His father had gone out to dine, and Gumbril had eaten his rump steak and drunk his bottle of stout alone. He was sitting now in front of the open french windows which led from his father’s workroom on to the balcony, with a block on his knee and a fountain-pen in his hand, composing advertisements for the Patent Small-Clothes. Outside, in the plane-trees of the square, the birds had gone through their nightly performance. But Gumbril had paid no attention to them. He sat there, smoking, sometimes writing a word or two – sunk in the quagmire of his own drowsy and comfortable body. The flawless weather of the day had darkened into a blue May evening. It was agreeable merely to be alive.
He sketched out two or three advertisements in the grand idealistic transatlantic style. He imagined one in particular with a picture of Nelson at the head of the page and ‘England expects . . .’ printed large beneath it. ‘England . . . Duty . . . these are solemn words.’ That was how it would begin. ‘These are solemn words, and we use them solemnly as men who realize what Duty is, and who do all that in them lies to perform it as Englishmen should. The Manufacturer’s is a sacred trust. The guide and ruler of the modern world, he has, like the Monarch of other days, responsibilities towards his people; he has a Duty to fulfil. He rules, but he must also serve. We realize our responsibilities, we take them seriously. Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes have been brought into the world that they may serve. Our Duty towards you is a Duty of Service. Our proud boast is that we perform it. But besides his Duty towards Others, every man has a duty towards Himself. What is that Duty? It is to keep himself in the highest possible state of physical and spiritual fitness. Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes protect the lumbar ganglia . . .’ After that it would be plain medical and mystical sailing.
As soon as he got to the ganglia, Gumbril stopped writing. He put down the block, sheathed his pen, and abandoned himself to the pleasures of pure idleness. He sat, he smoked his cigar. In the basement, two floors down, the cook and the house parlourmaid were reading – one the Daily Mirror, the other the Daily Sketch. For them, Her Majesty the Queen spoke kindly words to crippled female orphans; the jockeys tumbled at the jumps; Cupid was busy in Society, and the murderers who had disembowelled their mistresses were at large. Above him was the city of models, was a bedroom, a servant’s bedroom, an attic of tanks and ancient dirt, the roof and, after that, two or three hundred light-years away, a star of the fourth magnitude. On the other side of the party-wall on his right, a teeming family of Jews led their dark, compact, Jewish lives with a prodigious intensity.
At this moment they were all passionately quarrelling. Beyond the wall on the left lived the young journalist and his wife. To-night it was he who had cooked the supper. The young wife lay on the sofa, feeling horribly sick; she was going to have a baby, there could be no doubt about it now. They had meant not to have one; it was horrible. And, outside, the birds were sleeping in the trees, the invading children from the slum tumbled and squealed. Ships meanwhile were walloping across the Atlantic freighted with more cigars. Rosie at this moment was probably mending Shearwater’s socks. Gumbril sat and smoked, and the universe arranged itself in a pattern about him, like iron filings round a magnet.
The door opened, and the house-parlourmaid intruded Shearwater upon his lazy felicity, abruptly, in her unceremonious old way, and hurried back to the Daily Sketch.
‘Shearwater! This is very agreeable,’ said Gumbril. ‘Come and sit down!’ He pointed to a chair.
Clumsily, filling the space that two ordinary men would occupy, Shearwater came zigzagging and lurching across the room, bumped against the work-table and the sofa as he passed, and finally sat down in the indicated chair.
It suddenly occurred to Gumbril that this was Rosie’s husband: he had not thought of that before. Could it be in the marital capacity that he presented himself so unexpectedly now? After this afternoon . . . He had come home; Rosie had confessed all . . . Ah! but then she didn’t know who he was. He smiled to himself at the thought. What a joke! Perhaps Shearwater had come to complain to him of the unknown Complete Man – to him! It was delightful. Anon – the author of all those ballads in the Oxford Book of English Verse: the famous Italian painter – Ignoto. Gumbril was quite disappointed when his visitor began to talk of other themes than Rosie. Sunk in the quagmire of his own comfortable guts, he felt good-humouredly obscene. The dramatic scabrousness of the situation would have charmed him in his present mood. Good old Shearwater – but what an ox of a man! If he, Gumbril, took the trouble to marry a wife, he would at least take some interest in her.
