Antic Hay

  Emily smiled and opened her eyes, looked up at him. ‘Ah, not here,’ she said, ‘not in this real unreal room. Not during this eternity. But there will be other rooms just as real as this.’

  ‘Not so real, not so real.’ He bent his face towards hers. She closed her eyes again, and the lids fluttered with a sudden tremulous movement at the touch of his light kiss.

  For them there were no more minutes. But time passed, time passed flowing in a dark stream, stanchlessly, as though from some profound mysterious wound in the world’s side, bleeding, bleeding for ever. One of the candles had burned down to the socket and the long, smoky flame wavered unsteadily. The flickering light troubled their eyes; the shadows twitched and stirred uneasily. Emily looked up at him.

  ‘What’s the time?’ she said.

  Gumbril looked at his watch. It was nearly one o’clock. ‘Too late for you to get back,’ he said.

  ‘Too late?’ Emily sat up. Ah, the enchantment was breaking, was giving way, like a film of ice beneath a weight, like a web before a thrust of wind. They looked at one another. ‘What shall I do?’ she asked.

  ‘You could sleep here,’ Gumbril answered in a voice that came from a long way away.

  She sat for a long time in silence, looking through half-closed eyes at the expiring candle flame. Gumbril watched her in an agony of suspense. Was the ice to be broken, the webwork finally and for ever torn? The enchantment could still be prolonged, the eternity renewed. He felt his heart beating in his breast; he held his breath. It would be terrible if she were to go now, it would be a kind of death. The flame of the candle flickered more violently, leaping up in a thin, long, smoky flare, sinking again almost to darkness. Emily got up and blew out the candle. The other still burned calmly and steadily.

  ‘May I stay?’ she asked. ‘Will you allow me?’

  He understood the meaning of her question, and nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘Of course? Is it as much of course as all that?’

  ‘When I say so.’ He smiled at her. The eternity had been renewed, the enchantment prolonged. There was no need to think of anything but now the moment. The past was forgotten, the future abolished. There was only this secret room and the candlelight and the unreal, impossible happiness of being two. Now that this peril of a disenchantment had been averted, it would last for ever. He got up from the couch, crossed the room, he took her hands and kissed them.

  ‘Shall we sleep now?’ she asked.

  Gumbril nodded.

  ‘Do you mind if I blow out the light?’ And without waiting for his answer, Emily turned, gave a puff, and the room was in darkness. He heard the rustling of her undressing. Hastily he stripped off his own clothes, pulled back the coverlet from the divan. The bed was made and ready; he opened it and slipped between the sheets. A dim greenish light from the gas lamp in the street below came up between the parted curtains illuminating faintly the farther end of the room. Against this tempered darkness he could see her, silhouetted, standing quite still, as if hesitating on some invisible brink.

  ‘Emily,’ he whispered.

  ‘I’m coming,’ Emily answered. She stood there, unmoving, a few seconds longer, then overstepped the brink. She came across the room, and sat down on the edge of the low couch. Gumbril lay perfectly still, without speaking, waiting in the enchanted timeless darkness. Emily lifted her knees, slid her feet in under the sheet, then stretched herself out beside him, her body, in the narrow bed, touching his. Gumbril felt that she was trembling; trembling, a sharp involuntary start, a little shudder, another start.

  ‘You’re cold,’ he said, and slipping one arm beneath her shoulders he drew her, limp and unresisting, towards him. She lay there, pressed against him. Gradually the trembling ceased. Quite still, quite still in the calm of the enchantment. The past is forgotten, the future abolished; there is only this dark and everlasting moment. A drugged and intoxicated stupor possessed his spirit; a numbness, warm and delicious, lay upon him. And yet through the stupor he knew with a dreadful anxious certainty that the end would soon be there. Like a man on the night before his execution, he looked forward through the endless present; he foresaw the end of his eternity. And after? Everything was uncertain and unsafe.

  Very gently, he began caressing her shoulder, her long slender arm, drawing his finger-tips lightly and slowly over her smooth skin; slowly from her neck, over her shoulder, lingeringly round the elbow to her hand. Again, again: he was learning her arm. The form of it was part of the knowledge, now, of his fingertips; his fingers knew it as they knew a piece of music, as they knew Mozart’s Twelfth Sonata, for example. And the themes that crowd so quickly one after another at the beginning of the first movement played themselves aerially, glitteringly in his mind; they became a part of the enchantment.

