‘Good-bye,’ said Rosie from the door.
‘Good-bye,’ Coleman called back; and immediately afterwards jumped to his feet and made a dash across the room towards her.
Rosie uttered a cry, slipped through the door and, slamming it behind her, ran across the vestibule and began fumbling with the latches of the outer door. It wouldn’t open, it wouldn’t open. She was trembling; fear made her feel sick. There was a rattling at the door behind her. There was a whoop of laughter, and then the Cossack’s hands were on her arms, his face came peering over her shoulder, and the blond beard dabbled with blood prickled against her neck and face.
‘Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t!’ she implored, turning away her head. Then all at once she began violently crying.
‘Tears!’ exclaimed Coleman in rapture, ‘genuine tears!’ He bent eagerly forward to kiss them away, to drink them as they fell. ‘What an intoxication,’ he said, looking up to the ceiling like a chicken that has taken a sip of water; he smacked his lips.
Sobbing uncontrollably, Rosie had never in all her life felt less like a great, fastidious lady.
CHAPTER XXI
‘WELL,’ SAID GUMBRIL, ‘here I am again.’
‘Already?’ Mrs Viveash had been reduced, by the violence of her headache, to coming home after her luncheon with Piers Cotton for a rest. She had fed her hungry pain on Pyramidon and now she was lying down on the Dufy-upholstered sofa at the foot of her full-length portrait by Jacques-Emile Blanche. Her head was not much better, but she was bored. When the maid had announced Gumbril, she had given word that he was to be let in. ‘I’m very ill,’ she went on expiringly. ‘Look at me,’ she pointed to herself, ‘and me again.’ She waved her hand towards the sizzling brilliance of the portrait. ‘Before and after. Like the advertisements, you know. Every picture tells a story.’ She laughed faintly, then made a little grimace and, sucking in the breath between her lips, she put her hand to her forehead.
‘My poor Myra.’ Gumbril pulled up a chair to the sofa and sat there like a doctor at his patient’s bedside. ‘But before and after what?’ he asked, almost professionally.
Mrs Viveash gave an all but imperceptible shrug. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Not influenza, I hope?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Not love, by any chance?’
Mrs Viveash did not venture another laugh; she contented herself with smiling agonizingly.
‘That would have been a just retribution,’ Gumbril went on, ‘after what you’ve done to me.’
‘What have I done to you?’ Mrs Viveash asked, opening wide her pale-blue eyes.
‘Merely wrecked my existence.’
‘But you’re being childish, Theodore. Say what you mean without these grand, silly phrases.’ The dying voice spoke with impatience.
‘Well, what I mean,’ said Gumbril, ‘is merely this. You prevented me from going to see the only person I ever really wanted to see in my life. And yesterday, when I tried to see her, she was gone. Vanished. And here am I left in the vacuum.’
Mrs Viveash shut her eyes. ‘We’re all in the vacuum,’ she said. ‘You’ll still have plenty of company, you know.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Still, I’m sorry,’ she added. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? And why didn’t you just pay no attention to me and go all the same?’
‘I didn’t tell you,’ Gumbril answered, ‘because, then, I didn’t know. And I didn’t go because I didn’t want to quarrel with you.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mrs Viveash, and patted his hand. ‘But what are you going to do about it now? Not quarrelling with me is only a rather negative satisfaction, I’m afraid.’
‘I propose to leave the country to-morrow morning,’ said Gumbril.
‘Ah, the classical remedy . . . But not to shoot big game, I hope?’ She thought of Viveash among the Tikki-tikkis and the tsetses. He was a charming creature; charming, but . . . but what?
‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Gumbril. ‘What do you take me for? Big game!’ He leaned back in his chair and began to laugh, heartily, for the first time since he had returned from Robertsbridge, yesterday evening. He had felt then as though he would never laugh again. ‘Do you see me in a pith helmet, with an elephant gun?’
Mrs Viveash put her hand to her forehead. ‘I see you, Theodore,’ she said, ‘but I try to think you would look quite normal; because of my head.’
‘I go to Paris first,’ said Gumbril. ‘After that, I don’t know. I shall go wherever I think people will buy pneumatic trousers. I’m travelling on business.’
This time, in spite of her head, Mrs Viveash laughed.
