‘These substitutes for the genuine copulative article,’ said Coleman to his disciple, ‘are beneath the dignity of hellhounds like you and me.’
Charmed, the young man laughed; he was attentive as though at the feet of Socrates. Coleman had found him in a night club, where he had gone in search of Zoe, found him very drunk in the company of two formidable women fifteen or twenty years his senior, who were looking after him, half maternally out of pure kindness of heart, half professionally; for he seemed to be carrying a good deal of money. He was incapable of looking after himself. Coleman had pounced on him at once, claimed an old friendship which the youth was too tipsy to be able to deny, and carried him off. There was something, he always thought, peculiarly interesting about the spectacle of children tobogganing down into the cesspools.
‘I like this place,’ said the young man.
‘Tastes differ!’ Coleman shrugged his shoulders. ‘The German professors have catalogued thousands of people whose whole pleasure consists of eating dung.’
The young man smiled and nodded, rather vaguely. ‘Is there anything to drink here?’ he asked.
‘Too respectable,’ Coleman answered, shaking his head.
‘I think this is a bloody place,’ said the young man.
‘Ah! but some people like blood. And some like boots. And some like long gloves and corsets. And some like birch-rods. And some like sliding down slopes and can’t look at Michelangelo’s “Night” on the Medici Tombs without dying the little death, because the statue seems to be sliding. And some . . .’
‘But I want something to drink,’ insisted the young man.
Coleman stamped his feet, waved his arms. ‘À boire! à boire!’ he shouted, like the newborn Gargantua. Nobody paid any attention.
The music came to an end. Gumbril and Mrs Viveash reappeared.
‘Dante,’ said Coleman, ‘calls for drink. We must leave the building.’
‘Yes. Anything to get out of this,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘What’s the time?’
Gumbril looked at his watch. ‘Half-past one.’
Mrs Viveash sighed. ‘Can’t possibly go to bed,’ she said, ‘for another hour at least.’
They walked out into the street. The stars were large and brilliant overhead. There was a little wind that almost seemed to come from the country. Gumbril thought so, at any rate; he thought of the country.
‘The question is, where?’ said Coleman. ‘You can come to my bordello, if you like; but it’s a long way off and Zoe hates us all so much, she’ll probably set on us with the meat-chopper. If she’s back again, that is. Though she may be out all night. Zoe mou, sas agapo. Shall we risk it?’
‘To me it’s quite indifferent,’ said Mrs Viveash faintly, as though wholly preoccupied with expiring.
‘Or there’s my place,’ Gumbril said abruptly, as though shaking himself awake out of some dream.
‘But you live still farther, don’t you?’ said Coleman. ‘With venerable parents, and so forth. One foot in the grave and all that. Shall we mingle hornpipes with funerals?’ He began to hum Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ at three times its proper speed, and seizing the young stranger in his arms, two-stepped two or three turns on the pavement, then released his hold and let him go reeling against the area railings.
‘No, I don’t mean the family mansion,’ said Gumbril. ‘I mean my own rooms. They’re quite near. In Great Russell Street.’
‘I never knew you had any rooms, Theodore,’ said Mrs Viveash.
‘Nobody did.’ Why should they know now? Because the wind seemed almost a country wind? ‘There’s drink there,’ he said.
‘Splendid!’ cried the young man. They were all splendid people.
‘There’s some gin,’ said Gumbril.
‘Capital aphrodisiac!’ Coleman commented.
‘Some light white wine.’
‘Diuretic.’
‘And some whisky.’
‘The great emetic,’ said Coleman. ‘Come on.’ And he struck up the March of the Fascisti. ‘Giovinezza, giovinezza, primavera di bellezza . . .’ The noise went fading down the dark, empty streets.
The gin, the white wine, and even, for the sake of the stranger, who wanted to sample everything, the emetic whisky, were produced.
‘I like your rooms,’ said Mrs Viveash, looking round her. ‘And I resent your secrecy about them, Theodore.’
‘Drink, puppy!’ Coleman refilled the boy’s glass.
