Antic Hay

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.” “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 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 taximeter, 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 some one, 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 anapæsts 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. There 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.