‘Am I the physiologue’s keeper?’ asked Gumbril. ‘He’s with his glands and his hormones, I suppose. Not to mention his wife.’ He smiled to himself.
‘Where the hormones, there moan I,’ said Coleman, skidding off sideways along the slippery word. ‘I hear, by the way, that there’s a lovely prostitute in this play.’
‘You’ve missed her,’ said Mrs Viveash.
‘What a misfortune,’ said Coleman. ‘We’ve missed the delicious trull,’ he said, turning to the young man.
The young man only laughed.
‘Let me introduce, by the way,’ said Coleman. ‘This is Dante,’ he pointed to the dark-haired boy; ‘and I am Virgil. We’re making a round tour – or, rather, a descending spiral tour of hell. But we’re only at the first circle so far. These, Alighieri, are two damned souls, though not, as you might suppose, Paolo and Francesca.’
The boy continued to laugh, happily and uncomprehendingly.
‘Another of these interminable entr’actes,’ complained Mrs Viveash. ‘I was just saying to Theodore here that if there’s one thing I dislike more than another, it’s a long entr’acte.’ Would hers ever come to an end?
‘And if there’s one thing I dislike more than another,’ said the boy, breaking silence for the first time, with an air of the greatest earnestness, ‘it’s . . . it’s one thing more than another.’
‘And you’re perfectly right in doing so,’ said Coleman. ‘Perfectly right.’
‘I know,’ the boy replied modestly.
When the curtain rose again it was on an aged Monster, with a black patch over the left side of his nose, no hair, no teeth, and sitting harmlessly behind the bars of an asylum.
THE MONSTER: Asses, apes and dogs! Milton called them that; he should have known. Somewhere there must be men, however. The variations on Diabelli prove it. Brunelleschi’s dome is more than the magnification of Cléo de Mérode’s breast. Somewhere there are men with power, living reasonably. Like our mythical Greeks and Romans. Living cleanly. The images of the gods are their portraits. They walk under their own protection. [The MONSTER climbs on to a chair and stands in the posture of a statue.] Jupiter, father of gods, a man, I bless myself, I throw bolts at my own disobedience, I answer my own prayers, I pronounce oracles to satisfy the questions I myself propound.
I abolish all tetters, poxes, blood-spitting, rotting of bones. With love I recreate the world from within. Europa puts an end to squalor, Leda does away with tyranny, Danae tempers stupidity. After establishing these reforms in the social sewer, I climb, I climb, up through the manhole, out of the manhole, beyond humanity. For the manhole, even the manhole, is dark; though not so dingy as the doghole it was before I altered it. Up through the manhole, towards the air. Up, up! [And the MONSTER, suiting the action to his words, climbs up the runged back of his chair and stands, by a miraculous feat of acrobacy, on the topmost bar.] I begin to see the stars through other eyes than my own. More than dog already, I become more than man. I begin to have inklings of the shape and sense of things. Upwards, upwards I strain, I peer, I reach aloft. [The balanced MONSTER reaches, strains and peers.] And I seize, I seize! [As he shouts these words, the MONSTER falls heavily, head foremost, to the floor. He lies there quite still. After a little time the door opens and the DOCTOR of the first scene enters with a WARDER.]
THE WARDER: I heard a crash.
THE DOCTOR [who has by this time become immensely old and has a beard like Father Thames]: It looks as though you were right. [He examines the MONSTER.]
THE WARDER: He was for ever climbing on to his chair.
THE DOCTOR: Well, he won’t any more. His neck’s broken.
THE WARDER: You don’t say so?
THE DOCTOR: I do.
THE WARDER: Well, I never!
THE DOCTOR: Have it carried down to the dissecting-room.
THE WARDER: I’ll send for the porters at once.
[Exeunt severally, and CURTAIN.]
‘Well,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘I’m glad that’s over.’
The music struck up again, saxophone and ‘cello, with the thin draught of the violin to cool their ecstasies and the thumping piano to remind them of business. Gumbril and Mrs Viveash slid out into the dancing crowd, revolving as though by force of habit.
‘These substitutes for the genuine copulative article,’ said Coleman to his disciple, ‘are beneath the dignity of hellhounds like you and me.’
Charmed, the young man laughed; he was attentive as though at the feet of Socrates. Coleman had found him in a night club, where he had gone in search of Zoe, found him very drunk in the company of two formidable women fifteen or twenty years his senior, who were looking after him, half maternally out of pure kindness of heart, half professionally; for he seemed to be carrying a good deal of money. He was incapable of looking after himself. Coleman had pounced on him at once, claimed an old friendship which the youth was too tipsy to be able to deny, and carried him off. There was something, he always thought, peculiarly interesting about the spectacle of children tobogganing down into the cesspools.