  Through the silk of her shift he learned her curving side, her smooth straight back and the ridge of her spine. He stretched down, touched her feet, her knees. Under the smock he learned her warm body, lightly, slowly caressing. He knew her, his fingers, he felt, could build her up, a warm and curving statue in the darkness. He did not desire her; to desire would have been to break the enchantment. He let himself sink deeper and deeper into his dark stupor of happiness. She was asleep in his arms; and soon he too was asleep.

  CHAPTER XIV

  MRS VIVEASH DESCENDED the steps into King Street, and standing there on the pavement looked dubiously first to the right and then to the left. Little and loud, the taxis rolled by on their white wheels, the long-snouted limousines passed with a sigh. The air smelt of watered dust, tempered in Mrs Viveash’s immediate neighbourhood by those memories of Italian jasmines which were her perfume. On the opposite pavement, in the shade, two young men, looking very conscious of their grey top-hats, marched gravely along.

  Life, Mrs Viveash thought, looked a little dim this morning in spite of the fine weather. She glanced at her watch; it was one o’clock. Soon one would have to eat some lunch. But where, and with whom? Mrs Viveash had no engagements. All the world was before her, she was absolutely free, all day long. Yesterday, when she declined all those pressing invitations, the prospect had seemed delightful. Liberty, no complications, no contacts; a pre-Adamite empty world to do what she liked in.

  But to-day, when it came to the point, she hated her liberty. To come out like this at one o’clock into a vacuum – it was absurd, it was appalling. The prospect of immeasurable boredom opened before her. Steppes after steppes of ennui, horizon beyond horizon, for ever the same. She looked again to the right and again to the left. Finally she decided to go to the left. Slowly, walking along her private knife-edge between her personal abysses, she walked towards the left. She remembered suddenly one shining day like this in the summer of 1917, when she had walked along this same street, slowly, like this, on the sunny side, with Tony Lamb. All that day, that night, it had been one long good-bye. He was going back the next morning. Less than a week later he was dead. Never again, never again: there had been a time when she could make herself cry, simply by saying those two words once or twice, under her breath. Never again, never again. She repeated them softly now. But she felt no tears behind her eyes. Grief doesn’t kill, love doesn’t kill; but time kills everything, kills desire, kills sorrow, kills in the end the mind that feels them; wrinkles and softens the body while it still lives, rots it like a medlar, kills it too at last. Never again, never again. Instead of crying, she laughed, laughed aloud. The pigeon-breasted old gentleman who had just passed her, twirling between his finger and thumb the ends of a white military moustache, turned round startled. Could she be laughing at him?

  ‘Never again,’ murmured Mrs Viveash.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ queried the martial gentleman, in a rich, port-winey, cigary voice.

  Mrs Viveash looked at him with such wide-eyed astonishment that the old gentleman was quite taken aback. ‘A thousand apologies, dear lady. Thought you were addressing . . . H’m, ah’m.’ He replaced his hat, squared his shoulders and went of
f smartly, left, right, bearing preciously before him his pigeon breast. Poor thing, he thought, poor young thing. Talking to herself. Must be cracked, must be off her head. Or perhaps she took drugs. That was more likely: that was much more likely. Most of them did nowadays. Vicious young women. Lesbians, drug-fiends, nymphomaniacs, dipsos – thoroughly vicious, nowadays, thoroughly vicious. He arrived at his club in an excellent temper.

  Never again, never, never again. Mrs Viveash would have liked to be able to cry.

  St James’s Square opened before her. Romantically under its trees the statue pranced. The trees gave her an idea: she might go down into the country for the afternoon, take a cab and drive out, out, goodness only knew where! To the top of a hill somewhere. Box Hill, Leith Hill, Holmbury Hill, Ivinghoe Beacon – any hill where one could sit and look out over plains. One might do worse than that with one’s liberty.

  But not much worse, she reflected.

  Mrs Viveash had turned up towards the northern side of the square and was almost at its north-western corner when, with a thrill of genuine delight, with a sense of the most profound relief she saw a familiar figure, running down the steps of the London Library.

  ‘Theodore!’ she hallooed faintly but penetratingly, from her inward death-bed. ‘Gumbril!’ She waved her parasol.

  Gumbril halted, looked around, came smiling to meet her. ‘How delightful,’ he said, ‘but how unfortunate.’

