‘Talking of sitting,’ said Gumbril, ‘I wish I could persuade you to order a pair of my patent pneumatic trousers. They will –’
Coleman waved him away. ‘Not now, not now,’ he said. ‘I shall sit down and listen to the physiologue talking about runions, while I myself actually eat them – sautés. Sautés, mark my words.’
Laying his hat and stick on the floor beside him, he sat down at the end of the table, between Lypiatt and Shearwater.
‘Two believers,’ he said, laying his hand for a moment on Lypiatt’s arm, ‘and three black-hearted unbelievers – confronted. Eh, Buonarroti? You and I are both croyantes et pratiquants, as Mercaptan would say. I believe in one devil, father quasi-almighty, Samael and his wife, the Woman of Whoredom. Ha, ha!’ He laughed his ferocious, artificial laugh.
‘Here’s an end to any civilized conversation,’ Mr Mercaptan complained, hissing on the c, labiating lingeringly on the v of ‘civilized’ and giving the first two i’s their fullest value. The word, in his mouth, seemed to take on a special and a richer significance.
Coleman ignored him. ‘Tell me, you physiologue,’ he went on, ‘tell me about the physiology of the Archetypal Man. This is most important; Buonarroti shares my opinion about this, I know. Has the Archetypal Man a boyau rectum, as Mercaptan would say again, or not? Everything depends on this, as Voltaire realized ages ago. “His feet”, as we know already on inspired authority, “were straight feet; and the soles of his feet were like the sole of a calf’s foot.” But the viscera, you must tell us something about the viscera. Mustn’t he, Buonarroti? And where are my rognons sautés?’ he shouted at the waiter.
‘You revolt me,’ said Lypiatt.
‘Not mortually, I ‘ope?’ Coleman turned with solicitude to his neighbour; then shook his head. ‘Mortually I fear. Kiss me ’Ardy, and I die happy.’ He blew a kiss into the air. ‘But why is the physiologue so slow? Up, pachyderm, up! Answer. You hold the key to everything. The key, I tell you, the key. I remember, when I used to hang about the biological laboratories at school, eviscerating frogs – crucified with pins, they were, belly upwards, like little green Christs – I remember once, when I was sitting there, quietly poring over the entrails, in came the laboratory boy and said to the stinks usher: “Please, sir, may I have the key of the Absolute?”
And, would you believe it, that usher calmly put his hand in his trouser pocket and fished out a small Yale key and gave it him without a word. What a gesture! The key of the Absolute. But it was only the absolute alcohol the urchin wanted – to pickle some loathsome foetus in, I suppose. God rot his soul in peace! And now, Castor Fiber, out with your key. Tell us about the Archetypal Man, tell us about the primordial Adam. Tell us all about the boyau rectum.’
Ponderously, Shearwater moved his clumsy frame; leaning back in his chair he scrutinized Coleman with a large, benevolent curiosity. The eyes under the savage eyebrows were mild and gentle; behind the fearful disguise of the moustache he smiled poutingly, like a baby who sees the approaching bottle. The broad, domed forehead was serene. He ran his hand through his thick brown hair, scratched his head meditatively and then, when he had thoroughly examined, had comprehended and duly classified the strange phenomenon of Coleman, opened his mouth and uttered a little good-natured laugh of amusement.
‘Voltaire’s question,’ he said at last, in his slow, deep voice, ‘seemed at the time he asked it an unanswerable piece of irony. It would have seemed almost equally ironic to his contemporaries, if he had asked whether God had a pair of kidneys. We know a little more about the kidneys nowadays. If he had asked me, I should answer: why not? The kidneys are so beautifully organized; they do their work of regulation with such a miraculous – it’s hard to find another word – such a positively divine precision, such knowledge and wisdom, that there’s no reason why your archetypal man, whoever he is, or any one else, for that matter, should be ashamed of owning a pair.’
Coleman clapped his hands. ‘The key,’ he cried, ‘the key. Out of the trouser pocket of babes and sucklings it comes. The genuine, the unique Yale. How right I was to come here tonight! But, holy Sephiroth, there’s my trollop.’
He picked up his stick, jumped from his chair and threaded his way between the tables. A woman was standing near the door. Coleman came up to her, pointed without speaking to the table, and returned, driving her along in front of him, tapping her gently over the haunches with his stick, as one might drive a docile animal to the slaughter.
