Antic Hay

  ‘And if you want sundew,’ he wound up, ‘you’ll find it in the Punch Bowl, under Hindhead. Or round about Frensham. The Little Pond, you know, not the Big.’

  ‘But you know all about them,’ Emily exclaimed in delight. ‘I’m ashamed of my poor little knowledge. And you must really love them as much as I do.’

  Gumbril did not deny it; they were linked henceforth by a chain of flowers.

  But what else did she do?

  Oh, of course she played the piano a great deal. Very badly; but at any rate it gave her pleasure. Beethoven: she liked Beethoven best. More or less, she knew all the sonatas, though she could never keep up anything like the right speed in the difficult parts.

  Gumbril had again shown himself wonderfully at home. ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘I bet you can’t shake that low B in the last variation but one of Op. io6 so that it doesn’t sound ridiculous.’

  And of course she couldn’t, and of course she was glad that he knew all about it and how impossible it was.

  In the cab, as they drove back to Kew that evening, the Complete Man had decided it was time to do something decisive. The parting kiss – more of a playful sonorous buss than a serious embracement – that was already in the protocol, as signed and sealed before her departure by giggling Molly. It was time, the Complete Man considered, that this salute should take on a character less formal and less playful. One, two, three and, decisively, as they passed through Hammersmith Broadway, he risked the gesture. Emily burst into tears. He was not prepared for that, though perhaps he should have been. It was only by imploring, only by almost weeping himself, that Gumbril persuaded her to revoke her decision never, never to see him again.

  ‘I had thought you were different,’ she sobbed. ‘And now, now –’

  ‘Please, please,’ he entreated. He was on the point of tearing off his beard and confessing everything there and then. But that, on second thoughts, would probably only make things worse.

  ‘Please, I promise.’

  In the end, she had consented to see him once again, provisionally, in Kew Gardens, on the following day. They were to meet at the little temple that stands on the hillock above the valley of the heathers.

  And now, duly, they had met. The Complete Man had been left at home in the top right-hand drawer, along with the ties and collars. She would prefer, he guessed, the Mild and Melancholy one; he was quite right. She had thought him ‘sweeter’ at a first glimpse.

  ‘I forgive you,’ he said, and kissed her hand. ‘I forgive you.’

  Hand in hand they walked down towards the valley of the heaths.

  ‘I don’t know why you should be forgiving me,’ she said, laughing. ‘It seems to me that I ought to be doing the forgiving. After yesterday.’ She shook her head at him. ‘You made me so wretched.’

  ‘Ah, but you’ve already done your forgiving.’

  ‘You seem to take it very much for granted,’ said Emily. ‘Don’t be too sure.’

  ‘But I am sure,’ said Gumbril. ‘I can see –’

  Emily laughed again. ‘I feel happy,’ she declared.

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘How green the grass is!’

  Green, green – after these long damp months it glowed in the sunlight, as though it were lighted from inside.

  ‘And the trees!’

  The pale, high, clot-polled trees of the English spring; the dark, symmetrical pine trees, islanded here and there on the lawns, each with its own separate profile against the sky and its own shadow, impenetrably dark or freckled with moving lights, on the grass at its feet.

  They walked on in silence. Gumbril took off his hat, breathed the soft air that smelt of the greenness of the garden.

  ‘There are quiet places also in the mind,’ he said meditatively. ‘But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately – to put a stop to the quietness. We don’t like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head – round and round, continually.’ He made a circular motion with his hand. ‘And the jazz bands, the music-hall songs, the boys shouting the news. What’s it for? what’s it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost it isn’t there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night, sometimes – not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep – the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments of it we’ve been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like this outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows – a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying, yes, terrifying as well as beautiful. For one’s alone in the crystal and there’s no support from outside, there’s nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or to stand on, superiorly, contemptuously, so that one can look down. There’s nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressibly terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize and engulf you, you’d die; all the regular, habitual, daily part of you would die. There would be an end of bandstands and whizzing factories, and one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange, unheard-of-manner. Nearer, nearer come the steps; but one can’t face the advancing thing. One daren’t. It’s too terrifying, it’s too painful to die. Quickly, before it is too late, start the factory wheels, bang the drum, blow up the saxophone. Think of the women you’d like to sleep with, the schemes for making money, the gossip about your friends, the last outrage of the politicians. Anything for a diversion. Break the silence, smash the crystal to pieces. There, it lies in bits; it is easily broken, hard to build up and easy to break. And the steps? Ah, those have taken themselves off, double quick. Double quick, they were gone at the first flawing of the crystal. And by this time the lovely and terrifying thing is three infinities away, at least. And you lie tranquilly on your bed, thinking of what you’d do if you had ten thousand pounds, and of all the fornications you’ll never commit.’ He thought of Rosie’s pink underclothes.

  ‘You make things very complicated,’ she said, after a silence.