‘I like this place,’ said the young man.
‘Tastes differ!’ Coleman shrugged his shoulders. ‘The German professors have catalogued thousands of people whose whole pleasure consists of eating dung.’
The young man smiled and nodded, rather vaguely. ‘Is there anything to drink here?’ he asked.
‘Too respectable,’ Coleman answered, shaking his head.
‘I think this is a bloody place,’ said the young man.
‘Ah! but some people like blood. And some like boots. And some like long gloves and corsets. And some like birch-rods. And some like sliding down slopes and can’t look at Michelangelo’s “Night” on the Medici Tombs without dying the little death, because the statue seems to be sliding. And some . . .’
‘But I want something to drink,’ insisted the young man.
Coleman stamped his feet, waved his arms. ‘À boire! à boire!’ he shouted, like the newborn Gargantua. Nobody paid any attention.
The music came to an end. Gumbril and Mrs Viveash reappeared.
‘Dante,’ said Coleman, ‘calls for drink. We must leave the building.’
‘Yes. Anything to get out of this,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘What’s the time?’
Gumbril looked at his watch. ‘Half-past one.’
Mrs Viveash sighed. ‘Can’t possibly go to bed,’ she said, ‘for another hour at least.’
They walked out into the street. The stars were large and brilliant overhead. There was a little wind that almost seemed to come from the country. Gumbril thought so, at any rate; he thought of the country.
‘The question is, where?’ said Coleman. ‘You can come to my bordello, if you like; but it’s a long way off and Zoe hates us all so much, she’ll probably set on us with the meat-chopper. If she’s back again, that is. Though she may be out all night. Zoe mou, sas agapo. Shall we risk it?’
‘To me it’s quite indifferent,’ said Mrs Viveash faintly, as though wholly preoccupied with expiring.
‘Or there’s my place,’ Gumbril said abruptly, as though shaking himself awake out of some dream.
‘But you live still farther, don’t you?’ said Coleman. ‘With venerable parents, and so forth. One foot in the grave and all that. Shall we mingle hornpipes with funerals?’ He began to hum Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ at three times its proper speed, and seizing the young stranger in his arms, two-stepped two or three turns on the pavement, then released his hold and let him go reeling against the area railings.
‘No, I don’t mean the family mansion,’ said Gumbril. ‘I mean my own rooms. They’re quite near. In Great Russell Street.’
‘I never knew you had any rooms, Theodore,’ said Mrs Viveash.
‘Nobody did.’ Why should they know now? Because the wind seemed almost a country wind? ‘There’s drink there,’ he said.
‘Splendid!’ cried the young man. They were all splendid people.
‘There’s some gin,’ said Gumbril.
‘Capital aphrodisiac!’ Coleman commented.
‘Some light white wine.’
‘Diuretic.’
‘And some whisky.’
‘The great emetic,’ said Coleman. ‘Come on.’ And he struck up the March of the Fascisti. ‘Giovinezza, giovinezza, primavera di bellezza . . .’ The noise went fading down the dark, empty streets.
The gin, the white wine, and even, for the sake of the stranger, who wanted to sample everything, the emetic whisky, were produced.
‘I like your rooms,’ said Mrs Viveash, looking round her. ‘And I resent your secrecy about them, Theodore.’
‘Drink, puppy!’ Coleman refilled the boy’s glass.
‘Here’s to secrecy,’ Gumbril proposed. Shut it tightly, keep it dark, cover it up. Be silent, prevaricate, lie outright. He laughed and drank. ‘Do you remember,’ he went on, ‘those instructive advertisements of Eno’s Fruit Salts they used to have when we were young? There was one little anecdote about a doctor who advised the hypochondriacal patient who had come to consult him, to go and see Grimaldi, the clown; and the patient answered, “I am Grimaldi.” Do you remember?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘And why do you?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Or rather, I do know,’ Gumbril corrected himself, and laughed again.
The young man suddenly began to boast. ‘I lost two hundred pounds yesterday playing chemin de fer,’ he said, and looked round for applause.
Coleman patted his curly head. ‘Delicious child!’ he said. ‘You’re positively Hogarthian.’
Angrily, the boy pushed him away. ‘What are you doing?’ he shouted; then turned and addressed himself once more to the others. ‘I couldn’t afford it, you know – not a bloody penny of it. Not my money, either.’ He seemed to find it exquisitely humorous. ‘And that two hundred wasn’t all,’ he added, almost expiring with mirth.
‘Tell Coleman how you borrowed his beard, Theodore.’
Gumbril was looking intently into his glass, as though he hoped to see in its pale
