Crome Yellow, Page 2

  The tea-table had been planted in the shade of one of the little summer-houses, and the rest of the party was already assembled about it when Denis and Priscilla made their appearance. Henry Wimbush had begun to pour out the tea. He was one of those ageless, unchanging men on the farther side of fifty, who might be thirty, who might be anything. Denis had known him almost as long as he could remember. In all those years his pale, rather handsome face had never grown any older; it was like the pale grey bowler hat which he always wore, winter and summer — unageing, calm, serenely without expression.

  Next him, but separated from him and from the rest of the world by the almost impenetrable barriers of her deafness, sat Jenny Mullion. She was perhaps thirty, had a tilted nose and a pinkand-white complexion, and wore her brown hair plaited and coiled in two lateral buns over her ears. In the secret tower of her deafness she sat apart, looking down at the world through sharply piercing eyes. What did she think of men and women and things? That was something that Denis had never been able to discover. In her enigmatic remoteness Jenny was a little disquieting. Even now some interior joke seemed to be amusing her, for she was smiling to herself, and her brown eyes were like very bright round marbles.

  On his other side the serious, moonlike innocence of Mary Bracegirdle’s face shone pink and childish. She was nearly twenty-three, but one wouldn’t have guessed it. Her short hair, clipped like a page’s, hung in a bell of elastic gold about her cheeks. She had large blue china eyes, whose expression was one of ingenuous and often puzzled earnestness.

  Next to Mary a small gaunt man was sitting, rigid and erect in his chair. In appearance Mr. Scogan was like one of those extinct bird-lizards of the Tertiary. His nose was beaked, his dark eye had the shining quickness of a robin’s. But there was nothing soft or gracious or feathery about him. The skin of his wrinkled brown face had a dry and scaly look; his hands were the hands of a crocodile. His movements were marked by the lizard’s disconcertingly abrupt clockwork speed; his speech was thin, fluty, and dry. Henry Wimbush’s school-fellow and exact contemporary, Mr. Scogan looked far older and, at the same time, far more youthfully alive than did that gentle aristocrat with the face like a grey bowler.

  Mr. Scogan might look like an extinct saurian, but Gombauld was altogether and essentially human. In the old-fashioned natural histories of the ‘thirties he might have figured in a steel engraving as a type of Homo Sapiens — an honour which at that time commonly fell to Lord Byron. Indeed, with more hair and less collar, Gombauld would have been completely Byronic — more than Byronic, even, for Gombauld was of Provencal descent, a blackhaired young corsair of thirty, with flashing teeth and luminous large dark eyes. Denis looked at him enviously. He was jealous of his talent: if only he wrote verse as well as Gombauld painted pictures! Still more, at the moment, he envied Gombauld his looks, his vitality, his easy confidence of manner. Was it surprising that Anne should like him? Like him? — it might even be something worse, Denis reflected bitterly, as he walked at Priscilla’s side down the long grass terrace.

  Between Gombauld and Mr. Scogan a very much lowered deck-chair presented its back to the new arrivals as they advanced towards the tea-table. Gombauld was leaning over it; his face moved vivaciously; he smiled, he laughed, he made quick gestures with his hands. From the depths of the chair came up a sound of soft, lazy laughter. Denis started as he heard it. That laughter — how well he knew it! What emotions it evoked in him! He quickened his pace.

  In her low deck-chair Anne was nearer to lying than to sitting. Her long, slender body reposed in an attitude of listless and indolent grace. Within its setting of light brown hair her face had a pretty regularity that was almost doll-like. And indeed there were moments when she seemed nothing more than a doll; when the oval face, with its long-lashed, pale blue eyes, expressed nothing; when it was no more than a lazy mask of wax. She was Henry Wimbush’s own niece; that bowler-like countenance was one of the Wimbush heirlooms; it ran in the family, appearing in its female members as a blank doll-face. But across this dollish mask, like a gay melody dancing over an unchanging fundamental bass, passed Anne’s other inheritance — quick laughter, light ironic amusement, and the changing expressions of many moods. She was smiling now as Denis looked down at her: her cat’s smile, he called it, for no very good reason. The mouth was compressed, and on either side of it two tiny wrinkles had formed themselves in her cheeks. An infinity of slightly malicious amusement lurked in those little folds, in the puckers about the half-closed eyes, in the eyes themselves, bright and laughing between the narrowed lids.

  The preliminary greetings spoken, Denis found an empty chair between Gombauld and Jenny and sat down.

  “How are you, Jenny?” he shouted to her.

  Jenny nodded and smiled in mysterious silence, as though the subject of her health were a secret that could not be publicly divulged.

  “How’s London been since I went away?” Anne inquired from the depth of her chair.

  The moment had come; the tremendously amusing narrative was waiting for utterance. “Well,” said Denis, smiling happily, “to begin with...”

  “Has Priscilla told you of our great antiquarian find?” Henry Wimbush leaned forward; the most promising of buds was nipped.

  “To begin with,” said Denis desperately, “there was the Ballet...”

