‘Let me help you.’ Gumbril jumped up as she came into the room. ‘What can I do?’ He hovered rather ineptly round her.
The lady put down her tray on the little table. ‘N-nothing,’ she said.
‘N-nothing?’ he imitated her with a playful mockery. ‘Am I good for n-nothing at all?’ He took one of her hands and kissed it.
‘Nothing that’s of the 1-least importance.’ She sat down and began to pour out the tea.
The Complete Man also sat down. ‘So to adore at first sight,’ he asked, ‘is not of the 1-least importance?’
She shook her head, smiled, raised and lowered her eyelids. One was so well accustomed to this sort of thing; it had no importance. ‘Sugar?’ she asked. The young poet was safely there, sparkling across the tea-table. He offered love and she, with the easy heartlessness of one who is so well accustomed to this sort of thing, offered him sugar.
He nodded. ‘Please. But if it’s of no importance to you,’ he went on, ‘then I’ll go away at once.’
The lady laughed her section of a descending chromatic scale. ‘Oh no, you won’t,’ she said. ‘You can’t.’ And she felt that the grande dame had made a very fine stroke.
‘Quite right,’ the Complete Man replied; ‘I couldn’t.’ He stirred his tea. ‘But who are you,’ he looked up at her suddenly, ‘you devilish female?’ He was genuinely anxious to know; and besides, he was paying her a very pretty compliment. ‘What do you do with your dangerous existence?’
‘I enjoy life,’ she said. ‘I think one ought to enjoy life. Don’t you? I think it’s one’s first duty.’ She became quite grave. ‘One ought to enjoy every moment of it,’ she said. ‘Oh, passionately, adventurously, newly, excitingly, uniquely.’
The Complete Man laughed. ‘A conscientious hedonist. I see.’
She felt uncomfortably that the fastidious lady had not quite lived up to her character. She had spoken more like a young woman who finds life too dull and daily, and would like to get on to the cinema. ‘I am very conscientious,’ she said, making significant play with the magnolia petals and smiling her riddling smile. She must retrieve the Great Catherine’s reputation.
‘I could see that from the first,’ mocked the Complete Man with a triumphant insolence. ‘Conscience doth make cowards of us all.’
The fastidious lady only contemptuously smiled. ‘Have a little chocolate cake,’ she suggested. Her heart was beating. She wondered, she wondered.
There was a long silence. Gumbril finished his chocolate cake, gloomily drank his tea and did not speak. He found, all at once, that he had nothing to say. His jovial confidence seemed, for the moment, to have deserted him. He was only the Mild and Melancholy one foolishly disguised as a Complete Man; a sheep in beaver’s clothing. He entrenched himself behind his formidable silence and waited; waited, at first, sitting in his chair, then, when this total inactivity became unbearable, striding about the room.
She looked at him, for all her air of serene composure, with a certain disquiet. What on earth was he up to now? What could he be thinking about? Frowning like that, he looked like a young Jupiter, bearded and burly (though not, she noticed, quite so burly as he had appeared in his overcoat), making ready to throw a thunderbolt. Perhaps he was thinking of her – suspecting her, seeing through the fastidious lady and feeling angry at her attempted deception. Or perhaps he was bored with her, perhaps he was wanting to go away. Well, let him go; she didn’t mind. Or perhaps he was just made like that – a moody young poet; that seemed, on the whole, the most likely explanation; it was also the most pleasing and romantic. She waited. They both waited.
Gumbril looked at her and was put to shame by the spectacle of her quiet serenity. He must do something, he told himself; he must recover the Complete Man’s lost morale. Desperately he came to a halt in front of the one decent picture hanging on the walls. It was an eighteenth-century engraving of Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration’ – better, he always thought, in black and white than in its bleakly-coloured original.
‘That’s a nice engraving,’ he said. ‘Very nice.’ The mere fact of having uttered at all was a great comfort to him, a real relief.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That belongs to me. I found it in a secondhand shop, not far from here.’
