‘What is all this about?’ asked Mrs Viveash.
Gumbril finished off his glass. ‘I am talking esoterically,’ he said, ‘for my own pleasure, not yours.’
‘But tell me more about the beard,’ Mrs Viveash insisted. ‘I liked the beard so much.’
‘All right,’ said Gumbril, ‘let us try to be unworthy with coherence.’
They sat for a long time over their cigarettes; it was half past three before Mrs Viveash suggested they should go.
‘Almost time,’ she said, looking at her watch, ‘to have tea. One damned meal after another. And never anything new to eat. And every year one gets bored with another of the old things. Lobster, for instance, how I used to adore lobster once! But to-day – well, really, it was only your conversation, Theodore, that made it tolerable.’
Gumbril put his hand to his heart and bowed. He felt suddenly extremely depressed.
‘And wine: I used to think Orvieto so heavenly. But this spring, when I went to Italy, it was just a bad muddy sort of Vouvray. And those soft caramels they call Fiats; I used to eat those till I was sick. I was at the sick stage before I’d finished one of them, this time in Rome.’ Mrs Viveash shook her head. ‘Disillusion after disillusion.’
They walked down the dark passage into the street.
‘We’ll go home,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘I really haven’t got the spirit to do anything else this afternoon.’ To the commissionaire who opened the door of the cab she gave the address of her house in St James’s.
‘Will one ever recapture the old thrills?’ she asked rather fatiguedly as they drove slowly through the traffic of Regent Street.
‘Not by chasing after them,’ said Gumbril, in whom the clown had quite evaporated. ‘If one sat still enough they might perhaps come back of their own accord . . .’ There would be the faint sound as it were of feet approaching through the quiet.
‘It isn’t only food,’ said Mrs Viveash, who had closed her eyes and was leaning back in her corner.
‘So I can well believe.’
‘It’s everything. Nothing’s the same now. I feel it never will be.’
‘Never more,’ croaked Gumbril.
‘Never again,’ Mrs Viveash echoed. ‘Never again.’ There were still no tears behind her eyes. ‘Did you ever know Tony Lamb?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Gumbril answered from his corner. ‘What about him?’
Mrs Viveash did not answer. What, indeed, about him? She thought of his very clear blue eyes and the fair, bright hair that had been lighter than his brown face. Brown face and neck, red-brown hands; and all the rest of his skin was as white as milk. ‘I was very fond of him,’ she said at last. ‘That’s all. He was killed in 1917, just about this time of the year. It seems a very long time ago, don’t you think?’
‘Does it?’ Gumbril shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. The past is abolished. Vivamus, mea Lesbia. If I weren’t so horribly depressed, I’d embrace you. That would be some slight compensation for my’ – he tapped his foot with the end of his walking-stick – ‘my accident.’
‘You’re depressed too?’
‘One should never drink at luncheon,’ said Gumbril. ‘It wrecks the afternoon. One should also never think of the past and never for one moment consider the future. These are treasures of ancient wisdom. But perhaps after a little tea –’ He leaned forward to look at the figures on the taxi-meter, for the cab had come to a standstill – ‘after a nip of the tannin stimulant’ – he threw open the door – ‘we may feel rather better.’
Mrs Viveash smiled excruciatingly. ‘For me,’ she said, as she stepped out on to the pavement, ‘even tannin has lost its virtues now.’
Mrs Viveash’s drawing-room was tastefully in the movement. The furniture was upholstered in fabrics designed by Dufy – racehorses and roses, little tennis players clustering in the midst of enormous flowers, printed in grey and ochre on a white ground. There were a couple of lamp-shades by Balla. On the pale rose-stippled walls hung three portraits of herself by three different and entirely incongruous painters, a selection of the usual oranges and lemons, and a rather forbidding contemporary nude painted in two tones of green.
‘And how bored I am with this room and all these beastly pictures!’ exclaimed Mrs Viveash as she entered. She took off her hat and, standing in front of the mirror above the mantelpiece, smoothed her coppery hair.
‘You should take a cottage in the country,’ said Gumbril, ‘buy a pony and a governess cart and drive along the twiddly lanes looking for flowers. After tea you open the cottage piano,’ and suiting his action to the words, Gumbril sat down at the long-tailed Blüthner, ‘and you play, you play.’ Very slowly and with parodied expressiveness he played the opening theme of the Arietta. ‘You wouldn’t be bored then,’ he said, turning round to her, when he had finished.