  “Last week,” Mr. Wimbush went on softly and implacably, “we dug up fifty yards of oaken drain-pipes; just tree trunks with a hole bored through the middle. Very interesting indeed. Whether they were laid down by the monks in the fifteenth century, or whether...”

  Denis listened gloomily. “Extraordinary!” he said, when Mr. Wimbush had finished; “quite extraordinary!” He helped himself to another slice of cake. He didn’t even want to tell his tale about London now; he was damped.

  For some time past Mary’s grave blue eyes had been fixed upon him. “What have you been writing lately?” she asked. It would be nice to have a little literary conversation.

  “Oh, verse and prose,” said Denis —“just verse and prose.”

  “Prose?” Mr. Scogan pounced alarmingly on the word. “You’ve been writing prose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not a novel?”

  “Yes.”

  “My poor Denis!” exclaimed Mr. Scogan. “What about?”

  Denis felt rather uncomfortable. “Oh, about the usual things, you know.”

  “Of course,” Mr. Scogan groaned. “I’ll describe the plot for you. Little Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever. He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and comes to London, where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the luminous Future.”

  Denis blushed scarlet. Mr. Scogan had described the plan of his novel with an accuracy that was appalling. He made an effort to laugh. “You’re entirely wrong,” he said. “My novel is not in the least like that.” It was a heroic lie. Luckily, he reflected, only two chapters were written. He would tear them up that very evening when he unpacked.

  Mr. Scogan paid no attention to his denial, but went on: “Why will you young men continue to write about things that are so entirely uninteresting as the mentality of adolescents and artists? Professional anthropologists might find it interesting to turn sometimes from the beliefs of the Blackfellow to the philosophical preoccupations of the undergraduate. But you can’t expect an ordinary adult man, like myself, to be much moved by the story of his spiritual troubles. And after all, even in England, even in Germany and Russia, there are more adults than adolescents. As for the artist, he is preoccupied with problems that are so utterly unlike those of the ordinary adult man — problems of pure aesthetics which don’t so much as present themselves to people like myself — that a description of his mental processes is as boring to the ordinary r
eader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book about artists regarded as artists is unreadable; and a book about artists regarded as lovers, husbands, dipsomaniacs, heroes, and the like is really not worth writing again. Jean-Christophe is the stock artist of literature, just as Professor Radium of “Comic Cuts” is its stock man of science.”

  ‘I’m sorry to hear I’m as uninteresting as all that,” said Gombauld.

  “Not at all, my dear Gombauld,” Mr. Scogan hastened to explain. “As a lover or a dipsomaniac, I’ve no doubt of your being a most fascinating specimen. But as a combiner of forms, you must honestly admit it, you’re a bore.”

  “I entirely disagree with you,” exclaimed Mary. She was somehow always out of breath when she talked. And her speech was punctuated by little gasps. “I’ve known a great many artists, and I’ve always found their mentality very interesting. Especially in Paris. Tschuplitski, for example — I saw a great deal of Tschuplitski in Paris this spring...”

  “Ah, but then you’re an exception, Mary, you’re an exception,” said Mr. Scogan. “You are a femme superieure.”

  A flush of pleasure turned Mary’s face into a harvest moon.

  Chapter IV.

  * * *

  Denis woke up next morning to find the sun shining, the sky serene. He decided to wear white flannel trousers — white flannel trousers and a black jacket, with a silk shirt and his new peachcoloured tie. And what shoes? White was the obvious choice, but there was something rather pleasing about the notion of black patent leather. He lay in bed for several minutes considering the problem.

  Before he went down — patent leather was his final choice — he looked at himself critically in the glass. His hair might have been more golden, he reflected. As it was, its yellowness had the hint of a greenish tinge in it. But his forehead was good. His forehead made up in height what his chin lacked in prominence. His nose might have been longer, but it would pass. His eyes might have been blue and not green. But his coat was very well cut and, discreetly padded, made him seem robuster than he actually was. His legs, in their white casing, were long and elegant. Satisfied, he descended the stairs. Most of the party had already finished their breakfast. He found himself alone with Jenny.

  “I hope you slept well,” he said.

  “Yes, isn’t it lovely?” Jenny replied, giving two rapid little nods. “But we had such awful thunderstorms last week.”

  Parallel straight lines, Denis reflected, meet only at infinity. He might talk for ever of care-charmer sleep and she of meteorology till the end of time. Did one ever establish contact with anyone? We are all parallel straight lines. Jenny was only a little more parallel than most.

  “They are very alarming, these thunderstorms,” he said, helping himself to porridge. “Don’t you think so? Or are you above being frightened?”

  “No. I always go to bed in a storm. One is so much safer lying down.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” said Jenny, making a descriptive gesture, “because lightning goes downwards and not flat ways. When you’re lying down you’re out of the current.”

  “That’s very ingenious.”

  “It’s true.”

  There was a silence. Denis finished his porridge and helped himself to bacon. For lack of anything better to say, and because Mr. Scogan’s absurd phrase was for some reason running in his head, he turned to Jenny and asked:

  “Do you consider yourself a femme superieure?” He had to repeat the question several times before Jenny got the hang of it.