‘I thought of giving myself a farewell banquet,’ Gumbril went on. ‘We’ll go round before dinner, if you’re feeling well enough, that is, and collect a few friends. Then, in a profoundest gloom, we’ll eat and drink. And in the morning, unshaved, exhausted and filled with disgust, I shall take the train from Victoria, feeling thankful to get out of England.’
‘We’ll do it,’ said Mrs Viveash faintly and indomitably from the sofa that was almost genuinely a death-bed. ‘And, meanwhile, we’ll have a second brew of tea and you shall talk to me.’
The tannin was brought in. Gumbril settled down to talk and Mrs Viveash to listen – to listen and from time to time to dab her brows with eau-de-Cologne, to take a sniff of hartshorn.
Gumbril talked. He talked of the marriage ceremonies of octopuses, of the rites intricately consummated in the submarine green grottos of the Indian Ocean. Given a total of sixteen arms, how many permutations and combinations of caresses? And in the middle of each bunch of arms a mouth like the beak of a macaw.
On the backside of the moon, his friend Umbilikoff, the mystic, used to assure him, the souls of the dead in the form of little bladders – like so much swelled sago – are piled up and piled up till they squash and squeeze one another with an excruciating and ever-growing pressure. In the exoteric world this squeezing on the moon’s backside is known, erroneously, as hell. And as for the constellation, Scorpio – he was the first of all constellations to have a proper sort of backbone. For by an effort of the will he ingurgitated his external armour, he compressed and rebuilt it within his body and so became the first vertebrate. This, you may well believe, was a notable day in cosmic history.
The rents in these new buildings in Regent Street and Piccadilly run to as much as three or four pounds a square foot. Meanwhile, all the beauty imagined by Nash has departed, and chaos and barbarism once more reign supreme, even in Regent Street. The ghost of Gumbril Senior stalked across the room.
Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who lives on roast-beef, water and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the beef-eater are lived only in time. ‘I can tell you all about heroin,’ said Mrs Viveash.
Lady Capricorn, he understood, was still keeping open bed. How Rubens would have admired those silk cushions, those gigantic cabbage roses, those round pink pearls of hers, vaster than those that Captain Nemo discovered in the immemorial oyster! And the warm dry rustle of flesh over flesh as she walks, moving first one leg, then advancing the other.
Talking of octopuses, the swim-bladders of deep-sea fishes are filled with almost absolutely pure oxygen. C’est la vie – Gumbril shrugged his shoulders.
In Alpine pastures the grasshoppers start their flight, whizzing like clockwork grasshoppers. And these brown invisible ones reveal themselves suddenly as they skim above the flowers – a streak of blue lightning, a trailing curve of scarlet. Then the overwing shuts down over the coloured wing below and they are more invisible fiddlers rubbing their thighs, like Lady Capricorn, at the foot of the towering flowers.
Forgers give patina to their mediaeval ivories by lending them to stout young Jewesses to wear for a few months hanging, like an amulet, between their breasts.
In Italian cemeteries the family vaults are made of glass and iron, like greenhouses.
Sir Henry Griddle has finally married the hog-faced gentlewoman.
Piero della Francesca’s fresco of the Resurrection at San Sepolcro is the most beautiful picture in the world, and the hotel there is far from bad. Scriabine = le Tschaikovsky de nos jours. The dullest landscape painter is Marchand. The best poet . . .
‘You bore me,’ said Mrs Viveash.
‘Must I talk of love, then?’ asked Gumbril.
‘It looks like it,’ Mrs Viveash answered, and closed her eyes.
Gumbril told the anecdote about Jo Peters, Connie Asticot and Jim Baum. The anecdote of Lola Knopf and the Baroness Gnomon. Of Margherita Radicofani, himself, and the Pastor Meyer. Of Lord Cavey and little Toby Nobes. When he had finished these, he saw that Mrs Viveash had gone to sleep.
He was not flattered. But a little sleep would do her headache, he reflected, a world of good. And knowing that if he ceased to speak, she would probably be woken by the sudden blankness of the silence, he went on quietly talking to himself.
‘When I’m abroad this time,’ he soliloquized, ‘I shall really begin writing my autobiography. There’s nothing like a hotel bedroom to work in.’ He scratched his head thoughtfully and even picked his nose, which was one of his bad habits, when he was alone. ‘People who know me,’ he went on, ‘will think