‘Here’s to secrecy,’ Gumbril proposed. Shut it tightly, keep it dark, cover it up. Be silent, prevaricate, lie outright. He laughed and drank. ‘Do you remember,’ he went on, ‘those instructive advertisements of Eno’s Fruit Salts they used to have when we were young? There was one little anecdote about a doctor who advised the hypochondriacal patient who had come to consult him, to go and see Grimaldi, the clown; and the patient answered, “I am Grimaldi.” Do you remember?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘And why do you?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Or rather, I do know,’ Gumbril corrected himself, and laughed again.
The young man suddenly began to boast. ‘I lost two hundred pounds yesterday playing chemin de fer,’ he said, and looked round for applause.
Coleman patted his curly head. ‘Delicious child!’ he said. ‘You’re positively Hogarthian.’
Angrily, the boy pushed him away. ‘What are you doing?’ he shouted; then turned and addressed himself once more to the others. ‘I couldn’t afford it, you know – not a bloody penny of it. Not my money, either.’ He seemed to find it exquisitely humorous. ‘And that two hundred wasn’t all,’ he added, almost expiring with mirth.
‘Tell Coleman how you borrowed his beard, Theodore.’
Gumbril was looking intently into his glass, as though he hoped to see in its pale mixture of gin and Sauterne visions, as in a crystal, of the future. Mrs Viveash touched him on the arm and repeated her injunction.
‘Oh, that!’ said Gumbril rather irritably. ‘No. It isn’t an interesting story.’
‘Oh yes, it is! I insist,’ said Mrs Viveash, commanding peremptorily from her death-bed.
Gumbril drank his gin and Sauterne. ‘Very well then,’ he said reluctantly, and began.
‘I don’t know what my governor will say,’ the young man put in once or twice. But nobody paid any attention to him. He relapsed into a sulky and, it seemed to him, very dignified silence. Under the warm, jolly tipsiness he felt a chill of foreboding. He poured out some more whisky.
Gumbril warmed to his anecdote. Expiringly Mrs Viveash laughed from time to time, or smiled her agonizing smile. Coleman whooped like a Redskin.
‘And after the concert to these rooms,’ said Gumbril.
Well, let everything go. Into the mud. Leave it there, and let the dogs lift their hind legs over it as they pass.
‘Ah! the genuine platonic fumblers,’ commented Coleman.
‘I am Grimaldi,’ Gumbril laughed. Further than this it was difficult to see where the joke could go. There, on the divan, where Mrs Viveash and Coleman were now sitting, she had lain sleeping in his arms.
‘Towsing, in Elizabethan,’ said Coleman.
Unreal, eternal in the secret darkness. A night that was an eternal parenthesis among the other nights and days.
‘I feel I’m going to be sick,’ said the young man suddenly. He had wanted to go on silently and haughtily sulking; but his stomach declined to take part in the dignified game.
‘Good Lord!’ said Gumbril, and jumped up. But before he could do anything effective, the young man had fulfilled his own prophecy.
‘The real charm about debauchery,’ said Coleman philosophically, ‘is its total pointlessness, futility, and above all its incredible tediousness. If it really were all roses and exhilaration as these poor children seem to imagine, it would be no better than going to church or studying the higher mathematics. I should never touch a drop of wine or another harlot again. It would be against my principles. I told you it was emetic,’ he called to t
he young man.
‘And what are your principles?’ asked Mrs Viveash.
‘Oh, strictly ethical,’ said Coleman.
‘You’re responsible for this creature,’ said Gumbril, pointing to the young man, who was sitting on the floor near the fireplace, cooling his forehead against the marble of the mantelpiece. ‘You must take him away. Really, what a bore!’ His nose and mouth were all wrinkled up with disgust.
‘I’m sorry,’ the young man whispered. He kept his eyes shut and his face was exceedingly pale.
‘But with pleasure,’ said Coleman. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked the young man, ‘and where do you live?’
‘My name is Porteous,’ murmured the young man.
‘Good Lord!’ cried Gumbril, letting himself fall on to the divan beside Mrs Viveash. ‘That’s the last straw!’
