‘Ravishing little Toreador, that,’ said Gumbril, who had been following the black-breeched travesty with affectionate interest.
Mrs Viveash opened her eyes. Nil was unescapable. ‘With Piers Cotton, you mean? Your tastes are a little common, my Theodore.’
‘Green-eyed monster!’
Mrs Viveash laughed. ‘When I was being “finished” in Paris,’ she said, ‘Mademoiselle always used to urge me to take fencing lessons. C’est un exercise très gracieux. Et puis,’ Mrs Viveash mimicked a passionate earnestness, ‘et puis, ça develope le bassin. Your Toreador, Gumbril, looks as though she must be a champion with the foils. Quel bassin!’
‘Hush,’ said Gumbril. They were abreast of the Toreador and her partner. Piers Cotton turned his long greyhound’s nose in their direction.
‘How are you?’ he asked across the music.
They nodded. ‘And you?’
‘Ah, writing such a book,’ cried Piers Cotton, ‘such a brilliant, brilliant, flashing book.’ The dance was carrying them apart. ‘Like a smile of false teeth,’ he shouted across the widening gulf, and disappeared in the crowd.
‘What’s he to Hecuba?’ Lachrymosely, the hilarious blackamoors chanted their question, mournfully pregnant with its foreknown reply.
Nil, omnipresent nil, world-soul, spiritual informer of all matter. Nil in the shape of a black-breeched moon-basined Toreador. Nil, the man with the greyhound’s nose. Nil, as four blackamoors. Nil in the form of a divine tune. Nil, the faces, the faces one ought to know by sight, reflected in the mirrors of the hall. Nil this Gumbril whose arm is round one’s waist, whose feet step in and out among one’s own. Nothing at all.
That’s why there’ll be no wedding. No wedding at St George’s, Hanover Square, – oh, desperate experiment! – with Nil Viveash, that charming boy, that charming nothing at all, engaged at the moment in hunting elephants, hunting fever and carnivores among the Tikki-tikki pygmies. That’s why there’ll be no wedding on Wednesday week. For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime. For the light strawy hair (not a lock left), the brown face, the red-brown hands and the smooth boy’s body, milk-white, milk-warm, are nothing at all, nothing, now, at all – nil these five years – and the shining blue eyes as much nil as the rest.
‘Always the same people,’ complained Mrs Viveash, looking round the room. ‘The old familiar faces. Never any one new. Where’s the younger generation, Gumbril? We’re old, Theodore. There are millions younger than we are. Where are they?’
‘I’m not responsible for them,’ said Gumbril. ‘I’m not even responsible for myself.’ He imagined a cottagey room, under a roof, with a window near the floor and a sloping ceiling where you were always bumping your head; and in the candle-light Emily’s candid eyes, her grave and happy mouth; in the darkness, the curve, under his fingers, of her firm body.
‘Why don’t they come and sing for their supper?’ Mrs Viveash went on petulantly. ‘It’s their business to amuse us.’
‘They’re probably thinking of amusing themselves,’ Gumbril suggested.
‘Well, then, they should do it where we can see them.’
‘What’s he to Hecuba?’
‘Nothing at all,’ Gumbril clownishly sang. The room, in the cottage, had nothing to do with him. He breathed Mrs Viveash’s memories of Italian jasmines, laid his cheek for a moment against her smooth hair. ‘Nothing at all.’ Happy Clown!
Way down in old Bengal, under the green Paradisiac palms, among the ecstatic mystagogues and the saints who scream beneath the divine caresses, the music came to an end. The four negroes wiped their glistening faces. The couples fell apart. Gumbril and Mrs Viveash sat down and smoked a cigarette.
CHAPTER XVI
THE BLACKAMOORS HAD left the platform at the end of the hall. The curtains looped up at either side had slid down, cutting it off from the rest of the room – ‘making two worlds,’ Gumbril elegantly and allusively put it, ‘where only one grew before – and one of them a better world,’ he added too philosophically, ‘because unreal.’ There was the theatrical silence, the suspense. The curtains parted again.
On a narrow bed – on a pier perhaps – the corpse of a woman. The husband kneels beside it. At the foot stands the doctor, putting away his instruments. In a beribboned pink cradle reposes a monstrous baby.
THE HUSBAND: Margaret! Margaret!
THE DOCTOR: She is dead.
THE HUSBAND: Margaret!
THE DOCTOR: Of septicaemia, I tell you.
THE HUSBAND: I wish that I too were dead!
THE DOCTOR: But you won’t to-morrow.
THE HUSBAND: To-morrow! But I don’t want to live to see tomorrow.
THE DOCTOR: You will to-morrow.
THE HUSBAND: Margaret! Margaret! Wait for me there; I shall not fail to meet you in that hollow vale.
THE DOCTOR: You will not be slow to survive her.
THE HUSBAND: Christ have mercy upon us!
THE DOCTOR: You would do better to think of the child.
THE HUSBAND [rising and standing menacingly over the cradle]: Is that the monster?
