‘And then,’ he had suddenly stooped down, he was peering and pointing once more into the details of his palace, ‘then there’s the doorway – all florid and rich with carving. How magnificently and surprisingly it flowers out of the bare walls! Like the colossal writing of Darius, like the figures graven in the bald face of the precipice over Behistun – unexpected and beautiful and human, human in the surrounding emptiness.’
Gumbril Senior brushed back his hair and turned, smiling, to look at his son over the top of his spectacles.
‘Very fine,’ Gumbril Junior nodded to him. ‘But isn’t the wall a little too blank? You seem to allow very few windows in this vast palazzo.’
‘True,’ his father replied, ‘very true.’ He sighed. ‘I’m afraid this design would hardly do for England. It’s meant for a place where there’s some sun – where you do your best to keep the light out, instead of letting it in, as you have to do here. Windows are the curse of architecture in this country. Your walls have to be like sieves, all holes, it’s heart-breaking. If you wanted me to build you this house, you’d have to live in Barbados or somewhere like that.’
‘There’s nothing I should like better,’ said Gumbril Junior.
‘Another great advantage of sunny countries,’ Gumbril Senior pursued, ‘is that one can really live like an aristocrat, in privacy, by oneself. No need to look out on the dirty world or to let the dirty world look in on you. Here’s this great house, for example, looking out on the world through a few dark portholes and a single cavernous doorway. But look inside.’ He held his lamp above the courtyard that was at the heart of the palace. Gumbril Junior leaned and looked, like his father. ‘All the life looks inwards – into a lovely courtyard, a more than Spanish patio. Look there at the treble tiers of arcades, the vaulted cloisters for your cool peripatetic meditations, the central Triton spouting white water into a marble pool, the mosaic work on the floor and flowering up the walls, brilliant against the white stucco. And there’s the archway that leads out into the gardens. And now you must come and have a look at the garden front.’
He walked round with his lamp to the other side of the table. There was suddenly a crash; the wire had twitched a cathedral from off the table. It lay on the floor in disastrous ruin as though shattered by some appalling cataclysm.
‘Hell and death!’ said Gumbril Senior in an outburst of Elizabethan fury. He put down the lamp and ran to see how irreparable the disaster had been. ‘They’re so horribly expensive, these models,’ he explained, as he bent over the ruins. Tenderly he picked up the pieces and replaced them on the table. ‘It might have been worse,’ he said at last, brushing the dust off his hands. ‘Though I’m afraid that dome will never be quite the same again.’ Picking up the lamp once more, he held it high above his head and stood looking out, with a melancholy satisfaction, over his creations. ‘And to think,’ he said after a pause, ‘that I’ve been spending these last days designing model cottages for workmen at Bletchley!
I’m in luck to have got the job, of course, but really, that a civilized man should have to do jobs like that! It’s too much. In the old days these creatures built their own hovels, and very nice and suitable they were too. The architects busied themselves with architecture – which is the expression of human dignity and greatness, which is man’s protest, not his miserable acquiescence. You can’t do much protesting in a model cottage at seven hundred pounds a time. A little, no doubt, you can protest a little; you can give your cottage decent proportions and avoid sordidness and vulgarity. But that’s all; it’s really a negative process. You can only begin to protest positively and actively when you abandon the petty human scale and build for giants – when you build for the spirit and the imagination of man, not for his little body. Model cottages, indeed!’
Mr Gumbril snorted with indignation. ‘When I think of Alberti!’ And he thought of Alberti – Alberti, the noblest Roman of them all, the true and only Roman. For the Romans themselves had lived their own actual lives, sordidly and extravagantly in the middle of a vulgar empire. Alberti and his followers in the Renaissance lived the ideal Roman life. They put Plutarch into their architecture. They took the detestable real Cato, the Brutus of history, and made of them Roman heroes to walk as guides and models before them. Before Alberti there were no true Romans, and with Piranesi’s death the race began to wither towards extinction.
‘And when I think of Brunelleschi!’ Gumbril Senior went on to remember with passion the architect who had suspended on eight thin flying ribs of marble the lightest of all domes and the loveliest.