  “No,” she said, rather indignantly, when at last she heard what Denis was saying. “Certainly not. Has anyone been suggesting that I am?”

  “No,” said Denis. “Mr. Scogan told Mary she was one.”

  “Did he?” Jenny lowered her voice. “Shall I tell you what I think of that man? I think he’s slightly sinister.”

  Having made this pronouncement, she entered the ivory tower of her deafness and closed the door. Denis could not induce her to say anything more, could not induce her even to listen. She just smiled at him, smiled and occasionally nodded.

  Denis went out on to the terrace to smoke his after-breakfast pipe and to read his morning paper. An hour later, when Anne came down, she found him still reading. By this time he had got to the Court Circular and the Forthcoming Weddings. He got up to meet her as she approached, a Hamadryad in white muslin, across the grass.

  “Why, Denis,” she exclaimed, “you look perfectly sweet in your white trousers.”

  Denis was dreadfully taken aback. There was no possible retort. “You speak as though I were a child in a new frock,” he said, with a show of irritation.

  “But that’s how I feel about you, Denis dear.”

  “Then you oughtn’t to.”

  “But I can’t help it. I’m so much older than you.”

  “I like that,” he said. “Four years older.”

  “And if you do look perfectly sweet in your white trousers, why shouldn’t I say so? And why did you put them on, if you didn’t think you were going to look sweet in them?”

  “Let’s go into the garden,” said Denis. He was put out; the conversation had taken such a preposterous and unexpected turn. He had planned a very different opening, in which he was to lead off with, “You look adorable this morning,” or something of the kind, and she was to answer, “Do I?” and then there was to be a pregnant silence. And now she had got in first with the trousers. It was provoking; his pride was hurt.

  That part of the garden that sloped down from the foot of the terrace to the pool had a beauty which did not depend on colour so much as on forms. It was as beautiful by moonlight as in the sun. The silver of water, the dark shapes of yew and ilex trees remained, at all hours and seasons, the dominant features of the scene. It was a landscape in black and white. For colour there was the flower-garden; it lay to one side of the pool, separated from it by a huge Babylonian wall of yews. You passed through a tunnel in the hedge, you opened a wicket in a wall, and you found yourself, startlingly and suddenly, in the world of colour. The July borders blazed and flared under the sun. Within its high brick walls the garden was like a great tank of warmth and perfume and colour.

  Denis held open the little iron gate for his companion. “It’s like passing from a cloister into an Oriental palace,” he said, and took a deep breath of the warm, flower-scented air. “’In fragrant volleys they let fly...’ How does it go?

  “’Well shot, ye firemen! Oh how sweet And round your equal fires do meet; Whose shrill report no ear can tell, But echoes to the eye and smell...’”

  “You have a bad habit of quoting,” said Anne. “As I never know the context or author, I find it humiliating.”

  Denis apologized. “It’s the fault of one’s education. Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else’s ready-made phrase about them. And then there are lots of lovely names and words — Monophysite, Iamblichus, Pomponazzi; you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you’ve clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That’s what comes of the higher education.”

  “You may regret your education,” said Anne; “I’m ashamed of my lack of it. Look at those sunflowers! Aren’t they magnificent?”

  “Dark faces and golden crowns — they’re kings of Ethiopia. And I like the way the tits cling to the flowers and pick out the seeds, while the other loutish birds, grubbing dirtily for their food, look up in envy from the ground. Do they look up in envy? That’s the literary touch, I’m afraid. Education again. It always comes back to that.” He was silent.

  Anne had sat down on a bench that stood in the shade of an old apple tree. “I’m listening,” she said.

  He did not sit down, but walked backwards and forwards in front of the bench, gesticulating a little as he talked. “Books,” he said —“books. One reads so many, and one sees so few people and so little of the world. Great thick books about the universe and the mind and ethics. You’ve no idea how many there are. I must ha
ve read twenty or thirty tons of them in the last five years. Twenty tons of ratiocination. Weighted with that, one’s pushed out into the world.”

  He went on walking up and down. His voice rose, fell, was silent a moment, and then talked on. He moved his hands, sometimes he waved his arms. Anne looked and listened quietly, as though she were at a lecture. He was a nice boy, and to-day he looked charming — charming!

  One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one’s philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy? Denis came to a halt in front of the bench, and as he asked this last question he stretched out his arms and stood for an instant in an attitude of crucifixion, then let them fall again to his sides.

  “My poor Denis!” Anne was touched. He was really too pathetic as he stood there in front of her in his white flannel trousers. “But does one suffer about these things? It seems very extraordinary.”

  “You’re like Scogan,” cried Denis bitterly. “You regard me as a specimen for an anthropologist. Well, I suppose I am.”

  “No, no,” she protested, and drew in her skirt with a gesture that indicated that he was to sit down beside her. He sat down. “Why can’t you just take things for granted and as they come?” she asked. “It’s so much simpler.”