‘Photography,’ he pronounced, with that temporary earnestness which made him seem an enthusiast about everything, ‘is a mixed blessing. It has made it possible to reproduce pictures so easily and cheaply, that all the bad artists who were well occupied in the past, making engravings of good men’s paintings, are now free to do bad original work of their own.’ All this was terribly impersonal, he told himself, terribly off the point. He was losing ground. He must do something drastic to win it back. But what?
She came to his rescue. ‘I bought another at the same time,’ she said. ‘“The Last Communion of St Jerome”, by – who is it? I forget.’
‘Ah, you mean Domenichino’s “St Jerome”?’ The Complete Man was afloat again. ‘Poussin’s favourite picture. Mine too, very nearly. I’d like to see that.’
‘It’s in my room, I’m afraid. But if you don’t mind.’
He bowed. ‘If you don’t.’
She smiled graciously to him and got up. ‘This way,’ she said, and opened the door.
‘It’s a lovely picture,’ Gumbril went on, loquaciously now, behind her, as they walked down the dark corridor. ‘And besides, I have a sentimental attachment to it. There used to be a copy of an engraving of it at home, when I was a child. And I remember wondering and wondering – oh, it went on for years – every time I saw the picture; wondering why on earth that old bishop (for I did know it was a bishop) should be handing the naked old man a five-shilling piece.’
She opened a door; they were in her very pink room. Grave in its solemn and subtly harmonious beauty, the picture hung over the mantelpiece, hung there, among the photographs of the little friends of her own age, like some strange object from another world. From within that chipped gilt frame all the beauty, all the grandeur of religion looked darkly out upon the pink room. The little friends of her own age, all deliciously nubile, sweetly smiled, turned up their eyes, clasped Persian cats or stood jauntily, feet apart, hand in the breeches pocket of the land-girl’s uniform; the pink roses on the wallpaper, the pink and white curtains, the pink bed, the strawberry-coloured carpet, filled all the air with the rosy reflections of nakedness and life.
And utterly remote, absorbed in their grave, solemn ecstasy, the robed and mitred priest held out, the dying saint yearningly received, the body of the Son of God. The ministrants looked gravely on, the little angels looped in the air above a gravely triumphant festoon, the lion slept at the saint’s feet, and through the arch beyond, the eye travelled out over a quiet country of dark trees and hills.
‘There it is,’ she waved towards the mantelpiece.
But Gumbril had taken it all in long ago. ‘You see what I mean by the five-shilling piece.’ And stepping up to the picture, he pointed to the round bright wafer which the priest holds in his hand and whose averted disk is like the essential sun at the centre of the picture’s harmonious universe. ‘Those were the days of five-shilling pieces,’ he went on. ‘You’re probably too young to remember those large, lovely things. They came my way occasionally, and consecrated wafers didn’t. So you can understand how much the picture puzzled me. A bishop giving a naked old man five shillings in a church, with angels fluttering overhead, and a lion sleeping in the foreground. It was obscure, it was horribly obscure.’ He turned away from the picture and confronted his hostess, who was standing a little way behind him smiling enigmatically and invitingly.
‘Obscure,’ he repeated. ‘But so is everything. So is life in general. And you,’ he stepped towards her, ‘you in particular.’
‘Am I?’ she lifted her limpid eyes at him. Oh, how her heart was beating, how hard it was to be the fastidious lady, calmly satisfying her caprice. How difficult it was to be accustomed to this sort of thing. What was going to happen next?
What happened next was that the Complete Man came still closer, put his arms round her, as though he were inviting her to the fox-trot, and began kissing her with a startling violence. His beard tickled her neck; shivering a little, she brought down the magnolia petals across her eyes. The Complete Man lifted her up, walked across the room carrying the fastidious lady in his arms and deposited her on the rosy catafalque of the bed. Lying there with her eyes shut, she did her best to pretend she was dead.
Gumbril had looked at his wrist watch and found that it was six o’clock. Already? He prepared himself to take his departure. Wrapped in a pink kimono, she came out into the hall to wish him farewell.
‘When shall I see you again, Rosie?’ He had learnt that her name was Rosie.
She had recovered her great lady’s equanimity and detachment, and was able to shrug her shoulders and smile. ‘How should I know?’ she asked, implying that she could not
