Antic Hay (10 page)

‘Voltaire's question,' he said at last, in his slow, deep voice, ‘seemed at the time he asked it an unanswerable piece of irony. It would have seemed almost equally ironic to his contemporaries, if he had asked whether God had a pair of kidneys. We know a little more about the kidneys nowadays. If he had asked me, I should answer: why not? The kidneys are so beautifully organized; they do their work of regulation with such a miraculous – it's hard to find another word – such a positively divine precision, such knowledge and wisdom, that there's no reason why your archetypal man, whoever he is, or any one else, for that matter, should be ashamed of owning a pair.'

Coleman clapped his hands. ‘The key,' he cried, ‘the key. Out of the trouser pocket of babes and sucklings it comes. The genuine, the unique Yale. How right I was to come here tonight! But, holy Sephiroth, there's my trollop.'

He picked up his stick, jumped from his chair and threaded his way between the tables. A woman was standing near the door. Coleman came up to her, pointed without speaking to the table, and returned, driving her along in front of him, tapping her gently over the haunches with his stick, as one might drive a docile animal to the slaughter.

‘Allow me to introduce,' said Coleman. ‘The sharer of my joys and sorrows.
La compagne de mes nuits blanches et de mes jours plutôt sales
. In a word, Zoe.
Qui ne comprend pas le français, qui me déteste avec une passion égale à la mienne, et qui mangera, ma foi, des rognons pour fair honneur au physiologue
.'

‘Have some Burgundy?' Gumbril proffered the bottle.

Zoe nodded and pushed forward her glass. She was dark-haired, had a pale skin and eyes like round blackberries. Her mouth was small and floridly curved. She was dressed, rather depressingly, like a picture by Augustus John, in blue and orange. Her expression was sullen and ferocious, and she looked about her with an air of profound contempt.

‘Shearwater's no better than a mystic,' fluted Mr Mercaptan. ‘A mystical scientist; really, one hadn't reckoned on that.'

‘Like a Liberal Pope,' said Gumbril. ‘Poor Metternich, you remember? Pio Nono.' And he burst into a fit of esoteric laughter. ‘Of less than average intelligence,' he murmured delightedly, and refilled his glass.

‘It's only the deliberately blind who wouldn't reckon on the combination,' Lypiatt put in, indignantly. ‘What are science and art, what are religion and philosophy but so many expressions in human terms of some reality more than human? Newton and Bohme and Michelangelo – what are they doing but expressing, in different ways, different aspects of the same thing?'

‘Alberti, I beg you,' said Gumbril. ‘I assure you he was the better architect.'

‘
Fi donc!
' said Mr Mercaptan. ‘San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane –' But he got no further. Lypiatt abolished him with a gesture.

‘One reality,' he cried, ‘there is only one reality.'

‘One reality,' Coleman reached out a hand across the table and caressed Zoe's bare white arm, ‘and that is callipygous.' Zoe jabbed at his hand with her fork.

‘We are all trying to talk about it,' continued Lypiatt. ‘The physicists have formulated their laws, which are after all no more than stammering provisional theories about a part of it. The physiologists are penetrating into the secrets of life, psychologists into the mind. And we artists are trying to say what is revealed to us about the moral nature, the personality of that reality, which is the universe.'

Mr Mercaptan threw up his hands in affected horror. ‘Oh,
barbaridad, babaridad
!' Nothing less than the pure Castilian would relieve his feelings. ‘But all this is meaningless.'

‘Quite right about the chemists and physicists,' said Shearwater. ‘They're always trying to pretend that they're nearer the truth than we are. They take their crude theories as facts and try to make us accept them when we're dealing with life. Oh, they are sacred, their theories. Laws of Nature they call them; and they talk about their known truths and our romantic biological fancies. What a fuss they make when we talk about life! Bloody fools!' said Shearwater, mild and crushing. ‘Nobody but a fool could talk of mechanism in face of the kidneys. And there are actually imbeciles who talk about the mechanism of heredity and reproduction.'