  ‘Why unfortunate?’ asked Mrs Viveash. ‘Am I of evil omen?’

  ‘Unfortunate,’ Gumbril explained, ‘because I’ve got to catch a train and can’t profit by this meeting.’

  ‘Ah no, Theodore,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘you’re not going to catch a train. You’re going to come and lunch with me. Providence has decreed it. You can’t say no to Providence.’

  ‘I must,’ Gumbril shook his head. ‘I’ve said yes to somebody else.’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘Ah!’ said Gumbril, with a coy and saucy mysteriousness.

  ‘And where are you going in your famous train?’

  ‘Ah again,’ Gumbril answered.

  ‘How intolerably tiresome and silly you are!’ Mrs Viveash declared. ‘One would think you were a sixteen-year-old schoolboy going out for his first assignment with a shop girl. At your age, Gumbril!’ She shook her head, smiled agonizingly and with contempt. ‘Who is she? What sordid pick-up?’

  ‘Not sordid in the least,’ protested Gumbril.

  ‘But decidedly a pick-up. Eh?’ A banana-skin was lying, like a bedraggled starfish, in the gutter, just in front of where they were standing. Mrs Viveash stepped forward and with the point of her parasol lifted it carefully up and offered it to her companion.

  ‘Merci,’ Gumbril bowed.

  She tossed the skin back again into the gutter. ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘the young lady can wait while we have luncheon.’

  Gumbril shook his head. ‘I’ve made the arrangement,’ he said. Emily’s letter was in his pocket. She had taken the loveliest cottage just out of Robertsbridge, in Sussex. Ah, but the loveliest imaginable. For the whole summer. He could come and see her there. He had telegraphed that he would come to-day, this afternoon, by the two o’clock from Charing Cross.

  Mrs Viveash took him by the elbow. ‘Come along,’ she said. ‘There’s a post office in that passage going from Jermyn Street to Piccadilly. You can wire from there your infinite regrets. These things always improve with a little keeping. There will be raptures when you do go to-morrow.’

  Gumbril allowed himself to be led along. ‘What an insufferable woman you are,’ he said, laughing.

  ‘Instead of being grateful to me for asking you to luncheon!’

  ‘Oh, I am grateful,’ said Gumbril. ‘And astonished.’

  He looked at her. Mrs Viveash smiled and fixed him for a moment with her pale, untroubled eyes . . . She said nothing.

  ‘Still,’ Gumbril went on, ‘I must be at Charing Cross by two, you know.’

  ‘But we’re lunching at Verrey’s.’

  Gumbril shook his head.

  They were at the corner of Jermyn Street. Mrs Viveash halted and delivered her ultimatum, the more impressive for being spoken in that expiring voice of one who says in articulo the final and supremely important things. ‘We lunch at Verrey’s, Theodore, or I shall never, never speak to you again.’

  ‘But be reasonable, Myra,’ he implored. If only he’d told her that he had a business appointment . . . Imbecile, to have dropped those stupid hints . . . in that tone!

  ‘I prefer not to be,’ said Mrs Viveash.

  Gumbril made a gesture of despair and was silent. He thought of Emily in her native quiet among the flowers; in a cottage altogether too cottagey, with honeysuckles and red ramblers and hollyhocks – though, on second thoughts, none of them would be blooming yet, would they? – happily, in white muslin, extracting from the cottage piano the easier sections of the Arietta. A little absurd, perhaps, when you considered her like that; but exquisite, but adorable, but pure of heart and flawless in her bright pellucid integrity, complete as a crystal in its faceted perfection. She would be waiting for him, expecting him; and they would walk through the twiddly lanes – or perhaps there would be a governess cart for hire, with a fat pony like a tub on legs to pull it – they would look for flowers in the woods and perhaps he would still remember what sort of noise a whitethroat makes; or even if he didn’t remember, he could always magisterially say he did. ‘That’s a whitethroat, Emily. Do you hear? The one that goes “Tweedly, weedly, weedledy dee”.’

  ‘I’m waiting,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘Patiently, however.’

  Gumbril looked at her and found her smiling like a tragic mask. After all, he reflected, Emily would still be there if he went down to-morrow. It would be stupid to quarrel with Myra about something that was really, when he came to think of it, not of enormous importance. It was stupid to quarrel with any one about anything; and with Myra and about this, particularly so. In this white dress patterned with flowing arabesques of black she looked, he thought, more than ever enchanting. There had been times in the past . . . The past leads on the present . . . No; but in any case she was excellent company.

