Leisurely, he hunted for the pencil, he took out a notebook. The train gave a jerk forward.
‘Now, sir,’ he said.
Gumbril began dictating. ‘Theodore,’ he said slowly.
‘The – o – dore,’ the old gentleman repeated, syllable by syllable.
The train crept on, with slowly gathering momentum, through the station. Happening to look out of the window at this moment, Gumbril saw the name of the place painted across a lamp. It was Robertsbridge. He made a loud, inarticulate noise, flung open the door of the compartment, stepped out on to the footboard and jumped. He landed safely on the platform, staggered forward a few paces with his acquired momentum and came at last to a halt. A hand reached out and closed the swinging door of his compartment and, an instant afterwards, through the window, a face that, at a distance, looked more than ever like the face of the Emperor Francis Joseph, looked back towards the receding platform. The mouth opened and shut; no words were audible.
Standing on the platform, Gumbril made a complicated pantomime, signifying his regret by shrugging his shoulders and placing his hand on his heart; urging in excuse for his abrupt departure the necessity under which he laboured of alighting at this particular station – which he did by pointing at the name on the boards and lamps, then at himself, then at the village across the fields. The old gentleman waved his hand, which still held, Gumbril noticed, the notebook in which he had been writing. Then the train carried him out of sight. There went the only case of old brandy he was ever likely to possess, thought Gumbril sadly, as he turned away. Suddenly, he remembered Emily again; for a long time he had quite forgotten her.
The cottage, when at last he found it, proved to be fully as picturesque as he had imagined. And Emily, of course, had gone, leaving, as might have been expected, no address. He took the evening train back to London. The aridity was now complete, and even the hope of a mirage had vanished. There was no old gentleman to make a diversion. The size of clergymen’s families, even the fate of Europe, seemed unimportant now, were indeed perfectly indifferent to him.
CHAPTER XVIII
TWO HUNDRED AND thirteen Sloane Street. The address, Rosie reflected, as she vaporized synthetic lilies of the valley over all her sinuous person, was decidedly a good one. It argued a reasonable prosperity, attested a certain distinction. The knowledge of his address confirmed her already high opinion of the bearded stranger who had so surprisingly entered her life, as though in fulfilment of all the fortune-tellers’ prophecies that ever were made; had entered, yes, and intimately made himself at home. She had been delighted, when the telegram came that morning, to think that at last she was going to find out something more about this man of mystery. For dark and mysterious he had remained, remote even in the midst of the most intimate contacts. Why, she didn’t even know his name. ‘Call me Toto,’ he had suggested, when she asked him what it was. And Toto she had had to call him, for lack of anything more definite or committal. But to-day he was letting her further into his secret.
Rosie was delighted. Her pink underclothing, she decided, as she looked in the long glass, was really ravishing. She examined herself, turning first one way, then the other, looking over her shoulder to see the effect from behind. She pointed a toe, bent and straightened a knee, applauding the length of her legs (‘Most women,’ Toto had said, ‘are like dachshunds’), their slenderness and plump suavity of form. In their white stockings of Milanese silk they looked delicious; and how marvellously, by the way, those Selfridge people had mended those stockings by their new patent process! Absolutely like new, and only charged four shillings. Well, it was time to dress. Good-bye, then, to the pink underclothing and the long white legs.
She opened the wardrobe door. The moving glass reflected, as it swung through its half-circle, pink bed, rose-wreathed walls, little friends of her own age, and the dying saint at his last communion. Rosie selected the frock she had bought the other day at one of those little shops in Soho, where they sell such smart things so cheaply to a clientage of minor actresses and cocottes. Toto hadn’t seen it yet. She looked extremely distinguished in it. The little hat, with its inch of veil hanging like a mask, unconcealing and inviting, from the brim, suited her to perfection. One last dab of powder, one last squirt of synthetic lilies of the valley, and she was ready. She closed the door behind her. St Jerome was left to communicate in the untenanted pinkness.