‘All the same,' began Mr Mercaptan very earnestly, anxious to deny his own life, ‘there are eminent authorities. I can only quote what they say, of course. I can't pretend to know anything about it myself. But –'

‘Reproduction, reproduction,' Coleman murmured the word to himself ecstatically. ‘Delightful and horrifying to think they all come to that, even the most virginal; that they were all made for that, little she-dogs, in spite of their china-blue eyes. What sort of a mandrake shall we produce, Zoe and I?' he asked, turning to Shearwater. ‘How I should like to have a child,' he went on without waiting for an answer. ‘I shouldn't teach it anything; no language, nothing at all. Just a child of nature. I believe it would really be the devil. And then what fun it would be if it suddenly started to say “Bekkos”, like the children in Herodotus. And Buonarroti here would paint an allegorical picture of it and write an epic called “The Ignoble Savage”. And Castor Fiber would come and sound its kidneys and investigate its sexual instincts. And Mercaptan would write one of his inimitable middle articles about it. And Gumbril would make it a pair of patent trousers. And Zoe and I would look parentally on and fairly swell with pride. Shouldn't we, Zoe?' Zoe preserved her expression of sullen, unchanging contempt and did not deign to answer. ‘Ah, how delightful it would be! I long for posterity. I live in hopes. I stope against Stopes. I –'

Zoe threw a piece of bread, which caught him on the cheek, a little below the eye. Coleman leaned back and laughed and laughed till the tears rolled down his face.

ONE AFTER ANOTHER,
they engaged themselves in the revolving doors of the restaurant, trotted round the moving cage of glass and ejected themselves into the coolness and darkness of the street. Shearwater lifted up his large face and took two or three deep breaths. ‘Too much carbon dioxide and ammonia in there,' he said.

‘It is unfortunate that when two or three are gathered together in God's name, or even in the more civilized name of Mercaptan of the delicious middle,' Mercaptan dexterously parried the prod which Coleman aimed at him, ‘it is altogether deplorable that they should necessarily empest the air.'

Lypiatt had turned his eyes heavenwards. ‘What stars,' he said, ‘and what prodigious gaps between the stars!'

‘A real light opera summer night.' And Mercaptan began to sing, in fragmentary German, the ‘Barcarolle' from the
Tales of Hoffman.
‘Liebe Nacht, du schone Nacht, oh stille mein tumpty-tum. Te, tum, Te tum . . . Delicious Offenbach. Ah, if only we could have a third Empire! Another comic Napoleon! That would make Paris look like Paris again. Tiddy, tumpty-ti-tum.'

They walked along without any particular destination, but simply for the sake of walking through this soft cool night. Coleman led the way, tapping the pavement at every step with the ferrule of his stick. ‘The blind leading the blind,' he explained. ‘Ah, if only there were a ditch, a crevasse, a great hole full of stinging centipedes and dung. How gleefully I should lead you all into it!'

‘I think you would do well,' said Shearwater gravely, ‘to go and see a doctor.'

Coleman gave vent to a howl of delight.

‘Does it occur to you,' he went on, ‘that at this moment we are walking through the midst of seven million distinct and separate individuals, each with distinct and separate lives and all completely indifferent to our existence? Seven million people, each one of whom thinks himself quite as important as each of us does. Millions of them are now sleeping in an empested atmosphere. Hundreds of thousands of couples are at this moment engaged in mutually caressing one another in a manner too hideous to be thought of, but in no way differing from the manner in which each of us performs, delightfully, passionately and beautifully, his similar work of love. Thousands of women are now in the throes of parturition, and of both sexes thousands are dying of the most diverse and appalling diseases, or simply because they have lived too long. Thousands are drunk, thousands have overeaten, thousands have not had enough to eat. And they are all alive, all unique and separate and sensitive, like you and me. It's a horrible thought. Ah, if I could lead them all into that great hole of centipedes.'

He tapped and tapped on the pavement in front of him, as though searching for the crevasse. At the top of his voice he began to chant: ‘O all ye Beasts and Cattle, curse ye the Lord: curse him and vilify him for ever.'

‘All this religion,' sighed Mercaptan. ‘What with Lypiatt on one side, being a muscular Christian artist, and Coleman on the other, howling the black mass . . . Really!' He elaborated an Italianate gesture, and turned to Zoe. ‘What do you think of it all?' he asked.

Zoe jerked her head in Coleman's direction. ‘I think 'e's a bloody swine,' she said. They were the first words she had spoken since she had joined the party.

‘Hear, hear!' cried Coleman, and he waved his stick.

In the warm yellow light of the coffee-stall at Hyde Park Corner loitered a little group of people. Among the peaked caps and the chauffeurs' dust-coats, among the weather-stained workmen's jackets and the knotted handkerchiefs, emerged an alien elegance. A tall tubed hat and a silk-faced overcoat, a cloak of flame-coloured satin, and in bright, coppery hair a great Spanish comb of carved tortoiseshell.