  ‘Well,’ he said, sighing decisively, ‘let’s go and send my wire.’

  Mrs Viveash made no comment, and traversing Jermyn Street they walked up the narrow passage under the lee of Wren’s bald barn of St James’s, to the post office.

  ‘I shall pretext a catastrophe,’ said Gumbril, as they entered; and going to the telegraph desk he wrote: ‘Slight accident on the way to station not serious at all but a little indisposed come same train to-morrow.’ He addressed the form and handed it in.

  ‘A little what?’ asked the young lady behind the bars, as she read it through, prodding each successive word with the tip of her blunt pencil.

  ‘A little indisposed,’ said Gumbril, and he felt suddenly very much ashamed of himself. ‘A little indisposed,’ – no, really, that was too much. He’d withdraw the telegram, he’d go after all.

  ‘Ready?’ asked Mrs Viveash, coming up from the other end of the counter where she had been buying stamps.

  Gumbril pushed a florin under the bars.

  ‘A little indisposed,’ he said, hooting with laughter, and he walked towards the door leaning heavily on his stick and limping. ‘Slight accident,’ he explained.

  ‘What is the meaning of this clownery?’ Mrs Viveash inquired.

  ‘What indeed?’ Gumbril had limped up to the door and stood there, holding it open for her. He was taking no responsibility for himself. It was the clown’s doing, and the clown, poor creature, was non compos, not entirely there, and couldn’t be called to account for his actions. He limped after her towards Piccadilly.

  ‘Giudicato guarabile in cinque giorni,’ Mrs Viveash laughed. ‘How charming that always is in the Italian papers. The fickle lady, the jealous lover, the stab, the colpo di rivoltella, the mere Anglo-Saxon black eye – all judged by the house surgeon at the Misericord
ia curable in five days. And you, my poor Gumbril, are you curable in five days?’

  ‘That depends,’ said Gumbril. ‘There may be complications.’

  Mrs Viveash waved her parasol; a taxi came swerving to the pavement’s edge in front of them. ‘Meanwhile,’ she said, ‘you can’t be expected to walk.’

  At Verrey’s they lunched off lobsters and white wine. ‘Fish suppers,’ Gumbril quoted jovially from the Restoration, ‘fish suppers will make a man hop like a flea.’ Through the whole meal he clowned away in the most inimitable style. The ghost of a governess cart rolled along the tweddly lanes of Robertsbridge. But one can refuse to accept responsibility; a clown cannot be held accountable. And besides, when the future and the past are abolished, when it is only the present instant, whether enchanted or unenchanted, that counts, when there are no causes or motives, no future consequences to be considered, how can there be responsibility, even for those who are not clowns? He drank a great deal of hock, and when the clock struck two and the train had begun to snort out of Charing Cross, he could not refrain from proposing the health of Viscount Lascelles. After that he began telling Mrs Viveash about his adventure as a Complete Man.

  ‘You should have seen me,’ he said, describing his beard.

  ‘I should have been bowled over.’

  ‘You shall see me, then,’ said Gumbril. ‘Ah, what a Don Giovanni. La ci darem la mano, La mi dirai di si, Vieni, non e lontano, Partiam, ben mio, da qui. And they came they came. Without hesitation. No “vorrei e non vorrei”, no “mi trema un poco il cor.” Straight away.’

  ‘Felice, io so, sarei,’ Mrs Viveash sang very faintly under her breath, from a remote bed of agony.

  Ah, happiness, happiness; a little dull, some one had wisely said, when you looked at it from outside. An affair of duets at the cottage piano, of collecting specimens, hand in hand, for the hortus siccus. A matter of integrity and quietness.

  ‘Ah, but the history of the young woman who was married four years ago,’ exclaimed Gumbril with clownish rapture, ‘and remains to this day a virgin – what an episode in my memoirs!’ In the enchanted darkness he had learned her young body. He looked at his fingers; her beauty was a part of their knowledge. On the tablecloth he drummed out the first bars of the Twelfth Sonata of Mozart. ‘And even after singing her duet with the Don,’ he continued, ‘she is still virgin. There are chaste pleasures, sublimated sensualities. More thrillingly voluptuous,’ with the gesture of a restaurant-keeper who praises the speciality of the house, he blew a treacly kiss, ‘than any of the grosser deliriums.’