Antic Hay, Page 24

  ‘If you knew,’ Lypiatt began; but he checked himself. If you knew, he was going to say, what those things had cost me, what they meant, what thought, what passion – But how could Mercaptan understand? And it would sound as though he were appealing to this creature’s sympathy. ‘Bug!’ he shouted instead, ‘bug!’ And he struck out again with the flat of his hand. Mr Mercaptan put up his hands and ducked away from the slaps, blinking.

  ‘Really,’ he protested, ‘really . . .’

  Insincere? Perhaps it was half true. Lypiatt seized his man more furiously than before and shook him, shook him. ‘And then that vile insult about the vermouth advertisement,’ he cried out. That had rankled. Those flaring, vulgar posters! ‘You thought you could mock me and spit at me with impunity, did you? I’ve stood it so long, you thought I’d always stand it? Was that it? But you’re mistaken.’ He lifted his fist. Mr Mercaptan cowered away, raising his arm to protect his head. ‘Vile bug of a coward,’ said Lypiatt, ‘why don’t you defend yourself like a man? You can only be dangerous with words. Very witty and spiteful and cutting about those vermouth posters, wasn’t it? But you wouldn’t dare to fight me if I challenged you.’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Mr Mercaptan, peering up from under his defences, ‘I didn’t invent that particular piece of criticism. I borrowed the apéritif.’ He laughed feebly, more canary than bull.

  ‘You borrowed it, did you?’ Lypiatt contemptuously repeated. ‘And who from may I ask?’ Not that it interested him in the least to know.

  ‘Well, if you really want to know,’ said Mr Mercaptan, ‘it was from our friend Myra Viveash.’

  Lypiatt stood for a moment without speaking, then putting his menacing hand in his pocket, he turned away. ‘Oh!’ he said non-committally, and was silent again.

  Relieved, Mr Mercaptan sat up in his chair; with the palm of his right hand he smoothed his dishevelled head.

  Airily, outside in the sunshine, Rosie walked down Sloane Street, looking at the numbers on the doors of the houses. A hundred and ninety-nine, two hundred, two hundred and one – she was getting near now. Perhaps all the people who passed, strolling so easily and elegantly and disengagedly along, perhaps they all of them carried behind their eyes a secret, as delightful and amusing as hers. Rosie liked to think so; it made life more exciting. How nonchalantly distinguished, Rosie reflected, she herself must look. Would any one who saw her now, sauntering along like this, would any one guess that, ten houses farther down the street, a young poet, or at least very nearly a young poet, was waiting, on the second floor, eagerly for her arrival? Of course they wouldn’t and couldn’t guess! That was the fun and the enormous excitement of the whole thing. Formidable in her light-hearted detachment, formidable in the passion which at will she could give rein to and check again, the great lady swam beautifully along through the sunlight to satisfy her caprice. Like Diana, she stooped over the shepherd boy. Eagerly the starving young poet waited, waited in his garret. Two hundred and twelve, two hundred and thirteen. Rosie looked at the entrance and was reminded that the garret couldn’t after all be very sordid, nor the young poet absolutely starving. She stepped in and, standing in the hall, looked at the board with the names. Ground floor: Mrs Budge. First floor: F. de M. Rowbotham. Second floor: P. Mercaptan.

  P. Mercaptan . . . But it was a charming name, a romantic name, a real young poet’s name! Mercaptan – she felt more than ever pleased with her selection. The fastidious lady could not have had a happier caprice. Mercaptan . . . Mercaptan . . . She wondered what the P. stood for. Peter, Philip, Patrick, Pendennis even? She could hardly have guessed that Mr Mercaptan’s father, the eminent bacteriologist, had insisted, thirty-four years ago, on calling his first-born ‘Pasteur’.

  A little tremulous, under her outward elegant calm, Rosie mounted the stairs. Twenty-five steps to the first floor – one flight of thirteen, which was rather disagreeably ominous, and one of twelve. Then two flights of eleven, and she was on the second landing, facing a front door, a bell-push like a round eye, a brass name-plate. For a great lady thoroughly accustomed to this sort of thing, she felt her heart beating rather unpleasantly fast. It was those stairs, no doubt. She halted a moment, took two deep breaths, then pushed the bell.

  The door was opened by an aged servant of the most forbiddingly respectable appearance.

  ‘Mr Mercaptan at home?’