‘Well, I'm damned,' said Gumbril as they approached. ‘I believe it's Myra Viveash.'

‘So it is,' said Lypiatt, peering in his turn. He began suddenly to walk with an affected swagger, kicking his heels at every step. Looking at himself from outside, his divining eyes pierced through the veil of cynical
je-m'en-fichisme
to the bruised heart beneath. Besides, he didn't want any one to guess.

‘The Viveash, is it?' Coleman quickened his rapping along the pavement. ‘And who is the present incumbent?' He pointed at the top hat.

‘Can it be Bruin Opps?' said Gumbril dubiously.

‘Opps!' Coleman yelled out the name. ‘Opps!'

The top hat turned, revealing a shirt front, a long grey face, a glitter of circular glass over the left eye. ‘Who the devil are you?' The voice was harsh and arrogantly offensive.

‘I am that I am,' said Coleman. ‘But I have with me' – he pointed to Shearwater, to Gumbril, to Zoe – ‘a physiologue, a pedagogue and a priapagogue; for I leave out of account mere artists and journalists whose titles do not end with the magic syllable. And finally,' indicating himself, ‘plain Dog, which, being interpreted kabbalistically backwards, signifies God. All at your service.' He took off his hat and bowed.

The top hat turned back towards the Spanish comb. ‘Who is this horrible drunk?' it inquired.

Mrs Viveash did not answer him, but stepped forward to meet the newcomers. In one hand she held a peeled, hard-boiled egg and a thick slice of bread and butter in the other, and between her sentences she bit at them alternately.

‘Coleman!' she exclaimed, and her voice, as she spoke, seemed always on the point of expiring, as though each word were the last, uttered faintly and breakingly from a death-bed – the last, with all the profound and nameless significance of the ultimate word. ‘It's a very long time since I heard you raving last. And you, Theodore darling, why do I never see you now?'

Gumbril shrugged his shoulders. ‘Because you don't want to, I suppose,' he said.

Myra laughed and took another bite at her bread and butter . . . She laid the back of her hand – for she was still holding the butt end of her hard-boiled egg – on Lypiatt's arm. The Titan, who had been looking at the sky, seemed to be surprised to find her standing there. ‘You?' he said, smiling and wrinkling up his forehead interrogatively.

‘It's to-morrow I'm sitting for you, Casimir, isn't it?'

‘Ah, you remembered.' The veil parted for a moment. Poor Lypiatt! ‘And happy Mercaptan? Always happy?'

Gallantly Mercaptan kissed the back of the hand which held the egg. ‘I might be happier,' he murmured, rolling up at her from the snouty face of a pair of small brown eyes.
‘Puisje espérer?
'

Mrs Viveash laughed expiringly from her inward death-bed and turned on him, without speaking, her pale unwavering glance. Her eyes had a formidable capacity for looking and expressing nothing; they were like the pale blue eyes which peer out of the Siamese cat's black-velvet mask.

‘Bellissima,' murmured Mercaptan, flowering under their cool light.

Mrs Viveash addressed herself to the company at large. ‘We have had the most appalling evening,' she said. ‘Haven't we, Bruin?'

Bruin Opps said nothing, but only scowled. He didn't like these damned intruders. The skin of his contracted brows oozed over the rim of his monocle, on to the shining glass.

‘I thought it would be fun,' Myra went on, ‘to go to that place at Hampton Court, where you have dinner on an island and dance . . .'

‘What is there about islands?' put in Mercaptan, in a deliciously whimsical parenthesis, ‘that makes them so peculiarly voluptuous? Cythera, Monkey Island, Capri.
Je me demande
.'

‘Another charming middle.' Coleman pointed his stick menacingly; Mr Mercaptan stepped quickly out of range.

‘So we took a cab,' Mrs Viveash continued, ‘and set out. And what a cab, my God! A cab with only one gear, and that the lowest. A cab as old as the century, a museum specimen, a collector's piece.' They had been hours and hours on the way. And when they got there, the food they were offered to eat, the wine they were expected to drink! From her eternal death-bed Mrs Viveash cried out in unaffected horror. Everything tasted as though it had been kept soaking for a week in the river before being served up – rather weedy, with that delicious typhoid flavour of Thames water. There was Thames even in the champagne. They had not been able to eat so much as a crust of bread. Hungry and thirsty, they had re-embarked in their antique taxi, and here, at last, they were, at the first outpost of civilization, eating for dear life.