Antic Hay

  ‘Obscure,’ he repeated. ‘But so is everything. So is life in general. And you,’ he stepped towards her, ‘you in particular.’

  ‘Am I?’ she lifted her limpid eyes at him. Oh, how her heart was beating, how hard it was to be the fastidious lady, calmly satisfying her caprice. How difficult it was to be accustomed to this sort of thing. What was going to happen next?

  What happened next was that the Complete Man came still closer, put his arms round her, as though he were inviting her to the fox-trot, and began kissing her with a startling violence. His beard tickled her neck; shivering a little, she brought down the magnolia petals across her eyes. The Complete Man lifted her up, walked across the room carrying the fastidious lady in his arms and deposited her on the rosy catafalque of the bed. Lying there with her eyes shut, she did her best to pretend she was dead.

  Gumbril had looked at his wrist watch and found that it was six o’clock. Already? He prepared himself to take his departure. Wrapped in a pink kimono, she came out into the hall to wish him farewell.

  ‘When shall I see you again, Rosie?’ He had learnt that her name was Rosie.

  She had recovered her great lady’s equanimity and detachment, and was able to shrug her shoulders and smile. ‘How should I know?’ she asked, implying that she could not foresee what her caprice might be an hour hence.

  ‘May I write, then, and ask one of these days if you do know?’

  She put her head on one side and raised her eyebrows, doubtfully. At last nodded. ‘Yes, you can write,’ she permitted.

  ‘Good,’ said the Complete Man, and picked up his wide hat. She held out her hand to him with stateliness, and with a formal gallantry he kissed it. He was just closing the front door behind him, when he remembered something. He turned round. ‘I say,’ he called after the retreating pink kimono. ‘It’s rather absurd. But how can I write? I don’t know your name. I can’t just address it “Rosie”.’

  The great lady laughed delightedly. This had the real capriccio flavour. ‘Wait,’ she said, and she ran into the sitting-room. She was back again in a moment with an oblong of pasteboard. ‘There,’ she said, and dropped it into his great-coat pocket. Then blowing a kiss she was gone.

  The Complete Man closed the door and descended the stairs. Well, well, he said to himself; well, well. He put his hand in his coat pocket and took out the card. In the dim light of the staircase he read the name on it with some difficulty. Mrs James – but no, but no. He read again, straining his eyes; there was no question of it. Mrs James Shearwater.

  Mrs James Shearwater.

  That was why he had vaguely known the name of Bloxam Gardens.

  Mrs James Shear–. Step after step he descended, ponderously. ‘Good Lord,’ he said out loud. ‘Good Lord.’

  But why had he never seen her? Why did Shearwater never produce her? Now he came to think of it, he hardly ever spoke of her.

  Why had she said the flat wasn’t theirs? It was; he had heard Shearwater talk about it.

  Did she make a habit of this sort of thing?

  Could Shearwater be wholly unaware of what she was really like? But, for that matter, what was she really like?

  He was half-way down the last flight, when with a rattle and a squeak of hinges the door of the house, which was only separated by a short lobby from the foot of the stairs, opened, revealing, on the doorstep, Shearwater and a friend, eagerly talking.

  ‘. . . I take my rabbit,’ the friend was saying – he was a young man with dark, protruding eyes, and staring, doggy nostrils; very eager, lively and loud. ‘I take my rabbit and I inject into it the solution of eyes, pulped eyes of another dead rabbit. You see?’

  Gumbril’s first instinct was to rush up the stairs and hide in the first likely-looking corner. But he pulled himself together at once. He was a Complete Man, and Complete Men do not hide; moreover, he was sufficiently disguised to be quite unrecognisable. He stood where he was, and listened to the conversation.

  ‘The rabbit,’ continued the young man, and with his bright eyes and staring, sniffing nose, he looked like a poacher’s terrier ready to go barking after the first white tail that passed his way; ‘the rabbit naturally develops the appropriate resistance, develops a specific anti-eye to protect itself. I then take some of its anti-eye serum and inject it into my female rabbit; I then immediately breed from her.’ He paused.