‘Ah, wouldn’t I!’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘And with whom do you propose that I should share my cottage?’
‘Any one you like,’ said Gumbril. His fingers hung, as though meditating over the keys.
‘But I don’t like any one,’ cried Mrs Viveash with a terrible vehemence from her death-bed . . . Ah, now it had been said, the truth. It sounded like a joke. Tony had been dead five years now. Those bright blue eyes – ah, never again. All rotted away to nothing.
‘Then you should try,’ said Gumbril, whose hands had begun to creep softly forward into the Twelfth Sonata. ‘You should try.’
‘But I do try,’ said Mrs Viveash. Her elbows propped on the mantelpiece, her chin resting on her clasped hands, she was looking fixedly at her own image in the glass. Pale eyes looked unwaveringly into pale eyes. The red mouth and its reflection exchanged their smiles of pain. She had tried; it revolted her now to think how often she had tried; she had tried to like someone, any one, as much as Tony. She had tried to recapture, to re-evoke, to revivify. And there had never been anything, really, but a disgust. ‘I haven’t succeeded,’ she added, after a pause.
The music had shifted from F major to D minor; it mounted in leaping anapaests to a suspended chord, ran down again, mounted once more, modulating to C minor, then, through a passage of trembling notes to A flat major, to the dominant of D flat, to the dominant of C, to C minor, and at last, to a new clear theme in the major.
‘Then I’m sorry for you,’ said Gumbril, allowing his fingers to play on by themselves. He felt sorry, too, for the subjects of Mrs Viveash’s desperate experiments. She mightn’t have succeeded in liking them – for their part, poor devils, they in general only too agonizingly liked her . . . Only too . . . He remembered the cold, damp spots on his pillow, in the darkness. Those hopeless, angry tears. ‘You nearly killed me once,’ he said.
‘Only time kills,’ said Mrs Viveash, still looking into her own pale eyes. ‘I have never made any one happy,’ she added, after a pause. ‘Never any one,’ she thought, except Tony, and Tony they had killed, shot him through the head. Even the bright eyes had rotted, like any other carrion. She too had been happy then. Never again.
A maid came in with the tea-things.
‘Ah, the tannin!’ exclaimed Gumbril with enthusiasm, and broke off his playing. ‘The one hope of salvation.’ He poured out two cups, and picking up one of them he came over to the fireplace and stood behind her, sipping slowly at the pale brewage and looking over her shoulder at their two reflections in the mirror.
‘La ci darem,’ he hummed. ‘If only I had my beard!’ He stroked his chin and with the tip of his forefinger brushed up the drooping ends of his moustache. ‘You’d come trembling like Zerlina, in under its golden shadow.’
Mrs Viveash smiled. ‘I don’t ask for anything better,’ she said. ‘What more delightful part! Felice, io so, sarei: Batti, batti, o bel Mazetto. Enviable Zerlina!’
The servant made another silent entry.
‘A gentleman,’ she said, ‘called Mr Shearwater would like –’
‘Tell him I’m not at home,’ said Mrs Viveash, without looking round.
T
here was a silence. With raised eyebrows Gumbril looked over Mrs Viveash’s shoulder at her reflection. Her eyes were calm and without expression, she did not smile or frown. Gumbril still questioningly looked. In the end he began to laugh.
CHAPTER XV
THEY WERE PLAYING that latest novelty from across the water ‘What’s he to Hecuba?’ Sweet, sweet and piercing, the saxophone pierced into the very bowels of compassion and tenderness, pierced like a revelation from heaven, pierced like the angel’s treacly dart into the holy Teresa’s quivering and ecstasiated flank. More ripely and roundly, with a kindly and less agonizing voluptuousness, the ‘cello meditated those Mohammedian ecstasies that last, under the green palms of Paradise, six hundred inenarrable years apiece. Into this charged atmosphere the violin admitted refreshing draughts of fresh air, cool and thin like the breath from a still damp squirt. And the piano hammered and rattled away unmindful of the sensibilities of the other instruments, banged away all the time, reminding every one concerned, in a thoroughly business-like way, that this was a cabaret where people came to dance the fox-trot; not a baroque church for female saints to go into ecstasies in, not a mild, happy valley of tumbling houris.