  Gumbril spread out his great-coat on a green bank and they sat down. Leaning back, his hands under his head, he watched her sitting there beside him. She had taken off her hat; there was a stir of wind in those childish curls, and at the nape, at the temples, where the hair had sleaved out thin and fine, the sunlight made little misty haloes of gold. Her hands clasped round her knees, she sat quite still, looking out across the green expanses, at the trees, at the white clouds on the horizon. There was quiet in her mind, he thought. She was native to that crystal world; for her, the steps came comfortingly through the silence and the lovely thing brought with it no terrors. It was all so easy for her and simple.

  Ah, so simple, so simple; like the Hire Purchase System on which Rosie had bought her pink bed. And how simple it was, too, to puddle clear waters and unpetal every flower! – every wild flower, by God! one ever passed in a governess cart at the heels of a barrel-bellied pony. How simple to spit on the floors of churches! Si prega di non sputare. Simple to kick one’s legs and enjoy oneself – dutifully – in pink underclothing. Perfectly simple.

  ‘It’s like the Arietta, don’t you think?’ said Emily suddenly, ‘the Arietta of Op. III.’ And she hummed the first bars of the air. ‘Don’t you feel it’s like that?’

  ‘What’s like that?’

  ‘Everything,’ said Emily. ‘To-day, I mean. You and me. These gardens –’ And she went on humming.

  Gumbril shook his head. ‘Too simple for me,’ he said.

  Emily laughed. ‘Ah, but then think how impossible it gets a little farther on.’ She agitated her fingers wildly
, as though she were trying to play the impossible passages. ‘It begins easily for the sake of poor imbeciles like me; but it goes on, it goes on, more and more fully and subtly and abstrusely and embracingly. But it’s still the same movement.’

  The shadows stretched farther and farther across the lawns, and as the sun declined the level light picked out among the grasses innumerable stipplings of shadow; and in the paths, that had seemed under the more perpendicular rays as level as a table, a thousand little shadowy depressions and sun-touched mountains were now apparent. Gumbril looked at his watch.

  ‘Good Lord!’ he said, ‘we must fly.’ He jumped up. ‘Quick, quick!’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘We shall be late.’ He wouldn’t tell her for what. ‘Wait and see’ was all that Emily could get out of him by her questioning. They hurried out of the gardens, and in spite of her protests he insisted on taking a taxi into town. ‘I have such a lot of unearned increment to get rid of,’ he explained. The Patent Small-Clothes seemed at the moment remoter than the farthest stars.

  CHAPTER XIII

  IN SPITE OF the taxi, in spite of the gobbled dinner, they were late. The concert had begun.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Gumbril. ‘We shall get in in time for the minuetto. It’s then that the fun really begins.’

  ‘Sour grapes,’ said Emily, putting her ear to the door. ‘It sounds to me simply too lovely.’

  They stood outside, like beggars waiting abjectly at the doors of a banqueting-hall – stood and listened to the snatches of music that came out tantalizingly from within. A rattle of clapping announced at last that the first movement was over; the doors were thrown open. Hungrily they rushed in. The Sclopis Quartet and a subsidiary viola were bowing from the platform. There was a chirrup of tuning, then preliminary silence. Sclopis nodded and moved his bow. The minuetto of Mozart’s G minor Quintet broke out, phrase after phrase, short and decisive, with every now and then a violent sforzando chord, startling in its harsh and sudden emphasis.

  Minuetto – all civilization, Mr Mercaptan would have said, was implied in the delicious word, the delicate, pretty thing. Ladies and precious gentlemen, fresh from the wit and gallantry of Crebillon-haunted sofas, stepping gracefully to a pattern of airy notes. To this passion of one who cries out, to this obscure and angry argument with fate how would they, Gumbril wondered, how would they have tripped it?

  How pure the passion, how unaffected, clear and without clot or pretension the unhappiness of that slow movement which followed! Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Pure and unsullied; pure and unmixed, unadulterated. ‘Not passionate, thank God; only sensual and sentimental.’ In the name of earwig. Amen. Pure, pure. Worshippers have tried to rape the statues of the gods; the statuaries who made the images were generally to blame. And how deliciously, too, an artist can suffer! and, in the face of the whole Albert Hall, with what an effective gesture and grimace! But blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The instruments come together and part again. Long silver threads hang aerially over a murmur of waters; in the midst of muffled sobbing a cry. The fountains blow their architecture of slender pillars, and from basin to basin the waters fall; from basin to basin, and every fall makes somehow possible a higher leaping of the jet, and at the last fall the mounting column springs up into the sunlight, and from water the music has modulated up into a rainbow. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God; they shall make God visible too, to other eyes.

  Blood beats in the ears. Beat, beat, beat. A slow drum in the darkness, beating in the ears of one who lies wakeful with fever, with the sickness of too much misery. It beats unceasingly, in the ears, in the mind itself. Body and mind are indivisible, and in the spirit blood painfully throbs. Sad thoughts drop through the mind. A small, pure light comes swaying down through the darkness, comes to rest, resigning itself to the obscurity of its misfortune. There is resignation, but blood still beats in the ears. Blood still painfully beats, though the mind has acquiesced. And then, suddenly, the mind exerts itself, throws off the fever of too much suffering and laughing, commands the body to dance. The introduction to the last movement comes to its suspended, throbbing close. There is an instant of expectation, and then, with a series of mounting trochees and a downward hurrying, step after tiny step, in triple time, the dance begins. Irrelevant, irreverent, out of key with all that has gone before. But man’s greatest strength lies in his capacity for irrelevance. In the midst of pestilences, wars and famines, he builds cathedrals; and a slave, he can think the irrelevant and unsuitable thoughts of a free man. The spirit is slave to fever and beating blood, at the mercy of an obscure and tyrannous misfortune. But irrelevantly, it elects to dance in triple measure – a mounting skip, a patter of descending feet.

