down the whole height of the house, that is to say, more than seventy feet, through the cellars, and into a series of conduits provided with flowing water tunnelled in the ground on a level with the base of the raised terrace. These conduits emptied themselves into the stream several hundred yards below the fishpond. The total depth of the shafts from the top of the towers to their subterranean conduits was a hundred and two feet. The eighteenth century, with its passion for modernisation, swept away these monuments of sanitary ingenuity. Were it not for tradition and the explicit account of them left by Sir Ferdinando, we should be unaware that these noble privies had ever existed. We should even suppose that Sir Ferdinando built his house after this strange and splendid model for merely aesthetic reasons.”

  The contemplation of the glories of the past always evoked in Henry Wimbush a certain enthusiasm. Under the grey bowler his face worked and glowed as he spoke. The thought of these vanished privies moved him profoundly. He ceased to speak; the light gradually died out of his face, and it became once more the replica of the grave, polite hat which shaded it. There was a long silence; the same gently melancholy thoughts seemed to possess the mind of each of them. Permanence, transience — Sir Ferdinando and his privies were gone, Crome still stood. How brightly the sun shone and how inevitable was death! The ways of God were strange; the ways of man were stranger still...

  “It does one’s heart good,” exclaimed Mr. Scogan at last, “to hear of these fantastic English aristocrats. To have a theory about privies and to build an immense and splendid house in order to put it into practise — it’s magnificent, beautiful! I like to think of them all: the eccentric milords rolling across Europe in ponderous carriages, bound on extraordinary errands. One is going to Venice to buy La Bianchi’s larynx; he won’t get it till she’s dead, of course, but no matter; he’s prepared to wait; he has a collection, pickled in glass bottles, of the throats of famous opera singers. And the instruments of renowned virtuosi — he goes in for them too; he will try to bribe Paganini to part with his little Guarnerio, but he has small hope of success. Paganini won’t sell his fiddle; but perhaps he might sacrifice one of his guitars. Others are bound on crusades — one to die miserably among the savage Greeks, another, in his white top hat, to lead Italians against their oppressors. Others have no business at all; they are just giving their oddity a continental airing. At home they cultivate themselves at leisure and with greater elaboration. Beckford builds towers, Portland digs holes in the ground, Cavendish, the millionaire, lives in a stable, eats nothing but mutton, and amuses himself — oh, solely for his private delectation — by anticipating the electrical discoveries of half a century. Glorious eccentrics! Every age is enlivened by their presence. Some day, my dear Denis,” said Mr Scogan, turning a beady bright regard in his direction —“some day you must become their biographer — ‘The Lives of Queer Men.’ What a subject! I should like to undertake it myself.”

  Mr. Scogan paused, looked up once more at the towering house, then murmured the word “Eccentricity,” two or three times.

  “Eccentricity...It’s the justification of all aristocracies. It justifies leisured classes and inherited wealth and privilege and endowments and all the other injustices of that sort. If you’re to do anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That’s the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself — often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity in others. The eccentricities of the artist and the new-fangled thinker don’t inspire it with that fear, loathing, and disgust which the burgesses instinctively feel towards them. It is a sort of Red Indian Reservation planted in the midst of a vast horde of Poor Whites — colonials at that. Within its boundaries wild men disport themselves — often, it must be admitted, a little grossly, a little too flamboyantly; and when kindred spirits are born outside the pale it offers them some sort of refuge from the hatred which the Poor Whites, en bons bourgeois, lavish on anything that is wild or out of the ordinary. After the social revolution there will be no Reservations; the Redskins will be drowned in the great sea of Poor Whites. What then? Will they suffer you to go on writing villanelles, my good Denis? Will you, unhappy Henry
, be allowed to live in this house of the splendid privies, to continue your quiet delving in the mines of futile knowledge? Will Anne...”

  “And you,” said Anne, interrupting him, “will you be allowed to go on talking?”

  “You may rest assured,” Mr. Scogan replied, “that I shall not. I shall have some Honest Work to do.”

  Chapter XII.

  * * *

  Blight, Mildew, and Smut...” Mary was puzzled and distressed. Perhaps her ears had played her false. Perhaps what he had really said was, “Squire, Binyon, and Shanks,” or “Childe, Blunden, and Earp,” or even “Abercrombie, Drinkwater, and Rabindranath Tagore.” Perhaps. But then her ears never did play her false. “Blight, Mildew, and Smut.” The impression was distinct and ineffaceable. “Blight, Mildew...” she was forced to the conclusion, reluctantly, that Denis had indeed pronounced those improbable words. He had deliberately repelled her attempts to open a serious discussion. That was horrible. A man who would not talk seriously to a woman just because she was a woman — oh, impossible! Egeria or nothing. Perhaps Gombauld would be more satisfactory. True, his meridional heredity was a little disquieting; but at least he was a serious worker, and it was with his work that she would associate herself. And Denis? After all, what WAS Denis? A dilettante, an amateur...

  Gombauld had annexed for his painting-room a little disused granary that stood by itself in a green close beyond the farmyard. It was a square brick building with a peaked roof and little windows set high up in each of its walls. A ladder of four rungs led up to the door; for the granary was perched above the ground, and out of reach of the rats, on four massive toadstools of grey stone. Within, there lingered a faint smell of dust and cobwebs; and the narrow shaft of sunlight that came slanting in at every hour of the day through one of the little windows was always alive with silvery motes. Here Gombauld worked, with a kind of concentrated ferocity, during six or seven hours of each day. He was pursuing something new, something terrific, if only he could catch it.