Cithara benesonans Dei,
Cymbalum jubilationis Christi,
Promptuarium mysteriorum fidei, ora pro nobis.
Your Small-Clothes sound to me very like one of my old litanies, Theodore.’
‘We want scientific descriptions, not litanies,’ said Gumbril Senior. ‘What are Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes?’
‘Scientifically, then,’ said Gumbril Junior, ‘my Patent Small-Clothes may be described as trousers with a pneumatic seat, inflateable by means of a tube fitted with a valve; the whole constructed of stout seamless red rubber, enclosed between two layers of cloth.’
‘I must say,’ said Gumbril Senior in a tone of somewhat grudging approbation, ‘I have heard of worse inventions. You are too stout, Porteous, to be able to appreciate the idea. We Gumbrils are all a bony lot.’
‘When I have taken out a patent for my invention,’ his son went on, very business-like and cool, ‘I shall either sell it to some capitalist, or I shall exploit it commercially myself. In either case, I shall make money, which is more, I may say, than you or any other Gumbril have ever done.’
‘Quite right,’ said Gumbril Senior, ‘quite right’; and he laughed very cheerfully. ‘And nor will you. You can be grateful to your intolerable Aunt Flo for having left you that three hundred a year. You’ll need it. But if you really want a capitalist,’ he went on, ‘I have exactly the man for you. He’s a man who has a mania for buying Tudor houses and making them more Tudor than they are. I’ve pulled half a dozen of the wretched things to pieces and put them together again differently for him.’
‘He doesn’t sound much good to me,’ said his son.
‘Ah, but that’s only his vice. Only his amusement. His business,’ Gumbril Senior hesitated.
‘Well, what is his business?’
‘Well, it seems to be everything. Patent medicine, trade newspapers, bankrupt tobacconist’s stock – he’s talked to me about those and heaps more. He seems to flit like a butterfly in search of honey, or rather money.’
‘And he makes it?’
‘Well, he pays my fees and he buys more Tudor houses, and he gives me luncheons at the Ritz. That’s all I know.’
‘Well, there’s no harm in trying.’
‘I’ll write to him,’ said Gumbril Senior. ‘His name is Boldero. He’ll either laugh at your idea or take it and give you nothing for it. Still,’ he looked at his son over the top of his spectacles, ‘if by any conceivable chance you ever should become rich; if, if, if . . .’ And he emphasized the remoteness of the conditional by raising his eyebrows a little higher, by throwing out his hands in a dubious gesture a little farther at every repetition of the word, ‘if – why, then I’ve got exactly the thing for you. Look at this really delightful little idea I had this afternoon.’ He put his hand in his coat pocket and after some sorting and sifting produced a sheet of squared paper on which was roughly drawn the elevation of a house. ‘For any one with eight or ten thousand to spend, this would be – this would be . . .’ Gumbril Senior smoothed his hair and hesitated, searching for something strong enough to say of his little idea. ‘Well, this would be much too good for most of the greasy devils who do have eight or ten thousand to spend.’
He passed the sheet to Gumbril Junior, who held it out so that both Mr Porteous and himself could look at it. Gumbril Senior got up from his chair and, standing behind them, leant over to elucidate and explain.
‘You see the idea,’ he said, anxious lest they should fail to understand. ‘A central block of three stories, with low wings of only one, ending in pavilions with a second floor. And the flat roofs of the wings are used as gardens – you see? – protected from the north by a wall. In the east wing there is the kitchen and the garage, with the maids’ rooms in the pavilion at the end. The west is a library, and it has an arcaded loggia along the front.
And instead of a solid superstructure corresponding to the maids’ rooms, there’s a pergola with brick piers. You see? And in the main block there’s a Spanish sort of balcony along the whole length at first-floor level; that gives a good horizontal line. And you get the perpendiculars with coigns and raised panels. And the roof’s hidden by a balustrade, and there are balustrades along the open sides of the roof gardens on the wings. All in brick it is. This is the garden front; the entrance front will be admirable too. Do you like it?’
Gumbril Junior nodded. ‘Very much,’ he said.
His father sighed and taking the sketch put it back in his pocket. ‘You must hurry up with your ten thousand,’ he said. ‘And you, Porteous, and you. I’ve been waiting so long to build your splendid house.’