  ‘Well?’ asked Shearwater, in his slow, ponderous way. He lifted his great round head inquiringly and looked at the doggy young man from under his bushy eyebrows.

  The doggy young man smiled triumphantly. ‘The young ones,’ he said, emphasizing his words by striking his right fist against the extended palm of his left hand, ‘the young ones are born with defective sight.’

  Thoughtfully Shearwater pulled at his formidable moustache. ‘H’m,’ he said slowly. ‘Very remarkable.’

  ‘You realize the full significance of it?’ asked the young man. ‘We seem to be affecting the germ-plasm directly. We have found a way of making acquired characteristics . . .’

  ‘Pardon me,’ said Gumbril. He had decided that it was time to be gone. He ran down the stairs and across the tiled hall, he pushed his way firmly but politely between the talkers.

  ‘. . . heritable,’ continued the young man, imperturbably eager, speaking through and over and round the obstacle.

  ‘Damn!’ said Shearwater. The Complete Man had trodden on his toe. ‘Sorry,’ he added, absent-mindedly apologizing for the injury he had received.

  Gumbril hurried off along the street. ‘If we really have found out a technique for influencing the germ-plasm directly . . .’ he heard the doggy young man saying; but he was already too far away to catch the rest of the sentence. There are many ways, he reflected, of spending an afternoon.

  The doggy young man refused to come in, he had to get in his game of tennis before dinner. Shearwater climbed the stairs alone. He was taking off his hat in the little hall of his own apartment, when Rosie came out of the sitting-room with a trayful of tea-things.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, kissing her affectionately on the forehead. ‘Well? People to tea?’

  ‘Only one,’ Rosie replied. ‘I’ll go and make you a fresh cup.’

  She glided off, rustling in her pink kimono towards the kitchen.

  Shearwater sat down in the sitting-room. He had brought home with him from the library the fifteenth volume of the Journal of Biochemistry. There was something in it he wanted to look up. He turned over the pages. Ah, here it was. He began reading. Rosie came back again.

  ‘Here’s your tea,’ she said.

  He thanked her without looking up. The tea grew cold on the little table at his side.

  Lying on the sofa, Rosie pondered and remembered. Had the events of the afternoon, she asked herself, really happened? They seemed very improbable and remote, now, in this studious silence. She couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. Was it only this? So simple and obvious? She tried to work herself up into a more exalted mood. She even tried to feel guilty; but there she failed completely. She tried to feel rapturous; but without much more success. Still, he certainly had been a most extraordinary man. Such impudence, and at the same time such delicacy and tact.

  It was a pity she couldn’t afford to change the furniture. She saw now that it wouldn’t do at all. She would go and tell Aunt Aggie about the dreadful middle-classness of her Art and Craftiness.

  She ought to have an Empire chaise longue. Like Madame Récamier. She could see herself lying there, dispensing tea. ‘Like a delicious pink snake.’ He had called her that.

  Well, really, now she came to think of it all again, it had been too queer, too queer.

  ‘What’s a hedonist?’ she suddenly asked.

  Shearwater looked up from the Journal of Biochemistry. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘A hedonist.’

  ‘A man who holds that the end of life is pleasure.’

  A ‘conscientious hedonist’ – ah, that was good.

 
‘This tea is cold,’ Shearwater remarked.

  ‘You should have drunk it before,’ she said. The silence renewed and prolonged itself.

  Rosie was getting much better, Shearwater reflected, as he washed his hands before supper, about not interrupting him when he was busy. This evening she had really not disturbed him at all, or at most only once, and that not seriously. There had been times in the past when the child had really made life almost impossible. There were those months at the beginning of their married life, when she had thought she would like to study physiology herself and be a help to him. He remembered the hours he had spent trying to teach her elementary facts about the chromosomes. It had been a great relief when she abandoned the attempt. He had suggested she should go in for stencilling patterns on Government linen. Such pretty curtains and things one could make like that. But she hadn’t taken very kindly to the idea. There had followed a long period when she seemed to have nothing to do but prevent him from doing anything. Ringing him up at the laboratory, invading his study, sitting on his knee, or throwing her arms round his neck, or pulling his hair, or asking ridiculous questions when he was trying to work.

