Antic Hay

We all know that you’ve got beautiful arms,” said Bruin angrily. “There’s no need for you to make an exhibition of them in the street, at midnight. Let’s get out of this.” He laid his hand on her shoulder and made as if to draw her away. “We’d better be going. Goodness knows what’s happening behind us.” He indicated with a little movement of the head the loiterers round the coffee-stall. “Some disturbance among the _canaille_.” Mrs. Viveash looked round. The cab-drivers and the other consumers of midnight coffee had gathered in an interested circle, curious and sympathetic, round the figure of a woman who was sitting, like a limp bundle tied up in black cotton and mackintosh, on the stall-keeper’s high stool, leaning wearily against the wall of the booth. A man stood beside her drinking tea out of a thick white cup. Every one was talking at once. “Mayn’t the poor wretches talk?” asked Mrs. Viveash, turning back to Bruin. “I never knew any one who had the lower classes on the brain as much as you have.” “I loathe them,” said Bruin. “I hate every one poor, or ill, or old. Can’t abide them; they make me positively sick.” “_Quelle âme bien-née_,” piped Mr. Mercaptan. “And how well and frankly you express what we all feel and lack the courage to say.” Lypiatt gave vent to indignant laughter. “I remember when I was a little boy,” Bruin went on, “my old grandfather used to tell me stories about his childhood. He told me that when he was about five or six, just before the passing of the Reform Bill of ’thirty-two, there was a song which all right-thinking people used to sing, with a chorus that went like this: ‘Rot the People, blast the People, damn the Lower Classes.’ I wish I knew the rest of the words and the tune. It must have been a good song.” Coleman was enraptured with the song. He shouldered his walking-stick and began marching round and round the nearest lamp-post chanting the words to a stirring march tune. “Rot the People, blast the People....” He marked the rhythm with heavy stamps of his feet. “Ah, if only they’d invent servants with internal combustion engines,” said Bruin, almost pathetically. “However well trained they are, they always betray their humanity occasionally. And that is really intolerable.” “How tedious is a guilty conscience!” Gumbril murmured the quotation. “But Mr. Shearwater,” said Myra, bringing back the conversation to more congenial themes, “hasn’t told us yet what he thinks of arms.” “Nothing at all,” said Shearwater. “I’m occupied with the regulation of the blood at the moment.” “But is it true what he says, Theodore?” She appealed to Gumbril. “I should think so.” Gumbril’s answer was rather dim and remote. He was straining to hear the talk of Bruin’s _canaille_, and Mrs. Viveash’s question seemed a little irrelevant. “I used to do cartin’ jobs,” the man with the teacup was saying. “’Ad a van and a nold pony of me own. And didn’t do so badly neither. The only trouble was me lifting furniture and ’eavy weights about the place. Because I ’ad malaria out in India, in the war....” “Nor even—you compel me to violate the laws of modesty—nor even,” Mrs. Viveash went on, smiling painfully, speaking huskily, expiringly, “of legs?” A spring of blasphemy was touched in Coleman’s brain. “Neither delighteth He in any man’s legs,” he shouted, and with an extravagant show of affection he embraced Zoe, who caught hold of his hand and bit it. “It comes back on you when you get tired like, malaria does.” The man’s face was sallow and there was an air of peculiar listlessness and hopelessness about his misery. “It comes back on you, and then you go down with fever and you’re as weak as a child.” Shearwater shook his head. “Nor even of the heart?” Mrs. Viveash lifted her eyebrows. “Ah, now the inevitable word has been pronounced, the real subject of every conversation has appeared on the scene. Love, Mr. Shearwater!” “But as I says,” recapitulated the man with the teacup, “we didn’t do so badly after all. We ’ad nothing to complain about. ’Ad we, Florrie?” The black bundle made an affirmative movement with its upper extremity. “That’s one of the subjects,” said Shearwater, “like the Great Wall of China and the habits of Trematodes, I don’t allow myself to be interested in.” Mrs. Viveash laughed, breathed out a little “Good God!” of incredulity and astonishment, and asked, “Why not?” “No time,” he explained. “You people of leisure have nothing else to do or think about. I’m busy and so naturally less interested in the subject than you; and I take care, what’s more, to limit such interest as I have.” “I was goin’ up Ludgate ’Ill one day with a vanload of stuff for a chap in Clerkenwell. I was leadin’ Jerry up the ’ill—Jerry’s the name of our ole pony....” “One can’t have everything,” Shearwater was explaining, “not all at the same time, in any case. I’ve arranged my life for work now. I’m quietly married, I simmer away domestically.” “_Quelle horreur!_” said Mr. Mercaptan. All the Louis Quinze Abbé in him was shocked and revolted by the thought. “But love?” questioned Mrs. Viveash. “Love?” “Love!” Lypiatt echoed. He was looking up at the Milky Way. “All of a sudden out jumps a copper at me. ‘’Ow old is that ’orse?’ ’e says. ‘It ain’t fit to drawr a load, it limps in all four feet,’ ’e says. ‘No, it doesn’t,’ I says. ‘None of your answerin’ back,’ ’e says. ‘Take it outer the shafts at once.’” “But I know all about love already. I know precious little still about kidneys.” “But, my good Shearwater, how can you know all about love before you’ve made it with all women?” “Off we goes, me and the cop and the ’orse, up in front of the police court magistrate....” “Or are you one of those imbeciles,” Mrs. Viveash went on, “who speak of women with a large W and pretend we’re all the same? Poor Theodore here might possibly think so in his feebler moments.” Gumbril smiled vaguely from a distance. He was following the man with the teacup into the magistrate’s stuffy court. “And Mercaptan certainly does, because all the women who ever sat on his _dix-huitième_ sofa certainly were exactly like one another. And perhaps Casimir does too; all women look like his absurd ideal. But you, Shearwater, you’re intelligent. Surely you don’t believe anything so stupid?” Shearwater shook his head. “The cop, ’e gave evidence against me. ‘Limping in all four feet,’ ’e says. ‘It wasn’t,’ I says, and the police court vet, ’e bore me out. ‘The ’orse ’as been very well treated,’ ’e says. ‘But ’e’s old, ’e’s very old.’ ‘I know ’e’s old,’ I says. ‘But where am I goin’ to find the price for a young one?’” “_x_^2 – _y_^2,” Shearwater was saying, “= (_x_ + _y_)(_x_ – _y_). And the equation holds good whatever the values of _x_ and _y_.... It’s the same with your love business, Mrs. Viveash. The relation is still fundamentally the same, whatever the value of the unknown personal quantities concerned. Little individual tics and peculiarities—after all, what do they matter?” “What indeed!” said Coleman. “Tics, mere tics. Sheep ticks, horse ticks, bed bugs, tape worms, taint worms, guinea worms, liver flukes....” “‘The ’orse must be destroyed,” says the beak. “’E’s too old for work.’ ‘But I’m not,’ I says. ‘I can’t get a old age pension at thirty-two, can I? ’Ow am I to earn my living if you take away what I earns my living by?’” Mrs. Viveash smiled agonizingly. “Here’s a man who thinks personal peculiarities are trivial and unimportant,” she said. “You’re not even interested in people, then?” “‘I don’t know what you can do,’ ’e says. ‘I’m only ’ere to administer the law.’ ‘Seems a queer sort of law,’ I says. ‘What law is it?’” Shearwater scratched his head. Under his formidable black moustache he smiled at last his ingenuous, childish smile. “No,” he said. “No, I suppose I’m not. It hadn’t occurred to me, until you said it. But I suppose I’m not. No.” He laughed, quite delighted, it seemed, by this discovery about himself. “‘What law is it?’ ’e says. ‘The Croolty to Animals law. That’s what it is,’ ’e says.” The smile of mockery and suffering appeared and faded. “One of these days,” said Mrs. Viveash, “you may find them more absorbing than you do now.” “Meanwhile,” said Shearwater.... “I couldn’t find a job ’ere, and ’aving been workin’ on my own, my own master like, couldn’t get unemployment pay. So when we ’eard of jobs at Portsmouth, we thought we’d try to get one, even if it did mean walkin’ there.” “Meanwhile, I have my kidneys.” “‘’Opeless,’ ’e says to me, ‘quite ’opeless. More than two hundred come for three vacancies.’ So there was nothing for it but to walk back again. Took us four days it did, this time. She was very bad on the way, very bad. Being nearly six months gone. Our first it is. Things will be ’arder still, when it comes.” From the black bundle there issued a sound of quiet sobbing. “Look here,” said Gumbril, making a sudden irruption into the conversation. “This is really too awful.” He was consumed with indignation and pity; he felt like a prophet in Nineveh. “There are two wretched people here,” and Gumbril told them breathlessly, what he had overheard. It was terrible, terrible. “All the way to Portsmouth and back again; on foot; without proper food; and the woman’s with child.” Coleman exploded with delight. “Gravid,” he kept repeating, “gravid, gravid. The laws of gravidy, first formulated by Newton, now recodified by the immortal Einstein. God said, Let Newstein be, and there was light. And God said, Let there be Light; and there was darkness o’er the face of the earth.” He roared with laughter. Between them they raised five pounds. Mrs. Viveash undertook to give them to the black bundle. The cabmen made way for her as she advanced; there was an uncomfortable silence. The black bundle lifted a face that was old and worn, like the face of a statue in the portal of a cathedral; an old face, but one was aware somehow, that it belonged to a woman still young by the reckoning of years. Her hands trembled as she took the notes, and when she opened her mouth to speak her hardly articulate whisper of gratitude, one saw that she had lost several of her teeth. The party disintegrated. All went their ways: Mr. Mercaptan to his rococo boudoir, his sweet barocco bedroom in Sloane Street; Coleman and Zoe towards goodness only knew what scenes of intimate life in Pimlico; Lypiatt to his studio off the Tottenham Court Road, alone, silently brooding and perhaps too consciously bowed with unhappiness. But the unhappiness, poor Titan! was real enough, for had he not seen Mrs. Viveash and the insufferable, the stupid and loutish Opps driving off in one taxi? “Must finish up with a little dancing,” Myra had huskily uttered from that death-bed on which her restless spirit for ever and wearily exerted itself. Obediently, Bruin had given an address and they had driven off. But after the dancing? Oh, was it possible that that odious, bad-blooded young cad was her lover? And that she should like him? It was no wonder that Lypiatt should have walked, bent like Atlas under the weight of a world. And when, in Piccadilly, a belated and still unsuccessful prostitute sidled out of the darkness, as he strode by unseeing in his misery when she squeaked up at him a despairing “Cheer up, duckie,” Lypiatt suddenly threw up his head and laughed titanically, with the terrible bitterness of a noble soul in pain. Even the poor drabs