At each recurrence of the refrain the four negroes of the orchestra, or at least the three of them who played with their hands alone – for the saxophonist always blew at this point with a redoubled sweetness, enriching the passage with a warbling contrapuntal soliloquy that fairly wrung the entrails and transported the pierced heart – broke into melancholy and drawling song:
‘What’s he to Hecuba?
Nothing at all.
That’s why there’ll be no wedding on Wednesday week.
Way down in old Bengal.’
‘What unspeakable sadness,’ said Gumbril, as he stepped, stepped through the intricacies of the trot. ‘Eternal passion, eternal pain. Les chants désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux, Et j’en sais d’immortels qui sont de purs sanglots. Rum tiddle-um-tum, pom-pom. Amen. What’s he to Hecuba? Nothing at all. Nothing, mark you. Nothing, nothing.’
‘Nothing,’ repeated Mrs Viveash. ‘I know all about that.’ She sighed.
‘I am nothing to you,’ said Gumbril, gliding with skill between the wall and the Charybdis of a couple dangerously experimenting with a new step. ‘You are nothing to me. Thank God. And yet here we are, two bodies with but a single thought, a beast with two backs, a perfectly united centaur trotting, trotting.’ They trotted.
‘What’s he to Hecuba?’ The grinning blackamoors repeated the question, reiterated the answer on a tone of frightful unhappiness. The saxophone warbled on the verge of anguish. The couples revolved, marked time, stepped and stepped with an habitual precision, as though performing some ancient and profoundly significant rite. Some were in fancy dress, for this was a gala night at the cabaret. Young women disguised as callipygous Florentine pages, blue-breeched Gondoliers, black-breeched Toreadors circulated, moon-like, round the hall, clasped sometimes in the arms of Arabs, or white clowns, or more often of untravestied partners. The faces reflected in the mirrors were the sort of faces one feels one ought to know by sight; the cabaret was ‘Artistic’.
‘What’s he to Hecuba?’
Mrs Viveash murmured the response, almost piously, as though she were worshipping almighty and omnipresent Nil. ‘I adore this tune,’ she said, ‘this divine tune.’ It filled up a space, it moved, it jigged, it set things twitching in you, it occupied time, it gave you a sense of being alive. ‘Divine tune, divine tune,’ she repeated with emphasis, and she shut her eyes, trying to abandon herself, trying to float, trying to give Nil the slip.
‘Ravishing little Toreador, that,’ said Gumbril, who had been following the black-breeched travesty with affectionate interest.
Mrs Viveash opened her eyes. Nil was unescapable. ‘With Piers Cotton, you mean? Your tastes are a little common, my Theodore.’
‘Green-eyed monster!’
Mrs Viveash laughed. ‘When I was being “finished” in Paris,’ she said, ‘Mademoiselle always used to urge me to take fencing lessons. C’est un exercise très gracieux. Et puis,’ Mrs Viveash mimicked a passionate earnestness, ‘et puis, ça develope le bassin. Your Toreador, Gumbril, looks as though she must be a champion with the foils. Quel bassin!’
‘Hush,’ said Gumbril. They were abreast of the Toreador and her partner. Piers Cotton turned his long greyhound’s nose in their direction.
‘How are you?’ he asked across the music.
They nodded. ‘And you?’
‘Ah, writing such a book,’ cried Piers Cotton, ‘such a brilliant, brilliant, flashing book.’ The dance was carrying them apart. ‘Like a smile of false teeth,’ he shouted across the widening gulf, and disappeared in the crowd.
‘What’s he to Hecuba?’ Lachrymosely, the hilarious blackamoors chanted their question, mournfully pregnant with its foreknown reply.
Nil, omnipresent nil, world-soul, spiritual informer of all matter. Nil in the shape of a black-breeched moon-basined Toreador. Nil, the man with the greyhound’s nose. Nil, as four blackamoors. Nil in the form of a divine tune. Nil, the faces, the faces one ought to know by sight, reflected in the mirrors of the hall. Nil this Gumbril whose arm is round one’s waist, whose feet step in and out among one’s own. Nothing at all.