  The person at the door burst at once into a long, rambling, angry complaint, but precisely about what Rosie could not for certain make out. Mr Mercaptan had left orders, she gathered, that he wasn’t to be disturbed. But some one had come and disturbed him, ‘fairly shoved his way in, so rude and inconsiderate,’ all the same. And now he’d been once disturbed, she didn’t see why he shouldn’t be disturbed again. But she didn’t know what things were coming to if people fairly shoved their way in like that. Bolshevism, she called it.

  Rosie murmured her sympathies, and was admitted into a dark hall. Still querulously denouncing the Bolsheviks who came shoving in, the person led the way down a corridor and throwing open a door, announced, in a tone of grievance: ‘A lady to see you, Master Paster’ – for Mrs Goldie was an old family retainer, and one of the few who knew the secret of Mr Mercaptan’s Christian name, one of the fewer still who were privileged to employ it. Then, as soon as Rosie had stepped across the threshold, she cut off her retreat with a bang and went off, muttering all the time, towards her kitchen.

  It certainly wasn’t a garret. Half a glance, the first whiff of potpourri, the feel of the carpet beneath her feet, had been enough to prove that. But it was not the room which occupied Rosie’s attention, it was its occupants. One of them, thin, sharp-featured and, in Rosie’s very young eyes, quite old, was standing with an elbow on the mantelpiece. The other, sleeker and more genial in appearance, was sitting in front of a writing-desk near the window. And neither of them – Rosie glanced desperately from one to the other, hoping vainly that she might have overlooked a blond beard – neither of them was Toto.

  The sleek man at the writing-desk got up, advanced to meet her.

  ‘An unexpected pleasure,’ he said, in a voice that alternately boomed and fluted. ‘Too delightful! But to what do I owe –? Who, may I ask –?’

  He had held out his hand; automatically Rosie proffered hers. The sleek man shook it with cordiality, almost with tenderness.

  ‘I . . . I think I must have made a mistake,’ she said. ‘Mr Mercaptan . . .?’

  The sleek man smiled. ‘I am Mr Mercaptan.’

  ‘You live on the second floor?’

  ‘I never laid claims to being a mathematician,’ said the sleek man, smiling as though to applaud himself, ‘but I have always calculated that . . .’ he hesitated . . . ‘enfin, que ma demeure se trouve, en effet, on the second floor. Lypiatt will bear me out, I’m sure.’ He turned to the thin man, who had not moved from the fireplace, but had stood all the time motionlessly, his elbow on the mantelpiece, looking gloomily at the ground.

  Lypiatt looked up. ‘I must be going,’ he said abruptly. And he walked towards the door. Like vermouth posters, like vermouth posters! – so that was Myra’s piece of mockery! All his anger had sunk like a quenched flame. He was altogether quenched, put out with unhappiness.

  Politely Mr Mercaptan hurried across the room and opened the door for him. ‘Good-bye, then,’ he said airily.

  Lypiatt did not speak, but walked out into the hall. The front door banged behind him.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Mr Mercaptan, coming back across the room to where Rosie was still irresolutely standing. ‘Talk about the furor poeticus! But do sit down, I beg you. On Crébillon.’ He indicated the vast white satin sofa. ‘I call it Crébillon,’ he explained, ‘because the soul of that great writer undoubtedly tenants it, undoubtedly. You know his book, of course? You know Le Sopha?’

  Sinking into Crébillon’s soft lap, Rosie had to admit that she didn’t know Le Sopha. She had begun to recover her self-possession. If this wasn’t the y
oung poet, it was certainly a young poet. And a very peculiar one, too. As a great lady she laughingly accepted the odd situation.

  ‘Not know Le Sopha?’ exclaimed Mr Mercaptan. ‘Oh! but, my dear and mysterious young lady, let me lend you a copy of it at once. No education can be called complete without a knowledge of that divine book.’ He darted to the bookshelf and came back with a small volume bound in white vellum. ‘The hero’s soul,’ he explained, handing her the volume, ‘passes, by the laws of metempsychosis, into a sofa. He is doomed to remain a sofa until such time as two persons consummate upon his bosom their reciprocal and equal loves. The book is the record of the poor sofa’s hopes and disappointments.’

  ‘Dear me!’ said Rosie, looking at the title-page.

  ‘But now,’ said Mr Mercaptan, sitting down beside her on the edge of Crébillon, ‘won’t you please explain? To what happy quiproquo do I owe this sudden and altogether delightful invasion of my privacy?’

  ‘Well,’ said Rosie, and hesitated. It was really rather difficult to explain. ‘I was to meet a friend of mine.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Mr Mercaptan encouragingly.

