Antic Hay (8 page)

‘Precisely, precisely,' said Mr Albemarle in his juicy voice. He was a round, smooth, little man with a head like an egg; he spoke, he moved with a certain pomp, a butlerish gravity, that were evidently meant to be ducal.

‘That's what I've set myself to recapture,' Lypiatt went on: ‘the size, the masterfulness of the masters.' He felt a warmth running through him as he spoke, flushing his cheeks, pulsing hotly behind the eyes, as though he had drunk a draught of some heartening red wine. His own words elated him, and drunkenly gesticulating, he was as though drunken. The greatness of the masters – he felt it in him. He knew his own power, he knew, he knew. He could do all that they had done. Nothing was beyond his strength.

Egg-headed Albemarle confronted him, impeccably the butler, exacerbatingly serene. Albemarle too should be fired. He struck the table once more, he broke out again:

‘It's been my mission,' he shouted, ‘all these years.'

All these years . . . Time had worn the hair from his temples; the high, steep forehead seemed higher than it really was. He was forty now; the turbulent young Lypiatt who had once declared that no man could do anything worth doing after he was thirty, was forty now. But in these fiery moments he could forget the years, he could forget the disappointments, the unsold pictures, the bad reviews. ‘My mission,' he repeated; ‘and by God! I feel, I know I can carry it through.'

Warmly the blood pulsed behind his eyes.

‘Quite,' said Mr Albemarle, nodding the egg. ‘Quite.'

‘And how small the scale is nowadays!' Lypiatt went on, rhapsodically. ‘How trivial the conception, how limited the scope! You see no painter-sculptor-poets, like Michelangelo; no scientist-artists, like Leonardo; no mathematician-courtiers, like Boscovitch; no impresario-musicians, like Handel; no geniuses of all trades, like Wren. I have set myself against this abject specialization of ours. I stand alone, opposing it with my example.' Lypiatt raised his hand. Like the statue of Liberty, standing colossal and alone.

‘Nevertheless,' began Mr Albemarle.

‘Painter, poet, musician,' cried Lypiatt. ‘I am all three. I . . .'

‘. . . there is a danger of – how shall I put it – dissipating one's energies,' Mr Albemarle went on with determination. Discreetly, he looked at his watch. This conversation, he thought, seemed to be prolonging itself unnecessarily.

‘There is no greater danger in letting them stagnate and atrophy,' Lypiatt retorted. ‘Let me give you my experience.' Vehemently, he gave it.

Out in the gallery, among the boats, the views of the Grand Canal, and the Firth of Forth, Gumbril placidly ruminated. Poor old Lypiatt, he was thinking. Dear old Lypiatt, even, in spite of his fantastic egotism. Such a bad painter, such a bombinating poet, such a loud emotional improviser on the piano! And going on like this, year after year, pegging away at the same old things – always badly! And always without a penny, always living in the most hideous squalor! Magnificent and pathetic old Lypiatt!

A door suddenly opened and a loud, unsteady voice, now deep and harsh, now breaking to shrillness, exploded into the gallery.

‘. . . like a Veronese,' it was saying; ‘enormous, vehement, a great swirling composition' (‘swirling composition' – mentally, the young assistant made a note of that), ‘but much more serious, of course, much more spiritually significant, much more –'

‘Lypiatt!' Gumbril had risen from his chair, had turned, had advanced, holding out his hand.

‘Why, it's Gumbril. Good Lord!' and Lypiatt seized the proffered hand with an excruciating cordiality. He seemed to be in exuberantly good spirits. ‘We're settling about my show, Mr Albermarle and I,' he explained. ‘You know Gumbril, Mr Albemarle?'

‘Pleased to meet you,' said Mr Albermarle. ‘Our friend, Mr Lypiatt,' he added richly, ‘has the true artistic temp –'

‘It's going to be magnificent.' Lypiatt could not wait till Mr Albemarle had finished speaking. He gave Gumbril a heroic blow on the shoulder.

‘. . . artistic temperament, as I was saying,' pursued Mr Albemarle. ‘He is altogether too impatient and enthusiastic for us poor people . . .' a ducal smile of condescension accompanied this graceful act of self-abasement . . . ‘who move in the prosaic, practical, workaday world.'