That’s why there’ll be no wedding. No wedding at St George’s, Hanover Square, – oh, desperate experiment! – with Nil Viveash, that charming boy, that charming nothing at all, engaged at the moment in hunting elephants, hunting fever and carnivores among the Tikki-tikki pygmies. That’s why there’ll be no wedding on Wednesday week. For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime. For the light strawy hair (not a lock left), the brown face, the red-brown hands and the smooth boy’s body, milk-white, milk-warm, are nothing at all, nothing, now, at all – nil these five years – and the shining blue eyes as much nil as the rest.
‘Always the same people,’ complained Mrs Viveash, looking round the room. ‘The old familiar faces. Never any one new. Where’s the younger generation, Gumbril? We’re old, Theodore. There are millions younger than we are. Where are they?’
‘I’m not responsible for them,’ said Gumbril. ‘I’m not even responsible for myself.’ He imagined a cottagey room, under a roof, with a window near the floor and a sloping ceiling where you were always bumping your head; and in the candle-light Emily’s candid eyes, her grave and happy mouth; in the darkness, the curve, under his fingers, of her firm body.
‘Why don’t they come and sing for their supper?’ Mrs Viveash went on petulantly. ‘It’s their business to amuse us.’
‘They’re probably thinking of amusing themselves,’ Gumbril suggested.
‘Well, then, they should do it where we can see them.’
‘What’s he to Hecuba?’
‘Nothing at all,’ Gumbril clownishly sang. The room, in the cottage, had nothing to do with him. He breathed Mrs Viveash’s memories of Italian jasmines, laid his cheek for a moment against her smooth hair. ‘Nothing at all.’ Happy Clown!
Way down in old Bengal, under the green Paradisiac palms, among the ecstatic mystagogues and the saints who scream beneath the divine caresses, the music came to an end. The four negroes wiped their glistening faces. The couples fell apart. Gumbril and Mrs Viveash sat down and smoked a cigarette.
CHAPTER XVI
THE BLACKAMOORS HAD left the platform at the end of the hall. The curtains looped up at either side had slid down, cutting it off from the rest of the room – ‘making two worlds,’ Gumbril elegantly and allusively put it, ‘where only one grew before – and one of them a better world,’ he added too philosophically, ‘because unreal.’ There was the theatrical silence, the suspense. The curtains parted again.
On a narrow bed – on a pier perhaps – the corpse of a woman. The husband kneels beside it. At the foot stands the doctor, putting away his instruments. In a beribboned pink cradle reposes a monstrous baby.
THE HUSBAND: Margaret! Margaret!
TH
E DOCTOR: She is dead.
THE HUSBAND: Margaret!
THE DOCTOR: Of septicaemia, I tell you.
THE HUSBAND: I wish that I too were dead!
THE DOCTOR: But you won’t to-morrow.
THE HUSBAND: To-morrow! But I don’t want to live to see tomorrow.
THE DOCTOR: You will to-morrow.
THE HUSBAND: Margaret! Margaret! Wait for me there; I shall not fail to meet you in that hollow vale.
THE DOCTOR: You will not be slow to survive her.
THE HUSBAND: Christ have mercy upon us!
THE DOCTOR: You would do better to think of the child.
THE HUSBAND [rising and standing menacingly over the cradle]: Is that the monster?
THE DOCTOR: No worse than others.
THE HUSBAND: Begotten in a night of immaculate pleasure, monster, may you live loveless, in dirt and impurity!
THE DOCTOR: Conceived in lust and darkness, may your own impurity always seem heavenly, monster, in your own eyes!
THE HUSBAND: Murderer, slowly die all your life long!
THE DOCTOR: The child must be fed.
THE HUSBAND: Fed? With what?
THE DOCTOR: With milk.
THE HUSBAND: Her milk is cold in her breasts.
THE DOCTOR: There are still cows.
THE HUSBAND: Tubercular shorthorns. [Calling.] Let Short-i’-the-horn be brought!
VOICES [off]: Short-i’-the-horn! Short-i’-the-horn! [Fadingly.] Short-i’-the . . .
THE DOCTOR: In nineteen hundred and twenty-one, twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and thirteen women died in childbirth.