Antic Hay

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. “Look down, Conquistador! There on the valley’s broad green floor, There lies the lake; the jewelled cities gleam; Chalco and Tlacopan Awaiting the coming Man. Look down on Mexico, Conquistador, Land of your golden dream.” “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_ soi-disant _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 lacrymæ rerum, nos et mutamur in illis._” He laughed his own applause. “_Quot homines, 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!” Lypiatt dropped his knife and fork with a clatter and leaned forward, eager for battle. “Now I have you,” he said, “now I have you on the hip. You’ve given yourselves away. You’ve given away the secret of your spiritual poverty, your weakness and pettiness and impotence....” “Impotence? You malign me, sir,” said Gumbril. Shearwater ponderously stirred. He had been silent all this time, sitting with hunched shoulders, his elbows on the table, his big round head bent forward, absorbed, apparently, in the slow meticulous crumbling of a piece of bread. Sometimes he put a piece of crust in his mouth and under the bushy brown moustache his jaw moved slowly, ruminatively, with a sideways motion, like a cow’s. He nudged Gumbril with his elbow. “Ass,” he said, “be quiet.” Lypiatt went on torrentially. “You’re afraid of ideals, that’s what it is. You daren’t admit to having dreams. Oh, I call them dreams,” he added parenthetically. “I don’t mind being thought a fool and old-fashioned. The word’s shorter and more English. Besides, it rhymes with gleams. Ha, ha!” And Lypiatt laughed his loud Titan’s laugh, the laugh of cynicism which seems to belie, but which, for those who have understanding, reveals the high, positive spirit within. “Ideals—they’re not sufficiently genteel for you civilized young men. You’ve quite outgrown that sort of thing. No dream, no religion, no morality.” “I glory in the name of earwig,” said Gumbril. He was pleased with that little invention. It was felicitous; it was well chosen. “One’s an earwig in sheer self-protection,” he explained. But Mr. Mercaptan refused to accept the name of earwig at any price. “_What_ there is to be ashamed of in being civilized, I _really_ don’t know,” he said, in a voice that was now the bull’s, now the piping robin’s. “No, if I glory in anything, it’s in my little rococo boudoir, and the conversations across the polished mahogany, and the delicate, lascivious, _witty_ little flirtations on ample sofas inhabited by the soul of Crebillon Fils. We needn’t _all_ be Russians, I hope. These revolting Dostoievskys.” Mr. Mercaptan spoke with a profound feeling. “Nor all Utopians. Homo _au naturel_——” Mr. Mercaptan applied his thumb and forefinger to his, alas! too snout-like nose, “_ça pue_. And as for Homo à la H. G. Wells—_ça ne pue pas assez_. What I glory in is the civilized, middle way between stink and asepsis. Give me a little musk, a little intoxicating feminine exhalation, the bouquet of old wine and strawberries, a lavender bag under every pillow and pot-pourri in the corners of the drawing-room. Readable books, amusing conversation, civilized women, graceful art and dry vintage, music, with a quiet life and reasonable comfort—that’s _all_ I ask for.” “Talking about comfort,” Gumbril put in, before Lypiatt had time to fling his answering thunders, “I must tell you about my new invention. Pneumatic trousers,” he explained. “Blow them up. Perfect comfort. You see the idea? You’re a sedentary man, Mercaptan. Let me put you down for a couple of pairs.” Mr. Mercaptan shook his head. “Too Wellsian,” he said. “Too horribly Utopian. They’d be ludicrously out of place in my boudoir. And besides, my sofa is well enough sprung already, thank you.” “But what about Tolstoy?” shouted Lypiatt, letting out his impatience in a violent blast. Mr. Mercaptan waved his hand. “Russian,” he said, “Russian.” “And Michelangelo?” “Alberti,” said Gumbril, very seriously, giving them all a piece of his father’s mind—“Alberti was much the better architect, I assure you.” “And pretentiousness for pretentiousness,” said Mr. Mercaptan, “I prefer old Borromini and the baroque.” “What about Beethoven?” went on Lypiatt. “What about Blake? Where do they come in under your scheme of things?” Mr. Mercaptan shrugged his shoulders. “They stay in the hall,” he said. “I don’t let them into the boudoir.” “You disgust me,” said Lypiatt, with rising indignation, and making wider gestures. “You disgust me—you and your odious little sham eighteenth-century civilization; your piddling little poetry; your art for art’s sake instead of for God’s sake; your nauseating little copulations without love or passion; your hoggish materialism; your bestial indifference to all that’s unhappy and your yelping hatred of all that’s great.” “Charming, charming,” murmured Mr. Mercaptan, who was pouring oil on his salad. “How can you ever hope to achieve anything decent or solid, when you don’t even believe in decency or solidity? I look about me,” and Lypiatt cast his eyes wildly round the crowded room, “and I find myself alone, spiritually alone. I strive on by myself, by myself.” He struck his breast, a giant, a solitary giant. “I have set myself to restore painting and poetry to their rightful position among the great moral forces. They have been amusements, they have been mere games for too long. I am giving my life for that. My life.” His voice trembled a little. “People mock me, hate me, stone me, deride me. But I go on, I go on. For I know I’m right. And in the end they too will recognize that I’ve been right.” It was a loud soliloquy. One could fancy that Lypiatt had been engaged in recognizing himself. “All the same,” said Gumbril with a cheerful stubbornness, “I persist that the word ‘dreams’ is inadmissible.” “_Inadmissible_,” repeated Mr. Mercaptan, imparting to the word an additional significance by giving it its French pronunciation. “In the age of Rostand, well and good. But now....” “Now,” said Gumbril, “the word merely connotes Freud.” “It’s a matter of literary tact,” explained Mr. Mercaptan. “Have you no literary tact?” “No,” said Lypiatt, with emphasis, “thank God, I haven’t. I have no tact of any kind. I do things straightforwardly, frankly, as the spirit moves me. I don’t like compromises.” He struck the table. The gesture startlingly let loose a peal of cracked and diabolic laughter. Gumbril and Lypiatt and Mr. Mercaptan looked quickly up; even Shearwater lifted his great spherical head and turned towards the sound the large disk of his face. A young man with a blond, fan-shaped beard stood by the table, looking down at them through a pair of bright blue eyes and smiling equivocally and disquietingly as though his mind were full of some nameless and fantastic malice. “_Come sta la Sua Terribiltà?_” he asked; and, taking off his preposterous bowler hat, he bowed profoundly to Lypiatt. “How I recognize my Buonarotti!” he added affectionately. Lypiatt laughed, rather uncomfortably, and no longer on the Titanic scale. “How I recognize my Coleman!” he echoed, rather feebly. “On the contrary,” Gumbril corrected, “how almost completely I fail to recognize. This beard”—he pointed to the blond fan—“why, may I ask?” “More Russianism,” said Mr. Mercaptan, and shook his head. “Ah, why indeed?” Coleman lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. “For religious reasons,” he said, and made the sign of the cross. “Christlike in my behaviour, Like every good believer, I imitate the Saviour, And cultivate a beaver. There be beavers which have made themselves beavers for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. But there are some beavers, on the other hand, which were so born from their mother’s womb.” He burst into a fit of outrageous laughter which stopped as suddenly and as voluntarily as it had begun. Lypiatt shook his