THE DOCTOR: No worse than others.
THE HUSBAND: Begotten in a night of immaculate pleasure, monster, may you live loveless, in dirt and impurity!
THE DOCTOR: Conceived in lust and darkness, may your own impurity always seem heavenly, monster, in your own eyes!
THE HUSBAND: Murderer, slowly die all your life long!
THE DOCTOR: The child must be fed.
THE HUSBAND: Fed? With what?
THE DOCTOR: With milk.
THE HUSBAND: Her milk is cold in her breasts.
THE DOCTOR: There are still cows.
THE HUSBAND: Tubercular shorthorns. [Calling.] Let Short-i’-the-horn be brought!
VOICES [off]: Short-i’-the-horn! Short-i’-the-horn! [Fadingly.] Short-i’-the . . .
THE DOCTOR: In nineteen hundred and twenty-one, twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and thirteen women died in childbirth.
THE HUSBAND: But none of them belonged to my harem.
THE DOCTOR: Each of them was somebody’s wife.
THE HUSBAND: Doubtless. But the people we don’t know are only characters in the human comedy. We are the tragedians.
THE DOCTOR: Not in the spectator’s eyes.
THE HUSBAND: Do I think of the spectators? Ah, Margaret! Margaret! . . .
THE DOCTOR: The twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and fourteenth.
THE HUSBAND: The only one!
THE DOCTOR: But here comes the cow.
[SHORT-I’-THE-HORN is led in by a YOKEL.]
THE HUSBAND: Ah, good Short-i’-the-horn! [He pats the animal.] She was tested last week, was she not?
THE YOKEL: Ay, sir.
THE HUSBAND: And found tubercular. No?
THE YOKEL: Even in the udders, may it please you.
THE HUSBAND: Excellent! Milk me the cow, sir, into this dirty wash-pot.
THE YOKEL: I will, sir. [He milks the cow.]
THE HUSBAND: Her milk – her milk is cold already. All the woman in her chilled and curdled within her breasts. Ah, Jesus! what miraculous galactagogue will make it flow again?
THE YOKEL: The wash-pot is full, sir.
THE HUSBAND: Then take the cow away.
THE YOKEL: Come, Short-i’-the-horn; come up, Short-i’-the-horn. [He goes out with the cow.]
THE HUSBAND [pouring the milk into a long-tubed feeding-bottle]: Here’s for you, monster, to drink your own health in. [He gives the bottle to the child.]
[CURTAIN.]
‘A little ponderous, perhaps,’ said Gumbril, as the curtain came down.
‘But I liked the cow,’ Mrs Viveash opened her cigarette-case and found it empty. Gumbril offered her one of his. She shook her head. ‘I don’t want it in the least,’ she said.
‘Yes, the cow was in the best pantomime tradition,’ Gumbril agreed. Ah! but it was a long time since he had been to a Christmas pantomime. Not since Dan Leno’s days. All the little cousins, the uncles and aunts on both sides of the family, dozens and dozens of them – every year they filled thebest part of a row in the dress circle at Drury Lane. And buns were stickily passed from hand to hand, chocolates circulated; the grown-ups drank tea.
And the pantomime went on and on, glory after glory, under the shining arch of the stage. Hours and hours; and the grown-ups always wanted to go away before the harlequinade. And the children felt sick from eating too much chocolate, or wanted with such extreme urgency to go to the w.c. that they had to be led out, trampling and stumbling over everybody else’s feet – and every stumble making the need more agonizingly great – in the middle of the transformation scene. And there was Dan Leno, inimitable Dan Leno, dead now as poor Yorick, no more than a mere skull like anybody else’s skull. And his mother, he remembered, used to laugh at him sometimes till the tears ran down her cheeks. She used to enjoy things thoroughly, with a whole heart.
‘I wish they’d hurry up with the second scene,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘If there’s anything that bores me, it’s entr’actes.’
‘Most of one’s life is an entr’acte,’ said Gumbril, whose present mood of hilarious depression seemed favourable to the enunciation of apophthegms.
‘None of your cracker mottoes, please,’ protested Mrs Viveash. All the same, she reflected, what was she doing now but waiting for the curtain to go up again, waiting, with what unspeakable weariness of spirit, for the curtain that had rung down, ten centuries ago, on those blue eyes, that bright strawy hair and the weathered face?
‘Thank God,’ she said with an expiring earnestness, ‘here’s the second scene!’
The curtain went up. In a bald room stood the Monster, grown now from an infant into a frail and bent young man with bandy legs. At the back of the stage a large window giving on to a street along which people pass.
THE MONSTER [solus]: The young girls of Sparta, they say, used to wrestle naked with naked Spartan boys. The sun caressed their skins till they were brown and transparent like amber or a flask of olive oil. Their breasts were hard, their bellies flat. They were pure with the chastity of beautiful animals. Their thoughts were clear, their minds cool and untroubled. I spit blood into my handkerchief and sometimes
