Page 11 of Crome Yellow


  CHAPTER XI.

  Mr. Barbecue-Smith was gone. The motor had whirled him away to thestation; a faint smell of burning oil commemorated his recent departure.A considerable detachment had come into the courtyard to speed him onhis way; and now they were walking back, round the side of the house,towards the terrace and the garden. They walked in silence; nobody hadyet ventured to comment on the departed guest.

  "Well?" said Anne at last, turning with raised inquiring eyebrows toDenis.

  "Well?" It was time for someone to begin.

  Denis declined the invitation; he passed it on to Mr Scogan. "Well?" hesaid.

  Mr. Scogan did not respond; he only repeated the question, "Well?"

  It was left for Henry Wimbush to make a pronouncement. "A very agreeableadjunct to the week-end," he said. His tone was obituary.

  They had descended, without paying much attention where they were going,the steep yew-walk that went down, under the flank of the terrace, tothe pool. The house towered above them, immensely tall, with the wholeheight of the built-up terrace added to its own seventy feet ofbrick facade. The perpendicular lines of the three towers soared up,uninterrupted, enhancing the impression of height until it becameoverwhelming. They paused at the edge of the pool to look back.

  "The man who built this house knew his business," said Denis. "He was anarchitect."

  "Was he?" said Henry Wimbush reflectively. "I doubt it. The builder ofthis house was Sir Ferdinando Lapith, who flourished during the reign ofElizabeth. He inherited the estate from his father, to whom it had beengranted at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries; for Crome wasoriginally a cloister of monks and this swimming-pool their fish-pond.Sir Ferdinando was not content merely to adapt the old monasticbuildings to his own purposes; but using them as a stone quarry for hisbarns and byres and outhouses, he built for himself a grand new house ofbrick--the house you see now."

  He waved his hand in the direction of the house and was silent, severe,imposing, almost menacing, Crome loomed down on them.

  "The great thing about Crome," said Mr. Scogan, seizing the opportunityto speak, "is the fact that it's so unmistakably and aggressively a workof art. It makes no compromise with nature, but affronts it andrebels against it. It has no likeness to Shelley's tower, in the'Epipsychidion,' which, if I remember rightly--

  "'Seems not now a work of human art, But as it were titanic, in theheart Of earth having assumed its form and grown Out of the mountain,from the living stone, Lifting itself in caverns light and high.'

  "No, no, there isn't any nonsense of that sort about Crome. That thehovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown out ofthe earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, andsuitable. But the house of an intelligent, civilised, and sophisticatedman should never seem to have sprouted from the clods. It should ratherbe an expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddishlife. Since the days of William Morris that's a fact which we in Englandhave been unable to comprehend. Civilised and sophisticated men havesolemnly played at being peasants. Hence quaintness, arts and crafts,cottage architecture, and all the rest of it. In the suburbs of ourcities you may see, reduplicated in endless rows, studiedly quaintimitations and adaptations of the village hovel. Poverty, ignorance,and a limited range of materials produced the hovel, which possessesundoubtedly, in suitable surroundings, its own 'as it were titanic'charm. We now employ our wealth, our technical knowledge, our richvariety of materials for the purpose of building millions of imitationhovels in totally unsuitable surroundings. Could imbecility go further?"

  Henry Wimbush took up the thread of his interrupted discourse. "All thatyou say, my dear Scogan," he began, "is certainly very just, very true.But whether Sir Ferdinando shared your views about architecture or if,indeed, he had any views about architecture at all, I very much doubt.In building this house, Sir Ferdinando was, as a matter of fact,preoccupied by only one thought--the proper placing of his privies.Sanitation was the one great interest of his life. In 1573 he evenpublished, on this subject, a little book--now extremely scarce--called,'Certaine Priuy Counsels' by 'One of Her Maiestie's Most HonourablePriuy Counsels, F.L. Knight', in which the whole matter is treated withgreat learning and elegance. His guiding principle in arranging thesanitation of a house was to secure that the greatest possible distanceshould separate the privy from the sewage arrangements. Hence itfollowed inevitably that the privies were to be placed at the top of thehouse, being connected by vertical shafts with pits or channels in theground. It must not be thought that Sir Ferdinando was moved only bymaterial and merely sanitary considerations; for the placing of hisprivies in an exalted position he had also certain excellent spiritualreasons. For, he argues in the third chapter of his 'Priuy Counsels',the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying themwe are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe.To counteract these degrading effects he advised that the privy shouldbe in every house the room nearest to heaven, that it should be wellprovided with windows commanding an extensive and noble prospect,and that the walls of the chamber should be lined with bookshelvescontaining all the ripest products of human wisdom, such as the Proverbsof Solomon, Boethius's 'Consolations of Philosophy', the apophthegmsof Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the 'Enchiridion' of Erasmus, and allother works, ancient or modern, which testify to the nobility of thehuman soul. In Crome he was able to put his theories into practice. Atthe top of each of the three projecting towers he placed a privy. Fromthese a shaft went down the whole height of the house, that is tosay, more than seventy feet, through the cellars, and into a series ofconduits provided with flowing water tunnelled in the ground on a levelwith the base of the raised terrace. These conduits emptied themselvesinto the stream several hundred yards below the fish-pond. The totaldepth of the shafts from the top of the towers to their subterraneanconduits was a hundred and two feet. The eighteenth century, withits passion for modernisation, swept away these monuments of sanitaryingenuity. Were it not for tradition and the explicit account of themleft by Sir Ferdinando, we should be unaware that these noble privieshad ever existed. We should even suppose that Sir Ferdinando builthis house after this strange and splendid model for merely aestheticreasons."