‘Allow me to introduce,’ said Coleman. ‘The sharer of my joys and sorrows. La compagne de mes nuits blanches et de mes jours plutôt sales. In a word, Zoe. Qui ne comprend pas le français, qui me déteste avec une passion égale à la mienne, et qui mangera, ma foi, des rognons pour fair honneur au physiologue.’
‘Have some Burgundy?’ Gumbril proffered the bottle.
Zoe nodded and pushed forward her glass. She was dark-haired, had a pale skin and eyes like round blackberries. Her mouth was small and floridly curved. She was dressed, rather depressingly, like a picture by Augustus John, in blue and orange. Her expression was sullen and ferocious, and she looked about her with an air of profound contempt.
‘Shearwater’s no better than a mystic,’ fluted Mr Mercaptan. ‘A mystical scientist; really, one hadn’t reckoned on that.’
‘Like a Liberal Pope,’ said Gumbril. ‘Poor Metternich, you remember? Pio Nono.’ And he burst into a fit of esoteric laughter. ‘Of less than average intelligence,’ he murmured delightedly, and refilled his glass.
‘It’s only the deliberately blind who wouldn’t reckon on the combination,’ Lypiatt put in, indignantly. ‘What are science and art, what are religion and philosophy but so many expressions in human terms of some reality more than human? Newton and Bohme and Michelangelo – what are they doing but expressing, in different ways, different aspects of the same thing?’
‘Alberti, I beg you,’ said Gumbril. ‘I assure you he was the better architect.’
‘Fi donc!’ said Mr Mercaptan. ‘San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane –’ But he got no further. Lypiatt abolished him with a gesture.
‘One reality,’ he cried, ‘there is only one reality.’
‘One reality,’ Coleman reached out a hand across the table and caressed Zoe’s bare white arm, ‘and that is callipygous.’ Zoe jabbed at his hand with her fork.
‘We are all trying to talk about it,’ continued Lypiatt. ‘The physicists have formulated their laws, which are after all no more than stammering provisional theories about a part of it. The physiologists are penetrating into the secrets of life, psychologists into the mind. And we artists are trying to say what is revealed to us about the moral nature, the personality of that reality, which is the universe.’
Mr Mercaptan threw up his hands in affected horror. ‘Oh, barbaridad, babaridad!’ Nothing less than the pure Castilian would relieve his feelings. ‘But all this is meaningless.’
‘Quite right about the chemists and physicists,’ said Shearwater. ‘They’re always trying to pretend that they’re nearer the truth than we are. They take their crude theories as facts and try to make us accept them when we’re dealing with life. Oh, they are sacred, their theories. Laws of Nature they call them; and they talk about their known truths and our romantic biological fancies. What a fuss they make when we talk about life! Bloody fools!’ said Shearwater, mild and crushing. ‘Nobody but a fool could talk of mechanism in face of the kidneys. And there are actually imbeciles who talk about the mechanism of heredity and reproduction.’
‘All the same,’ began Mr Mercaptan very earnestly, anxious to deny his own life, ‘there are eminent authorities. I can only quote what they say, of course. I can’t pretend to know anything about it myself. But –’
‘Reproduction, reproduction,’ Coleman murmured the word to himself ecstatically. ‘Delightful and horrifying to think they all come to that, even the most virginal; that they were all made for that, little she-dogs, in spite of their china-blue eyes. What sort of a mandrake shall we produce, Zoe and I?’ he asked, turning to Shearwater. ‘How I should like to have a child,’ he went on without waiting for an answer. ‘I shouldn’t teach it anything; no language, nothing at all. Just a child of nature. I believe it would really be the devil. And then what fun it would be if it suddenly started to say “Bekkos”, like the children in Herodotus.
And Buonarroti here would paint an allegorical picture of it and write an epic called “The Ignoble Savage”. And Castor Fiber would come and sound its kidneys and investigate its sexual instincts. And Mercaptan would write one of his inimitable middle articles about it. And Gumbril would make it a pair of patent trousers. And Zoe and I would look parentally on and fairly swell with pride. Shouldn’t we, Zoe?’ Zoe preserved her expression of sullen, unchanging contempt and did not deign to answer. ‘Ah, how delightful it would be! I long for posterity. I live in hopes. I stope against Stopes. I –’
Zoe threw a