CHAPTER XVII
THE TWO O’CLOCK snorted out of Charing Cross, but no healths were drunk, this time, to Viscount Lascelles. A desiccating sobriety made arid the corner of the third-class carriage in which Gumbril was sitting. His thoughts were an interminable desert of sand, with not a palm in sight, not so much as a comforting mirage. Once again he fumbled in his breast-pocket, brought out and unfolded the flimsy paper. Once more he read. How many times had he read it before?
‘Your telegram made me very unhappy. Not merely because of the accident – though it made me shudder to think that something terrible might have happened, poor darling – but also, selfishly, my own disappointment. I had looked forward so much. I had made a picture of it all so clearly. I should have met you at the station with the horse and trap from the Chequers, and we’d have driven back to the cottage – and you’d have loved the cottage. We’d have had tea and I’d have made you eat an egg with it after your journey. Then we’d have gone for a walk; through the most heavenly wood I found yesterday to a place where there’s a wonderful view – miles and miles of it. And we’d have wandered on and on, and sat down under the trees, and the sun would have set, and the twilight would slowly have come to an end, and we’d have gone home again and found the lamps lighted and supper ready – not very grand, I’m afraid, for Mrs Vole isn’t the best of cooks. And then the piano; for there is a piano, and I had the tuner come specially from Hastings yesterday, so that it isn’t so bad now. And you’d have played; and perhaps I would have made my noises on it. And at last it would have been time for candles and bed. When I heard you were coming, Theodore, I told Mrs Vole a lie about you. I said you were my husband, because she’s fearfully respectable, of course; and it would dreadfully disturb her if you weren’t. But I told myself that, too. I meant that you should be. You see, I tell you everything. I’m not ashamed. I wanted to give you everything I could, and then we should always be together, loving one another. And I should have been your slave, I should have been your property and lived inside your life. But you would always have had to love me.
‘And then, just as I was getting ready to go and call at the Chequers for the horse and trap, your telegram came. I saw the word “accident”, and I imagined you all bleeding and smashed – oh, dreadful, dreadful. But then, when you seemed to make rather a joke of it – why did you say “a little indisposed”? that seemed, somehow, so stupid, I thought – and said you were coming to-morrow, it wasn’t that which upset me; it was the dreadful, dreadful disappointment. It was like a stab, that disappointment; it hurt so terribly, so unreasonably much. It made me cry and cry, so that I thought I should never be able to stop. And then, gradually, I began to see that the pain of the disappointment wasn’t unreasonably great. It wasn’t merely a question of your coming being put off for a day; it was a question of its being put off for ever, of my never seeing you again. I saw that that accident had been something really arranged by Providence. It was meant to warn me and show me what I ought to do. I saw how hopelessly impracticable the happiness I had been imagining really was. I saw that you didn’t, you couldn’t love me in anything like the same way as I loved you. I was only a curious adventure, a new experience, a means to some other end. Mind, I’m not blaming you in the least. I’m only telling you what it true, what I gradually came to realize as true. If you’d come – what then? I’d have given you everything, my body, my mind, my soul, my whole life. I’d have twisted myself into the threads of your life. And then, when in due course you wanted to make an end to this curious little adventure, you would have had to cut the tangle and it would have killed me; it would also have hurt you. At least I think it would. In the end, I thanked God for the accident which had prevented you coming. In this way, Providence lets us off very lightly – you with a bruise or two (for I do hope it really is nothing, my precious darling), and me with a bruise inside, round the heart. But both will get well quite soon. And all our lives, we shall have an afternoon under the trees, an evening of music and in the darkness, a night, an eternity of happiness, to look back on. I shall go away from Robertsbridge at once. Good-bye, Theodore. What a long letter! The last you’ll ever get from me. The last – what a dreadful hurting word that is. I shall take it to post at once, for fear, if I leave it, I may be weak enough to change my mind and let you come to-morrow. I shall take it at once, then I shall come home again and pack up and tell some new fib to Mrs Vole. And after that, perhaps I shall allow myself to cry again. Good-bye.’
Aridly, the desert of sand stretched out with not a tree and not even a mirage, except perhaps the vague and desperate hope that he might get there before she started, that she might conceivably have changed her mind. Ah, if only he’d read the letter a little earlier! But he hadn’t woken up before eleven, he hadn’t been down before half-past. Sitting at the breakfast-table, he had read the letter through.