  The contemplation of the glories of the past always evoked in HenryWimbush a certain enthusiasm. Under the grey bowler his face workedand glowed as he spoke. The thought of these vanished privies movedhim profoundly. He ceased to speak; the light gradually died out of hisface, and it became once more the replica of the grave, polite hat whichshaded it. There was a long silence; the same gently melancholy thoughtsseemed to possess the mind of each of them. Permanence, transience--SirFerdinando and his privies were gone, Crome still stood. How brightlythe sun shone and how inevitable was death! The ways of God werestrange; the ways of man were stranger still...

  "It does one's heart good," exclaimed Mr. Scogan at last, "to hear ofthese fantastic English aristocrats. To have a theory about priviesand to build an immense and splendid house in order to put it intopractise--it's magnificent, beautiful! I like to think of them all: theeccentric milords rolling across Europe in ponderous carriages, boundon extraordinary errands. One is going to Venice to buy La Bianchi'slarynx; he won't get it till she's dead, of course, but no matter; he'sprepared to wait; he has a collection, pickled in glass bottles, ofthe throats of famous opera singers. And the instruments of renownedvirtuosi--he goes in for them too; he will try to bribe Paganini to partwith his little Guarnerio, but he has small hope of success. Paganiniwon't sell his fiddle; but perhaps he might sacrifice one of hisguitars. Others are bound on crusades--one to die miserably among thesavage Greeks, another, in his white top hat, to lead Italians againsttheir oppressors. Others have no business at all; they are just givingtheir oddity a continental airing. At home they cultivate themselves atleisure and with greater elaboration. Beckford builds towers, Portlanddigs holes in the ground, Cavendish, the millionaire, lives in a stable,eats nothing but mutton, and amuses himsel
f--oh, solely for his privatedelectation--by anticipating the electrical discoveries of half acentury. Glorious eccentrics! Every age is enlivened by their presence.Some day, my dear Denis," said Mr Scogan, turning a beady bright regardin his direction--"some day you must become their biographer--'The Livesof Queer Men.' What a subject! I should like to undertake it myself."

  Mr. Scogan paused, looked up once more at the towering house, thenmurmured the word "Eccentricity," two or three times.

  "Eccentricity...It's the justification of all aristocracies. Itjustifies leisured classes and inherited wealth and privilege andendowments and all the other injustices of that sort. If you're to doanything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people whoare secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, notcompelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by thename of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members canthink and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must havea class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and inwhich eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That'sthe important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentricitself--often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourageseccentricity in others. The eccentricities of the artist and thenew-fangled thinker don't inspire it with that fear, loathing, anddisgust which the burgesses instinctively feel towards them. It is asort of Red Indian Reservation planted in the midst of a vast horde ofPoor Whites--colonials at that. Within its boundaries wild men disportthemselves--often, it must be admitted, a little grossly, a little tooflamboyantly; and when kindred spirits are born outside the pale itoffers them some sort of refuge from the hatred which the Poor Whites,en bons bourgeois, lavish on anything that is wild or out of theordinary. After the social revolution there will be no Reservations;the Redskins will be drowned in the great sea of Poor Whites. What then?Will they suffer you to go on writing villanelles, my good Denis? Willyou, unhappy Henry, be allowed to live in this house of the splendidprivies, to continue your quiet delving in the mines of futileknowledge? Will Anne..."

  "And you," said Anne, interrupting him, "will you be allowed to go ontalking?"

  "You may rest assured," Mr. Scogan replied, "that I shall not. I shallhave some Honest Work to do."