  ‘Who sent me a telegram,’ Rosie went on.

  ‘He sent you a telegram!’ Mr Mercaptan echoed.

  ‘Changing the – the place we had fixed and telling me to meet him at this address.’

  ‘Here?’

  Rose nodded. ‘On the s-second floor,’ she made it more precise.

  ‘But I live on the second floor,’ said Mr Mercaptan. ‘You don’t mean to say your friend is also called Mercaptan and lives here too?’

  Rosie smiled. ‘I don’t know what he’s called,’ she said with a cool ironical carelessness that was genuinely grande dame.

  ‘You don’t know his name?’ Mr Mercaptan gave a roar and a squeal of delighted laughter. ‘But that’s too good,’ he said.

  ‘S-second floor, he wrote in the telegram.’ Rosie was now perfectly at her ease. ‘When I saw your name, I thought it was his name. I must say,’ she added, looking sideways at Mr Mercaptan and at once dropping the magnolia petals of her eyelids, ‘it seemed to me a very charming name.’

  ‘You overwhelm me,’ said Mr Mercaptan, smiling all over his cheerful, snouty face. ‘As for your name – I am too discreet a galantuomo to ask. And, in any case, what does it matter? A rose by any other name . . .’

  ‘But, as a matter of fact,’ she said, raising and lowering once again her smooth, white lids, ‘my name does happen to be Rose; or, at any rate, Rosie.’

  ‘So you are sweet by right!’ exclaimed Mr Mercaptan, with a pretty gallantry which he was the first to appreciate. ‘Let’s order tea on the strength of it.’ He jumped up and rang the bell. ‘How I congratulate myself on this astonishing piece of good fortune!’

  Rosie said nothing. This Mr Mercaptan, she thought, seemed to be even more a man of the great artistic world than Toto.

  ‘What puzzles me,’ he went on, ‘is why your anonymous friend should have chosen my address out of all the millions of others. He must know me, or, at any rate, know about me.’

  ‘I should imagine,’ said Rosie, ‘that you have a lot of friends.’

  Mr Mercaptan laughed – the whole orchestra, from bassoon to piccolo. ‘Des amis, des amies – with and without the mute “e”,’ he declared.

  The aged and forbidding servant appeared at the door.

  ‘Tea for two, Mrs Goldie.’

  Mrs Goldie looked round the room suspiciously. ‘The other gentleman’s gone, has he?’ she asked. And having assured herself of his absence, she renewed her complaint. ‘Shoving in like that,’ she said. ‘Bolshevism, that’s what I –’

  ‘All right, all right, Mrs Goldie. Let’s have our tea as quickly as possible.’ Mr Mercaptan held up his hand, authoritatively, with the gesture of a policeman controlling the traffic.

  ‘Very well, Master Paster.’ Mrs Goldie spoke with resignation and departed.

  ‘But tell me,’ Mr Mercaptan went on, ‘if it isn’t indiscreet – what does your friend look like?’

  ‘W-well,’ Rosie answered, ‘he’s fair, and though he’s quite young he wears a beard.’ With her two hands she indicated on her own unemphatic bosom the contours of Toto’s broad blond fan.

  ‘A beard! But, good heavens,’ Mr Mercaptan slapped his thigh, ‘it’s Coleman, it’s obviously and undoubtedly Coleman!’

  ‘Well, whoever it was,’ said Rosie severely, ‘he played a very stupid sort of joke.’

  ‘For which I thank him. De tout mon coeur.’

  Rosie smiled and looked sideways. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘I shall give him a piece of my mind.’

  Poor Aunt Aggie! Oh, poor Aunt Aggie, indeed! In the light of Mr Mercaptan’s boudoir her hammered copper and her leadless gaze certainly did look a bit comical.

  After tea Mr Mercaptan played cicerone in a tour of inspection round the room. They visited the papier mâché writing-desk, the Condor fans, the Marie Laurencin, the 1914 edition of Du Côté de chez Swann, the Madonna that probably was a fake, the nigger mask, the Chelsea figures, the Chinese object of art in sculptured crystal, the scale model of Queen Victoria in wax under a glass bell. Toto, it became clear, had been no more than a forerunner; the definitive revelation was Mr Mercaptan’s. Yes, poor Aunt Aggie! And indeed, when Mr Mercaptan began to read her his little middle on the ‘Droit du Seigneur’, it was poor everybody. Poor mother, with her absurd, old-fashioned, prudish views; poor, earnest father, with his Unitarianism, his Hibbert Journal, his letters to the papers about the necessity for a spiritual regeneration.