Lypiatt laughed, a loud, discordant peal. He didn't seem to mind being accused of having an artistic temperament; he seemed, indeed, to enjoy it, if anything. ‘Fire and water,' he said aphoristically, ‘brought together, beget steam. Mr Albemarle and I go driving along like a steam engine. Psh, psh!' He worked his arms like a pair of alternate pistons. He laughed; but Mr Albemarle only coldly and courteously smiled. ‘I was just telling Mr Albemarle about the great Crucifixion I've just been doing. It's as big and headlong as a Veronese, but much more serious, more . . .'

Behind them the little assistant was expounding to a new visitor the beauties of the etchings. ‘Very intense,' he was saying, ‘the feeling in this passage.' The shadow, indeed, clung with an insistent affection round the stern of the boat. ‘And what a fine, what a –' he hesitated for an instant, and under his pale, oiled hair his face became suddenly very red – ‘what a swirling composition.' He looked anxiously at the visitor. The remark had been received without comment. He felt immensely relieved.

They left the galleries together. Lypiatt set the pace, striding along at a great rate and with a magnificent brutality through the elegant and leisured crowd, gesticulating and loudly talking as he went. He carried his hat in his hand; his tie was brilliantly orange. People turned to look at him as he passed and he liked it. He had, indeed, a remarkable face – a face that ought by rights to have belonged to a man of genius. Lypiatt was aware of it. The man of genius, he liked to say, bears upon his brow a kind of mark of Cain, by which men recognize him at once – ‘and having recognized, generally stone him,' he would add with that peculiar laugh he always uttered whenever he said anything rather bitter or cynical; a laugh that was meant to show that the bitterness, the cynicism, justifiable as events might have made them, were really only a mask, and that beneath it the artist was still serenely and tragically smiling. Lypiatt thought a great deal about the ideal artist. That titanic abstraction stalked within his own skin. He was it – a little too consciously, perhaps.

‘This time,' he kept repeating, ‘they'll be bowled over. This time . . . It's going to be terrific.' And with the blood beating behind his eyes, with the exultant consciousness and certainty of power growing and growing in him with every word he spoke, Lypiatt began to describe the pictures there would be at his show; he talked about the preface he was writing to the catalogue, the poems that would be printed in it by way of literary complement to the pictures. He talked, he talked.

Gumbril listened, not very attentively. He was wondering how any one could talk so loud, could boast so extravagantly. It was as though the man had to shout in order to convince himself of his own existence. Poor Lypiatt; after all these years, Gumbril supposed, he must have some doubts about it. Ah, but this time, this time he was going to bowl them all over.

‘You're pleased, then, with what you've done recently,' he said at the end of one of Lypiatt's long tirades.

‘Pleased?' exclaimed Lypiatt; ‘I should think I was.'

Gumbril might have reminded him that he had been as well pleased in the past and that ‘they' had by no means been bowled over. He preferred, however, to say nothing, Lypiatt went on about the size and universality of the old masters. He himself, it was tacitly understood, was one of them.

They parted near the bottom of the Tottenham Court Road, Lypiatt to go northward to his studio off Maple Street, Gumbril to pay one of his secret visits to those rooms of his in Great Russell Street. He had taken them nearly a year ago now, two little rooms over a grocer's shop, promising himself goodness only knew what adventures in them. But somehow there had been no adventures. Still, it had pleased him, all the same, to be able to go there from time to time when he was in London and to think, as he sat in solitude before his gas fire, that there was literally not a soul in the universe who knew where he was. He had an almost childish affection for mysteries and secrets.

‘Good-bye,' said Gumbril, raising his hand to the salute. ‘And I'll beat up some people for dinner on Friday.' (For they had agreed to meet again.) He turned away, thinking that he had spoken the last words; but he was mistaken.

‘Oh, by the way,' said Lypiatt, who had also turned to go, but who now came stepping quickly after his companion. ‘Can you, by any chance, lend me five pounds? Only till after the exhibition, you know. I'm a bit short.'

Poor old Lypiatt! But it was with reluctance that Gumbril parted from his Treasury notes.