Shearwater had begun to talk in general terms about life. What would he be getting at, Gumbril wondered? What particulars were ambushed behind these generalizations? There were silences. Shearwater looked, he thought, very gloomy. Under his thick moustache the small, pouting babyish mouth did not smile. The candid eyes had a puzzled, tired expression in them.
‘People are queer,’ he said after one of his silences. ‘Very queer. One has no idea how queer they are.’
Gumbril laughed. ‘But I have a very clear idea of their queerness,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s queer, and the ordinary, respectable, bourgeois people are the queerest of the lot. How do they manage to live like that? It’s astonishing. When I think of all my aunts and uncles . . .’ He shook his head.
‘Perhaps it’s because I’m rather incurious,’ said Shearwater. ‘One ought to be curious, I think. I’ve come to feel lately that I’ve not been curious enough about people.’ The particulars began to peep, alive and individual, out of the vagueness, like rabbits; Gumbril saw them in his fancy, at the fringe of a wood.
‘Quite,’ he said encouragingly. ‘Quite.’
‘I think too much of my work,’ Shearwater went on, frowning. ‘Too much physiology. There’s also psychology. People’s minds as well as their bodies . . . One shouldn’t be limited. Not too much, at any rate. People’s minds . . .’ He was silent for a moment. ‘I can imagine,’ he went on at last, as in the tone of one who puts a very hypothetical case, ‘I can imagine one’s getting so much absorbed in somebody else’s psychology that one could really think of nothing else.’ The rabbits seemed ready to come out into the open.
‘That’s a process,’ said Gumbril, with middle-aged jocularity, speaking out of his private warm morass, ‘that’s commonly called falling in love.’
There was another silence. Shearwater broke it to begin talking about Mrs Viveash. He had lunched with her three or four days running. He wanted Gumbril to tell him what she was really like. ‘She seems to be a very extraordinary woman,’ he said.
‘Like everybody else,’ said Gumbril irritatingly. It amused him to see the rabbits scampering about at last.
‘I’ve never known a woman like that before.’
Gumbril laughed. ‘You’d say that of any woman you happen to be interested in,’ he said. ‘You’ve never known any women at all.’ He knew much more about Rosie, already, than Shearwater did, or probably ever would.
Shearwater meditated. He thought of Mrs Viveash, her cool, pale, critical eyes; her laughter, faint and mocking; her words that pierced into the mind, goading it into thinking unprecedented thoughts.
‘She interests me,’ he repeated. ‘I want you to tell me what she’s really like.’ He emphasized the word really, as though there must, in the nature of things, be a vast difference between the apparent and the real Mrs Viveash.
Most lovers, Gumbril reflected, picture to themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see every day. They are in love with somebody else – their own invention. And sometimes there is a secret reality; and sometimes reality and appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to cause a shock. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘How should I know? You must find out for yourself.’
‘But you know her, you know her well,’ said Shearwater, almost with anxiety in his voice.
‘Not so well as all that.’
Shearwater sighed profoundly, like a whale in the night. He felt restless, incapable of concentrating. His mind was full of a horrible confusion. A violent eruptive bubbling up from below had shaken its calm clarity to pieces. All this absurd business of passion – he had always thought it nonsense, unnecessary. With a little strength of will one could shut it out. Women – only for half an hour out of the twenty-four. But she had laughed, and his quiet, his security had vanished. ‘I can imagine,’ he had said to her yesterday, ‘I can imagine myself giving up everything, work and all, to go running round after you.’ ‘And do you suppose I should enjoy that?’ Mrs Viveash had asked. ‘It would be ridiculous,’ he said, ‘it would be almost shameful.’ And she had thanked him for the compliment. ‘And
