‘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 black 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 world’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 Crébillon 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 a 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 potpourri 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 wilder 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 solidarity? 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 Buonarroti!’ 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 is 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 head. ‘Hideous,’ he said, ‘hideous.’
‘Moreover,’ Coleman went on, without paying any attention, ‘I have other and, alas! less holy reasons for this change of face. It enables one to make such delightful acquaintances in the street. You hear some one saying, “Beaver,” as you pass, and you immediately have the right to rush up and get into conversation. I owe to this dear symbol,’ and he caressed the golden beard tenderly with the palm of his hand, ‘the most admirably dangerous relations.’
‘Magnificent,’ said Gumbril, drinking his own health. ‘I will stop shaving at once.’
Shearwater looked round the table with raised eyebrows and a wrinkled forehead. ‘This conversation is rather beyond me,’ he said gravely. Under the formidable moustache, under the thick, tufted eyebrows, the mouth was small and ingenuous, the mild grey eyes full of an almost childish inquiry. ‘What does the word “beaver” signify in this context? You don’t refer, I suppose, to the rodent, Castor fiber?’
‘But this is a very great man,’ said Coleman, raising his bowler. ‘Tell me, who he is?’
‘Our friend Shearwater,’ said Gumbril, ‘the physiologist.’
Coleman bowed. ‘Physiological Shearwater,’ he said. ‘Accept my homage. To one who doesn’t know what a beaver is, I resign all my claims to superiority. There’s nothing else but beavers in all the papers. Tell me, do you never read the Daily Express?’
‘No.’
‘Nor the Daily Mail?’
Shearwater shook his head.
‘Nor the Mirror? nor the Sketch? nor the Graphic? nor even (for I was forgetting that physiologists must surely have Liberal opinions) – even the Daily News?’
Shearwater continued to shake his large spherical head.
‘Nor any of the evening papers?’
‘No.’
Coleman once more lifted his hat. ‘O eloquent, just and mighty Death!’ he exclaimed, and replaced it on his head. ‘You never read any papers at all – not even our friend Mercaptan’s delicious little middles in the weeklies? How is your delicious little middle, by the way?’ Coleman turned to Mr Mercaptan and with the point of his huge stick gave him a little prod in the stomach. ‘Ça marche – les tripes? Hein?’ He turned back to Shearwater. ‘Not even those?’ he asked.
‘Never,’ said Shearwater. ‘I have more serious things to think about than newspapers.’
‘And what serious thing, may I ask?’
‘Well, at the present moment,’ said Shearwater, ‘I am chiefly preoccupied with the kidneys.’
‘The kidneys!’ In an ecstasy of delight, Coleman thumped the floor with the ferrule of his stick. ‘The kidneys! Tell me all about kidneys. This is of the first importance. This is