  ‘Bravo!’ she cried from the depths of Crébillon. She was leaning back in one corner, languid, serpentine, and at ease, her feet in their mottled snake’s leather tucked up under her. ‘Bravo!’ she cried as Mr Mercaptan finished his reading, and looked up for his applause.

  Mr Mercaptan bowed.

  ‘You express so exquisitely what we –’ and waving her hand in a comprehensive gesture, she pictured to herself all the other fastidious ladies, all the marchionesses of fable, reclining, as she herself at this moment reclined, on upholstery of white satin, ‘what we all only feel and aren’t clever enough to say.’

  Mr Mercaptan was charmed. He got up from before his writing-desk, crossed the room and sat down beside her on Crébillon. ‘Feeling,’ he said, ‘is the important thing.’

  Rosie remembered that her father had once remarked in blank verse: ‘The things that matter happen in the heart.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ she said.

  Like movable raisins in the suet of his snouty face, Mr Mercaptan’s brown little eyes rolled amorous avowals. He took Rosie’s hand and kissed it. Crébillon creaked discreetly as he moved a little nearer.

  It was on the evening of the same day. Rosie lay on her sofa – a poor, hire-purchase thing indeed, compared with Mr Mercaptan’s grand affair in white satin and carved and gilded wood, but still a sofa – lay with her feet on the arm of it and her long suave legs exposed, by the slipping of the kimono, to the top of her stretched stockings. She was reading the little vellum-jacketed volume of Crébillon, which Mr Mercaptan had given her when he said ‘good-bye’ (or rather, ‘À bientôt, mon amie’); given, not lent, as he had less generously offered at the beginning of their afternoon; given with the most graceful of allusive dedications inscribed on the fly-leaf:

  TO

  BY-NO-OTHER-NAME-AS-SWEET,

  WITH GRATITUDE,

  FROM

  CRÉBILLON DELIVERED.

  À bientôt – she had promised to come again very soon. She thought of the essay on the ‘Jus primae Noctis’ – ah! what we’ve all been feeling and none of us clever enough to say. We on the sofas, ruthless, lovely and fastidious . . .

  ‘I am proud to constitute myself’ – Mr Mercaptan had said of it – ‘l’esprit d’escalier des dames galantes.’

  Rosie was not quite sure what he meant; but it certainly sounded very witty indeed.

  She read the book slowly. Her Fr
ench, indeed, wasn’t good enough to permit her to read it anyhow else. She wished it were better. Perhaps if it were better she wouldn’t be yawning like this. It was disgraceful: she pulled herself together. Mr Mercaptan had said that it was a masterpiece.

  In his study, Shearwater was trying to write his paper on the regulative functions of the kidneys. He was not succeeding.

  Why wouldn’t she see me yesterday? he kept wondering. With anguish he suspected other lovers; desired her, in consequence, the more. Gumbril had said something, he remembered, that night they had met her by the coffee-stall. What was it? He wished now that he had listened more attentively.

  She’s bored with me. Already. It was obvious.

  Perhaps he was too rustic for her. Shearwater looked at his hands. Yes, the nails were dirty. He took an orange stick out of his waistcoat pocket and began to clean them. He had bought a whole packet of orange sticks that morning.

  Determinedly he took up his pen. ‘The hydrogen ion concentration in the blood . . .’ he began a new paragraph. But he got no further than the first seven words.

  If, he began thinking with a frightful confusion, if – if – if – Past conditionals, hopelessly past. He might have been brought up more elegantly; his father, for example, might have been a barrister instead of a barrister’s clerk. He mightn’t have had to work so hard when he was young; might have been about more, danced more, seen more young women. If he had met her years ago – during the war, should one say, dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant in the Guards . . .

  He had pretended that he wasn’t interested in women; that they had no effect on him; that, in fact, he was above that sort of thing. Imbecile! He might as well have said that he was above having a pair of kidneys. He had only consented to admit, graciously, that they were a physiological necessity.

  O God, what a fool he had been!

  And then, what about Rosie? What sort of a life had she been having while he was being above that sort of thing? Now he came to think of it, he really knew nothing about her, except that she had been quite incapable of learning correctly, even by heart, the simplest facts about the physiology of frogs. Having found that out, he had really given up exploring further. How could he have been so stupid?