  The G minor Quintet is at an end; the applause rattles out loudly. Enthusiasts stand up and cry bravo. And the five men on the platform rise and bow their acknowledgments. Great Sclopis himself receives his share of the plaudits with a weary condescension; weary are his poached eyes, weary his disillusioned smile. It is only his due, he knows; but he has had so much clapping, so many lovely women. He has a Roman nose, a colossal brow and, though the tawny musical mane does much to conceal the fact, no back to his head. Garofalo, the second fiddle, is black, beady-eyed and pot-bellied. The convex reflections of the electroliers slide back and forth over his polished bald head, as he bends, again, again, in little military salutes. Peperkoek, two metres high, bows with a sinuous politeness. His face, his hair are all the same greyish buff colour; he does not smile, his appearance is monolithic and grim. Not so exuberant Knoedler, who sweats and smiles and embraces his ‘cello and lays his hand to his heart and bows almost to the ground as though all this hullaboo were directed only at him. As for poor little Mr Jenkins, the subsidiary viola, he has slid away into the background, and feeling that this is really the Sclopis’s show and that he, a mere intruder, has no right to any of these demonstrations, he hardly bows at all, but only smiles, vaguely and nervously, and from time to time makes a little spasmodic twitch to show that he isn’t really ungrateful or haughty, as you might think, but that he feels in the circumstances – the position is a little embarrassing – it is hard to explain . . .

  ‘Strange,’ said Gumbril, ‘to think that those ridiculous creatures could have produced what we’ve just been hearing.’

  The poached eye of Sclopis lighted on Emily, flushed and ardently applauding. He gave her, all to herself, a weary smile. He would have a letter, he guessed, to-morrow morning signed ‘Your little Admirer in the Third Row’. She looked a choice little piece. He smiled again to encourage her. Emily, alas! had not even noticed. She was applauding the music.

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’ he asked, as they stepped out into a deserted Bond Street.

  ‘Did I . . .?’ Emily laughed expressively. ‘No, I didn’t enjoy,’ she said. ‘Enjoy isn’t the word. You enjoy eating ices. It made me happy. It’s unhappy music, but it made me happy.’

  Gumbril hailed a cab and gave the address of his rooms in Great Russell Street. ‘Happy,’ he repeated, as they sat there side by side in the darkness. He, too, was happy.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

  ‘To my rooms,’ said Gumbril, ‘we shall be quiet there.’ He was afraid she might object to going there – after yesterday. But she made no comment.

  ‘Some people think that it’s only possible to be happy if one makes a noise,’ she said, after a pause. ‘I find it’s too delicate and melancholy for noise. Being happy is rather melancholy – like the most beautiful landscape, like those trees and the grass and the clouds and the sunshine to-day.’

  ‘From the outside,’ said Gumbril, ‘it even looks rather dull.’ They stumbled up the dark staircase to his rooms. Gumbril lit a pair of candles and put the kettle on the gas ring. They sat together on the divan sipping tea. In the rich, soft light of the candles she looked different, more beautiful. The silk of her dress seemed wonderfully rich and g
lossy, like the petals of a tulip, and on her face, on her bare arms and neck the light seemed to spread an impalpable bright bloom. On the wall behind them, their shadows ran up towards the ceiling, enormous and profoundly black.

  ‘How unreal it is,’ Gumbril whispered. ‘Not true. This remote secret room. These lights and shadows out of another time. And you out of nowhere and I, out of a past utterly remote from yours, sitting together here, together – and being happy. That’s the strangest thing of all. Being quite senselessly happy. It’s unreal, unreal.’

  ‘But why,’ said Emily, ‘why? It’s here and happening now. It is real.’

  ‘It all might vanish, at any moment,’ he said.

  Emily smiled rather sadly. ‘It’ll vanish in due time,’ she said. ‘Quite naturally, not by magic; it’ll vanish the way everything else vanishes and changes. But it’s here now.’

  They gave themselves up to the enchantment. The candles burned, two shining eyes of flame, without a wink, minute after minute. But for them there were no longer any minutes. Emily leaned against him, her body held in the crook of his arm, her head resting on his shoulder. He caressed his cheek against her hair; sometimes, very gently, he kissed her forehead or her closed eyes.

  ‘If I had known you years ago . . .’ she sighed. ‘But I was a silly little idiot then. I shouldn’t have noticed any difference between you and anybody else.’

  ‘I shall be very jealous,’ Emily spoke again after another timeless silence. ‘There must never be anybody else, never the shadow of anybody else.’

  ‘There never will be anybody else,’ said Gumbril.