Laughing, Mr Porteous got up from his chair. ‘And long, dear Gumbril,’ he said, ‘may you continue to wait. For my splendid house won’t be built this side of New Jerusalem, and you must go on living a long time yet. A long, long time,’ Mr Porteous repeated; and carefully he buttoned up his double-breasted coat, carefully, as though he were adjusting an instrument of precision, he took out and replaced his monocle. Then, very erect and neat, very soldierly and pillarboxical, he marched towards the door. ‘You’ve kept me very late to-night,’ he said. ‘Unconscionably late.’
The front door closed heavily behind Mr Porteous’s departure. Gumbril Senior came upstairs again into the big room on the first floor smoothing down his hair, which the impetuosity of his ascent had once more disarranged.
‘That’s a good fellow,’ he said of his departed guest, ‘a splendid fellow.’
‘I always admire the monocle,’ said Gumbril Junior irrelevantly. But his father turned the irrelevance into relevance.
‘He couldn’t have come through without it, I believe. It was a symbol, a proud flag. Poverty’s squalid, not fine at all. The monocle made a kind of difference, you understand. I’m always so enormously thankful I had a little money. I couldn’t have stuck it without. It needs strength, more strength than I’ve got.’ He clutched his beard close under the chin and remained for a moment pensively silent. ‘The advantage of Porteous’s line of business,’ he went on at last, reflectively, ‘is that it can be carried on by oneself, without collaboration.
There’s no need to appeal to any one outside oneself, or to have any dealings with other people at all, if one doesn’t want to. That’s so deplorable about architecture. There’s no privacy, so to speak; always this horrible jostling with clients and builders and contractors and people, before one can get anything done. It’s really revolting. I’m not good at people. Most of them I don’t like at all, not at all,’ Mr Gumbril repeated with vehemence. ‘I don’t deal with them very well; it isn’t my business. My business is architecture. But I don’t often get a chance of practising it. Not properly.’
Gumbril Senior smiled rather sadly. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘I can do something. I have my talent, I have my imagination. They can’t take those from me. Come and see what I’ve been doing lately.’
He led the way out of the room and mounted, two steps at a time, towards a higher floor. He opened the door of what should have been, in a well-ordered house, the Best Bedroom, and slipped into the darkness.
‘Don’t rush in,’ he called back to his son, ‘for God’s sake don’t rush in. You’ll smash something. Wait till I’ve turned on the light. It’s so like these asinine electricians to have hidden the switch behind the door like this.’ Gumbril Junior heard him fumbling in the darkness; there was suddenly light. He stepped in.
The only furniture in the room consisted of a couple of long trestle tables. On these, on the mantelpiece and all over the floor, were scattered confusedly, like the elements of a jumbled city, a vast collection of architectural models. There were cathedrals, there were town halls, universities, public libraries, there were three or four elegant little sky-scrapers, there were blocks of offices, huge warehouses, factories, and finally dozens of magnificent country mansions, complete with their terraced gardens, their noble flights of steps, their fountains and ornamental waters and grandly bridged canals, their little rococo pavilions and garden houses.
‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ Gumbril Senior turned enthusiastically towards his son. His long grey hair floated wispily about his head, his spectacles flashed, and behind them his eyes shone with emotion.
‘Beautiful,’ Gumbril Junior agreed.
‘When you’re really rich,’ said his father, ‘I’ll build you one of these,’ And he pointed to a little village of Chatsworths clustering, at one end of a long table, round the dome of a vaster and austerer St Peter’s. ‘Look at this one, for example.’ He picked his way nimbly across the room, seized the little electric reading-lamp that stood between a railway station and a baptistery on the mantelpiece, and was back again in an instant, trailing behind him a long flex that, as it tautened out, twitched one of the crowning pinnacles off the top of a sky-scraper near the fireplace. ‘Look,’ he repeated, ‘look.’ He switched on the current, and moved the lamp back and forth, up and down in front of the miniature palace. ‘See the beauty of the light and shade,’ he said. ‘There, underneath the great, ponderous cornice, isn’t that fine? And look how splendidly the pilasters carry up the vertical lines. And then the solidity of it, the size, the immense, impending bleakness of it!’ He threw up his