The eggs and bacon had grown still colder, if that was possible, than they were. He had read it through, he had rushed to the A.B.C. There was no practicable train before the two o’clock.
If he had taken the seven-twenty-seven he would certainly have got there before she started. Ah, if only he had woken up a little earlier! But then he would have had to go to bed a little earlier. And in order to go to bed earlier, he would have had to abandon Mrs Viveash before she had bored herself to that ultimate point of fatigue at which she did at last feel ready for repose. And to abandon Mrs Viveash – ah, that was really impossible, she wouldn’t allow herself to be left alone. If only he hadn’t gone to the London Library yesterday! A wanton, unnecessary visit it had been. For after all, the journey was short; he didn’t need a book for the train. And the Life of Beckford, for which he had asked proved, of course, to be out – and he had been utterly incapable of thinking of any other book, among the two or three hundred thousand on the shelves, that he wanted to read. And, in any case, what the devil did he want with a Life of Beckford? Hadn’t he his own life, the life of Gumbril, to attend to? Wasn’t one life enough, without making superfluous visits to the London Library in search of other lives? And then what a stroke of bad luck to have run into Mrs Viveash at that very moment! What an abject weakness to have let himself be bullied into sending that telegram. ‘A little indisposed . . .’ Oh, my God! Gumbril shut his eyes and ground his teeth together; he felt himself blushing with a retrospective shame.
And of course it was quite useless taking the train, like this, to Robertsbridge. She’d be gone, of course. Still, there was always the desperate hope. There was the mirage across the desiccated plains, the mirage one knew to be deceptive and which, on a second glance, proved not even to be a mirage, but merely a few livery spots behind the eyes. Still, it was amply worth doing – as a penance, and to satisfy the conscience and to deceive oneself with an illusion of action. And then the fact that he was to have spent the afternoon with Rosie and had put her off – that too was highly satisfying. And not merely put her off, but – ultimate clownery in the worst of deliriously bad taste – played a joke on her. ‘Impossible to come to you, meet me 213 Sloane Street, second floor, a little indisposed.’ He wondered how she’d get on with Mr Mercaptan; for it was to hi
s rococo boudoir and Crébillon-souled sofa that he had on the spur of the clownish moment, as he dashed into the post office on the way to the station, sent her.
Aridly, the desiccated waste extended. Had she been right in her letter? Would it really have lasted no more than a little while and ended as she prophesied, with an agonizing cutting of the tangle? Or could it be that she had held out the one hope of happiness? Wasn’t she perhaps the one unique being with whom he might have learned to await in quietness the final coming of that lovely terrible thing, from before the sound of whose secret footsteps more than once and oh! ignobly he had fled? He could not decide, it was impossible to decide until he had seen her again, till he had possessed her, mingled his life with hers. And now she had eluded him; for he knew very well that he would not find her. He sighed and looked out of the window.
The train pulled up at a small suburban station. Suburban, for though London was already some way behind, the little sham half-timbered houses near the station, the newer tile and rough-cast dwellings farther out on the slope of the hill proclaimed with emphasis the presence of the business man, the holder of the season ticket. Gumbril looked at them with a pensive disgust which must have expressed itself on his features; for the gentleman sitting in the corner of the carriage facing his, suddenly leaned forward, tapped him on the knee, and said, ‘I see you agree with me, sir, that there are too many people in the world.’
Gumbril, who up till now had merely been aware that somebody was sitting opposite him, now looked with more attention at the stranger. He was a large, square old gentleman of robust and flourishing appearance, with a face of wrinkled brown parchment and a white moustache that merged, in a handsome curve, with a pair of side whiskers, in a manner which reminded one of the photographs of the Emperor Francis Joseph.
‘I perfectly agree with you, sir,’ Gumbril answered. If he had been wearing his beard, he would have gone on to suggest that loquacious old gentlemen in trains are among the supernumeraries of the planet. As it was, however, he spoke with courtesy, and smiled in his most engaging fashion.
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