‘And when of Michelangelo! The grim, enormous apse . . . And of Wren and of Palladio, when I think of all these –’ Gumbril Senior waved his arms and was silent. He could not put into words what he felt when he thought of them.
Gumbril Junior looked at his watch. ‘Half-past two,’ he said. ‘Time to go to bed.’
CHAPTER III
‘MISTER GUMBRIL!’ SURPRISE was mingled with delight. ‘This is indeed a pleasure!’ Delight was now the prevailing emotion expressed by the voice that advanced, as yet without a visible source, from the dark recesses of the shop.
‘The pleasure, Mr Bojanus, is mine.’ Gumbril closed the shop door behind him.
A very small man, dressed in a frock-coat, popped out from a canyon that opened, a mere black crevice, between two stratified precipices of mid-season suitings, and advancing into the open space before the door bowed with an old-world grace, revealing a nacreous scalp thinly mantled with long, damp creepers of brown hair.
‘And to what, may I ask, do I owe this pleasure, sir?’ Mr Bojanus looked up archly with a sideways cock of his head that tilted the rigid points of his waxed moustache. The fingers of his right hand were thrust into the bosom of his frock-coat and his toes were turned out in the dancing-master’s First Position. ‘A light spring great-coat, is it? Or a new suit? I notice,’ his eye travelled professionally up and down Gumbril’s long, thin form, ‘I notice that the garments you are wearing at present, Mr Gumbril, look – how shall I say? – well, a trifle negleejay, as the French would put it, a trifle negleejay.’
Gumbril looked down at himself. He resented Mr Bojanus’s negleejay, he was pained and wounded by the aspersion. Negleejay? And he had fancied that he really looked rather elegant and distinguished (but, after all, he always looked like that, even in rags) – no, that he looked positively neat, like Mr Porteous, positively soldierly in his black jacket and his musical-comedy trousers and his patent-leather shoes. And the black felt hat – didn’t that add just the foreign, the Southern touch which saved the whole composition from banality? He regarded himself, trying to see his clothes – garments, Mr Bojanus had called them; garments, good Lord! – through the tailor’s expert eyes.
There were sagging folds about the overloaded pockets, there was a stain on his waistcoat, the knees of his trousers were baggy and puckered like the bare knees of Hélène Fourmont in Rubens’s fur-coat portrait at Vienna. Yes, it was all horribly negleejay. He felt depressed; but looking at Mr Bojanus’s studied and professional correctness, he was a little comforted. That frockcoat, for example. It was like something in a very modern picture – such a smooth, unwrinkled cylinder about the chest, such a sense of pure and abstract conic-ness in the sleekly rounded skirts! Nothing could have been less negleejay. He was reassured.
‘I want you,’ he said at last, clearing his throat importantly, ‘to make me a pair of trousers to a novel specification of my own. It’s a new idea.’ And he gave a brief description of Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.
Mr Bojanus listened with attention.
‘I can make them for you,’ he said, when the description was finished. ‘I can make them for you – if you really wish, Mr Gumbril,’ he added.
‘Thank you,’ said Gumbril.
‘And do you intend, may I ask, Mr Gumbril, to wear these . . . these garments?’
Guiltily, Gumbril denied himself. ‘Only to demonstrate the idea, Mr Bojanus. I am exploiting the invention commercially, you see.’
‘Commercially? I see, Mr Gumbril.’
‘Perhaps you would like a share,’ suggested Gumbril.
Mr Bojanus shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t do for my cleeantail, I fear, Mr Gumbril. You could ‘ardly expect the Best People to wear such things.’
‘Couldn’t you?’
Mr Bojanus went on shaking his head. ‘I know them,’ he said, ‘I know the Best People. Well.’ And he added with an irrelevance that was, perhaps, only apparent, ‘Between ourselves, Mr Gumbril, I am a great admirer of Lenin . . .’
‘So am I,’ said Gumbril, ‘theoretically. But then I have so little to lose to Lenin. I can afford to admire him. But you, Mr Bojanus, you, the prosperous bourgeois – oh, purely in the economic sense of the word, Mr Bojanus . . .’
Mr Bojanus accepted the explanation with one of his old-world