LYPIATT HAD A
habit, which some of his friends found rather trying – and not only friends, for Lypiatt was ready to let the merest acquaintances, the most absolute strangers, even, into the secrets of his inspiration – a habit of reciting at every possible opportunity his own verses. He would declaim in a voice loud and tremulous, with an emotion that never seemed to vary with the varying subject-matter of his poems, for whole quarters of an hour at a stretch; would go on declaiming till his auditors were overwhelmed with such a confusion of embarrassment and shame, that the blood rushed to their cheeks and they dared not meet one another's eyes.

He was declaiming now; not merely across the dinner-table to his own friends, but to the whole restaurant. For at the first reverberating lines of his latest, ‘The Conquistador', there had been a startled turning of heads, a craning of necks from every corner of the room. The people who came to this Soho restaurant because it was, notoriously, so ‘artistic', looked at one another significantly and nodded; they were getting their money's worth, this time. And Lypiatt, with a fine air of rapt unconsciousness, went on with his recitation.

‘Look down on Mexico, Conquistador' – that was the refrain.

The Conquistador, Lypiatt had made it clear, was the Artist, and the Vale of Mexico on which he looked down, the towered cities of Tlacopan and Chalco, of Tenochtitlan and Iztapalapan symbolized – well, it was difficult to say precisely what. The universe, perhaps?

‘Look down,' cried Lypiatt, with a quivering voice.

‘Not “dream”,' said Gumbril, putting down the glass from which he had been profoundly drinking. ‘You can't possibly say “dream”, you know.'

‘Why do you interrupt me?' Lypiatt turned on him angrily. His wide mouth twitched at the corners, his whole long face worked with excitement. ‘Why don't you let me finish?' He allowed his hand, which had hung awkwardly in the air above him, suspended, as it were, at the top of a gesture, to sink slowly to the table. ‘Imbecile!' he said, and once more picked up his knife and fork.

‘But really,' Gumbril insisted, ‘you can't say “dream”. Can you now, seriously?' He had drunk the best part of a bottle of Burgundy and he felt good-humoured, obstinate and a little bellicose.

‘And why not?' Lypiatt asked.

‘Oh, because one simply can't.' Gumbril leaned back in his chair, smiled and caressed his drooping blond moustache. ‘Not in this year of grace, nineteen twenty-two.'

‘But why?' Lypiatt repeated, with exasperation.

‘Because it's altogether
too
late in the day,' declared precious Mr Mercaptan, rushing up to his emphasis with flutes and roaring, like a true Conquistador, to fall back, however, at the end of the sentence rather ignominiously into a breathless confusion. He was a sleek, comfortable young man with smooth brown hair parted in the centre and conducted in a pair of flowing curves across the temples, to be looped in damp curls behind his ears. His face ought to have been rather more exquisite, rather more refinedly
dix-huitième
than it actually was. It had a rather gross, snouty look, which was sadly out of harmony with Mr Mercaptan's inimitably graceful style. For Mr Mercaptan had a style and used it, delightfully, in his middle articles for the literary weeklies. His most precious work, however, was that little volume of essays, prose poems, vignettes and paradoxes, in which he had so brilliantly illustrated his favourite theme – the pettiness, the simian limitations, the insignificance and the absurd pretentiousness of
Homo
soidisant
sapiens.
Those who met Mr Mercaptan personally often came away with the feeling that perhaps, after all, he was right in judging so severely of humanity.

‘Too late in the day,' he repeated. ‘Times have changed.
Sunt lacrymae rerum, nos et mutamur in illis.'
He laughed his own applause.

‘Quot hominess, tot disputandum est,'
said Gumbril, taking another sip of his Beaune Supérieure. At the moment, he was all for Mercaptan.

‘But
why
is it too late?' Lypiatt insisted.

Mr Mercaptan made a delicate gesture. ‘
Ça se sent, mon cher ami,'
he said, ‘
ça ne s'explique pas
.' Satan, it is said, carries hell in his heart; so it was with Mr Mercaptan – wherever he was, it was Paris. ‘Dreams in nineteen twenty-two . . .' He shrugged his shoulders.

‘After you've accepted the war, swallowed the Russian famine,' said Gumbril. ‘Dreams!'

‘They belonged to the
Rostand
epoch,' said Mr Mercaptan, with a little titter. ‘
Le Rève
– ah!'