  Shearwater flattered himself that he had been extremely patient. He had never got cross. He had just gone on as though she weren’t there. As though she weren’t there.

  ‘Hurry up,’ he heard her calling. ‘The soup’s getting cold.’

  ‘Coming,’ he shouted back, and began to dry his large, blunt hands.

  She seemed to have been improving lately. And to-night, to-night she had been a model of non-existence.

  He came striding heavily into the dining-room. Rosie was sitting at the head of the table, ladling out the soup. With her left hand she held back the flowing pink sleeve of her kimono so that it should not trail in the plates or the tureen. Her bare arms showed white and pearly through the steam of lentils.

  How pretty she was! He could not resist the temptation, but coming up behind her bent down and kissed her, rather clumsily, on the back of her neck.

  Rosie drew away from him. ‘Really, Jim,’ she said, disapprovingly. ‘At meal-times!’ The fastidious lady had to draw the line at these ill-timed, tumbling familiarities.

  ‘And what about work-times?’ Shearwater asked laughing. ‘Still, you were wonderful this evening, Rosie, quite wonderful.’ He sat down and began eating his soup. ‘Not a sound all the time I was reading; or, at any rate, only one sound, so far as I remember.’

  The great lady said nothing, but only smiled – a little contemptuously and with a touch of pity. She pushed away the plate of soup unfinished and planted her elbows on the table. Slipping her hands under the sleeves of her kimono, she began, lightly, delicately, with the tips of her fingers, to caress her own arms.

  How smooth they were, how soft and warm and how secret under the sleeves. And all her body was as smooth and warm, was as soft and secret, still more secret beneath the pink folds. Like a warm serpent hidden away, secretly, secretly.

  CHAPTER X

  MR BOLDERO LIKED the idea of the Patent Small-Clothes. He liked it immensely, he said, immensely.

  ‘There’s money in it,’ he said.

  Mr Boldero was a small dark man of about forty-five, active as a bird and with a bird’s brown, beady eyes, a bird’s sharp nose. He was always busy, always had twenty different irons in the fire at once, was always fresh, clear-headed, never tired. He was also always unpunctual, always untidy. He had no sense of time or of order. But he got away with it, as he liked to say. He delivered the goods – or rather the good, in the convenient form of cash, delivered themselves, almost miraculously it always seemed, to him.

  He was like a bird in appearance. But in mind, Gumbril found, after having seen him once or twice, he was like a caterpillar: he ate all that was put before him, he consumed a hundred times his own mental weight every day. Other people’s ideas, other people’s knowledge – they were his food. He devoured them and they were at once his own. All that belonged to other people he annexed without a scruple or a second thought, quite naturally, as though it were already his own. And he absorbed it so rapidly and completely, he laid public claim to it so promptly that he sometimes deceived people into believing that he had really anticipated them in their ideas, that he had known for years and years the things they had just been telling him, and which he would at once airily repeat to them with the perfect assurance of one who knows – knows by instinct, as it were, by inheritance.

  At their first luncheon he had asked Gumbril to tell him all about modern painting. Gumbril had given him a brief lecture; before the savoury had appeared on the table, Mr Boldero was talking with perfect familiarity of Picasso and Derain. He almost made it understood that he had a fine collection of their works in his drawing-room at home. Being a trifle deaf, however, he was not very good at names, and Gumbril’s all-too-tactful corrections were lost on him. He could not be induced to abandon his Bacosso in favour of any other version of the Spaniard’s name. Bacosso – why, he had known all about Bacosso since he was a schoolboy! Bacosso was an old master, already.

  Mr Boldero was very severe with the waiters and knew so well how things ought to be done at a good restaurant, that Gumbril felt sure he must recently have lunched with some meticulous gormandizer of the old school. And when the waiter made as though to serve them with brandy in small glasses, Mr Boldero was so passionately indignant that he sent for the manager.

  ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ he shouted in a perfect frenzy of righteous anger, ‘that you don’t yet know how brandy ought to be drunk?’

  Perhaps it was only last week that he himself, Gumbril reflected, had learned to aerate his cognac in Gargantuan beakers.

  Meanwhile, of course, the Patent Small-Clothes were not neglected. As soon as he had been told about the things, Mr Boldero began speaking of them with a perfect and practised familiarity. They were already his, mentally his. And it was only Mr Boldero’s generosity that prevented him from making the Small-Clothes more effectively his own.

  ‘If it weren’t for the friendship and respect which I feel for your father, Mr Gumbril,’ he said, twinkling genially over the brandy, ‘I’d just annex your Small-Clothes. Bag and baggage. Just annex them.’

  ‘Ah, but they’re my patent,’ said Gumbril. ‘Or at least they’re in process of being patented. The agents are at work.’

  Mr Boldero laughed. ‘Do you suppose that would trouble me if I wanted to be unscrupulous? I’d just take the idea and manufacture the article. You’d bring an action. I’d have it defended with all the professional erudition that could be brought. You’d find yourself let in for a case that might cost thousands. And how would you pay for it? You’d be forced to come to an agreement out of court, Mr Gumbril. That’s what you’d have to do. And a damned bad agreement it would be for you. I can tell you.’ Mr Boldero laughed very cheerfully at the thought of the badness of this agreement. ‘But don’t be alarmed,’ he said. ‘I shan’t do it, you know.’

  Gumbril was not wholly impressed. Tactfully, he tried to find out what terms Mr Boldero was prepared to offer. Mr Boldero was nebulously vague.

  They met again in Gumbril’s rooms. The contemporary drawings on the walls reminded Mr Boldero that he was now an art expert. He told Gumbril all about it – in Gumbril’s words. Every now and then, it was true, Mr Boldero made a little slip. Bacosso, for example, remained unshakably Bacosso. But on the whole the performance was most impressive. It made Gumbril feel very uncomfortable, however, while it lasted. For he recognized in this characteristic of Mr Boldero a horrible caricature of himself. He too was an assimilator; more discriminating, no doubt, more tactful, knowing better than Mr Boldero how to turn the assimilated experience into something new and truly his own; but still a caterpillar, definitely a caterpillar. He began studying Mr Boldero with a close and disgustful attention, as one might pore over some repulsive memento mori.

  It was a relief when Mr Boldero stopped talking art and consented to get down to business. Gum
bril was wearing for the occasion the sample pair of Small-Clothes which Mr Bojanus had made for him. For Mr Boldero’s benefit he put them, so to speak, through their paces. He allowed himself to drop with a bump on to the floor – arriving therefore bruiseless and unjarred. He sat in complete comfort for minutes at a stretch on the edge of the ornamental iron fender. In the intervals he paraded up and down before Mr Boldero like a mannequin. ‘A trifle bulgy,’ said Mr Boldero. ‘But still . . .’ He was, taking it all round, favourably impressed. It was time, he said, to begin thinking of details. They would have to begin by making experiments with the bladders to discover a model combining, as Mr Boldero put it, ‘maximum efficiency with minimum bulge’. When they had found the right thing, they would have it made in suitable quantities by any good rubber firm. As for the trousers themselves, they could rely for those on sweated female labour in the East End. ‘Cheap and good,’ said Mr Boldero.

  ‘It sounds ideal,’ said Gumbril.

  ‘And then,’ said Mr Boldero, ‘there’s our advertising campaign. On that I may say,’ he went on with a certain solemnity, ‘will depend the failure or success of our enterprise. I consider it of the first importance.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Gumbril, nodding impatiently and with intelligence.

  ‘We must set to work,’ said Mr Boldero, ‘sci – en – tifically.’

  Gumbril nodded again.

  ‘We have to appeal,’ Mr Boldero went on so glibly that Gumbril felt sure he must be quoting somebody else’s words, ‘to the great instincts and feelings of humanity . . . They are the sources of action. They spend the money, if I may put it like that.’