Mr Mercaptan sat at his writing-table – an exquisitely amusing affair in papier mâché, inlaid with floral decorations in mother-of-pearl and painted with views of Windsor Castle and Tintern in the romantic manner of Prince Albert’s later days – polishing to its final and gem-like perfection one of his middle articles. It was on a splendid subject – the ‘Jus Primae Noctis, or Droit du Seigneur’ – ‘that delicious droit,’ wrote Mr Mercaptan, ‘on which, one likes to think, the Sovereigns of England insist so firmly in their motto, Dieu et mon Droit – de Seigneur.’ That was charming, Mr Mercaptan thought, as he read it through. And he liked that bit which began elegiacally: ‘But, alas! the Right of the First Night belongs to a Middle Age as mythical, albeit happily different, as those dismal epochs invented by Morris or by Chesterton.
The Lord’s right, as we prettily imagine it, is a figment of the baroque imagination of the seventeenth century. It never existed. Or at least it did exist, but as something deplorably different from what we love to picture it.’ And he went on, eruditely, to refer to that Council of Carthage which, in 398, demanded of the faithful that they should be continent on their wedding-night. It was the Lord’s right – the droit of a heavenly Seigneur. On this text of fact, Mr Mercaptan went on to preach a brilliant sermon on that melancholy sexual perversion known as continence. How much happier we all should be if the real historical droit du Seigneur had in fact been the mythical right of our ‘pretty prurient imaginations’! He looked forward to a golden age when all should be seigneurs possessing rights that should have broadened down into universal liberty.
And so on. Mr Mercaptan read through his creation with a smile of satisfaction on his face. Every here and there he made a careful correction in red ink. Over ‘pretty prurient imaginations’ his pen hung for a full minute in conscientious hesitation. Wasn’t it perhaps a little too strongly alliterative, a shade, perhaps, cheap? Perhaps ‘pretty lascivious’ or ‘delicate prurient’ would be better. He repeated the alternatives several times, rolling the sound of them round his tongue, judicially, like a tea-taster. In the end, he decided that ‘pretty prurient’ was right. ‘Pretty prurient’ – they were the mots justes, decidedly, without a question.
Mr Mercaptan had just come to this decision and his poised pen was moving farther down the page, when he was disturbed by the sound of arguing voices in the corridor, outside his room.
‘What is it, Mrs Goldie?’ he called irritably, for it was not difficult to distinguish his housekeeper’s loud and querulous tones. He had given orders that he was not to be disturbed. In these critical moments of correction one needed such absolute tranquillity.
But Mr Mercaptan was to have no tranquillity this afternoon. The door of his sacred boudoir was thrown rudely open, and there strode in, like a Goth into the elegant marble vomitorium of Petronius Arbiter, a haggard and dishevelled person whom Mr Mercaptan recognized, with a certain sense of discomfort, as Casimir Lypiatt.
‘To what do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected . . .?’ Mr Mercaptan began with an essay in offensive courtesy.
But Lypiatt, who had no feeling for the finer shades, coarsely interrupted him. ‘Look here, Mercaptan,’ he said. ‘I want to have a talk with you.’
‘Delighted, I’m sure,’ Mr Mercaptan replied. ‘And what, may I ask, about?’ He knew, of course, perfectly well; and the prospect of the talk disturbed him.
‘About this,’ said Lypiatt; and he held out what looked like a roll of paper.
Mr Mercaptan took the roll and opened it out. It was a copy of the Weekly World. ‘Ah!’ said Mr Mercaptan, in a tone of delighted surprise, ‘The World. You have read my little article?’
‘That was what I wanted to talk to you about,’ said Lypiatt.
Mr Mercaptan modestly laughed. ‘It hardly deserves it,’ he said.
Preserving a calm of expression which was quite unnatural to him, and speaking in a studiedly quiet voice, Lypiatt pronounced with careful deliberation: ‘It is a disgusting, malicious, ignoble attack on me,’ he said.
‘Come, come!’ protested Mr Mercaptan. ‘A critic must be allowed to criticize.’
‘But there are limits,’ said Lypiatt.
‘Oh, I quite agree,’ Mr Mercaptan eagerly conceded. ‘But, after all, Lypiatt, you can’t pretend that I have come anywhere near those limits. If I had called you a murderer, or even an adulterer – then, I admit, you would have some cause to complain. But I haven’t. There’s nothing like a personality in the whole thing.’
Lypiatt laughed derisively, and his face went all to pieces, like a
