Behind them the little assistant was expounding to a new visitor the beauties of the etchings. ‘Very intense,’ he was saying, ‘the feeling in this passage.’ The shadow, indeed, clung with an insistent affection round the stern of the boat. ‘And what a fine, what a –’ he hesitated for an instant, and under his pale, oiled hair his face became suddenly very red – ‘what a swirling composition.’ He looked anxiously at the visitor. The remark had been received without comment. He felt immensely relieved.
They left the galleries together. Lypiatt set the pace, striding along at a great rate and with a magnificent brutality through the elegant and leisured crowd, gesticulating and loudly talking as he went. He carried his hat in his hand; his tie was brilliantly orange. People turned to look at him as he passed and he liked it. He had, indeed, a remarkable face – a face that ought by rights to have belonged to a man of genius.
Lypiatt was aware of it. The man of genius, he liked to say, bears upon his brow a kind of mark of Cain, by which men recognize him at once – ‘and having recognized, generally stone him,’ he would add with that peculiar laugh he always uttered whenever he said anything rather bitter or cynical; a laugh that was meant to show that the bitterness, the cynicism, justifiable as events might have made them, were really only a mask, and that beneath it the artist was still serenely and tragically smiling. Lypiatt thought a great deal about the ideal artist. That titanic abstraction stalked within his own skin. He was it – a little too consciously, perhaps.
‘This time,’ he kept repeating, ‘they’ll be bowled over. This time . . . It’s going to be terrific.’ And with the blood beating behind his eyes, with the exultant consciousness and certainty of power growing and growing in him with every word he spoke, Lypiatt began to describe the pictures there would be at his show; he talked about the preface he was writing to the catalogue, the poems that would be printed in it by way of literary complement to the pictures. He talked, he talked.
Gumbril listened, not very attentively. He was wondering how any one could talk so loud, could boast so extravagantly. It was as though the man had to shout in order to convince himself of his own existence. Poor Lypiatt; after all these years, Gumbril supposed, he must have some doubts about it. Ah, but this time, this time he was going to bowl them all over.
‘You’re pleased, then, with what you’ve done recently,’ he said at the end of one of Lypiatt’s long tirades.
‘Pleased?’ exclaimed Lypiatt; ‘I should think I was.’
Gumbril might have reminded him that he had been as well pleased in the past and that ‘they’ had by no means been bowled over. He preferred, however, to say nothing, Lypiatt went on about the size and universality of the old masters. He himself, it was tacitly understood, was one of them.
They parted near the bottom of the Tottenham Court Road, Lypiatt to go northward to his studio off Maple Street, Gumbril to pay one of his secret visits to those rooms of his in Great Russell Street. He had taken them nearly a year ago now, two little rooms over a grocer’s shop, promising himself goodness only knew what adventures in them. But somehow there had been no adventures. Still, it had pleased him, all the same, to be able to go there from time to time when he was in London and to think, as he sat in solitude before his gas fire, that there was literally not a soul in the universe who knew where he was. He had an almost childish affection for mysteries and secrets.
‘Good-bye,’ said Gumbril, raising his hand to the salute. ‘And I’ll beat up some people for dinner on Friday.’ (For they had agreed to meet again.) He turned away, thinking that he had spoken the last words; but he was mistaken.
‘Oh, by the way,’ said Lypiatt, who had also turned to go, but who now came stepping quickly after his companion. ‘Can you, by any chance, lend me five pounds? Only till after the exhibition, you know. I’m a bit short.’
Poor old Lypiatt! But it was with reluctance that Gumbril parted from his Treasury notes.
CHAPTER IV
LYPIATT HAD A habit, which some of his friends found rather trying – and not only friends, for Lypiatt was ready to let the merest acquaintances, the most absolute strangers, even, into the secrets of his inspiration – a habit of reciting at every possible opportunity his own verses. He would declaim in a voice loud and tremulous, with an emotion that never seemed to vary with the varying subject-matter of his poems, for whole quarters of an hour at a stretch; would go on declaiming till his auditors were overwhelmed with such a confusion of embarrassment and shame, that the blood rushed to their cheeks and they dared not meet one another’s eyes.
He was declaiming now; not merely across the dinner-table to his own friends, but to the whole restaurant. For at the first reverberating lines of his latest, ‘The Conquistador’, there had been a startled turning of heads, a craning of necks from every corner of the room. The people who came to this Soho restaurant because it was, notoriously, so ‘artistic’, looked at one another significantly and nodded; they were getting their money’s worth, this time. And Lypiatt, with a fine air of rapt unconsciousness, went on with his recitation.
‘Look down on Mexico, Conquistador’ – that was the refrain.
The Conquistador, Lypiatt had made it clear, was the Artist, and the Vale of Mexico on which he looked down, the towered cities of Tlacopan and Chalco, of Tenochtitlan and Iztapalapan symbolized – well, it was difficult to say precisely what. The universe, perhaps?
‘Look down,’ cried Lypiatt, with a quivering voice.
‘Look down, Conquistador!
There on the valley’s broad green floor,
There lies the lake; the jewelled cities gleam;
Chalco and Tlacopan
Await the coming Man.
Look down on Mexico, Conquistador,
Land of your golden dream.’
‘Not “dream”,’ said Gumbril, putting down the glass from which he had been profoundly drinking. ‘You can’t possibly say “dream”, you know.’
‘Why do you interrupt me?’ Lypiatt turned on him angrily. His wide mouth twitched at the corners, his whole long face worked with excitement. ‘Why don’t you let me finish?’ He allowed his hand, which had hung awkwardly in the air above him, suspended, as it were, at the top of a gesture, to sink slowly to the table. ‘Imbecile!’ he said, and once more picked up his knife and fork.
‘But really,’ Gumbril insisted, ‘you can’t say “dream”. Can you now, seriously?’ He had drunk the best part of a bottle of Burgundy and he felt good-humoured, obstinate and a little bellicose.
‘And why not?’ Lypiatt asked.
‘Oh, because one simply can’t.’ Gumbril leaned back in his chair, smiled and caressed his drooping blond moustache. ‘Not in this year of grace, nineteen twenty-two.’
‘But why?’ Lypiatt repeated, with exasperation.
‘Because it’s altogether too late in the day,’ declared precious Mr Mercaptan, rushing up to his emphasis with flutes and roaring, like a true Conquistador, to fall back, however, at the end of the sentence rather ignominiously into a breathless confusion. He was a sleek, comfortable young man with smooth brown hair parted in the centre and conducted in a pair of flowing curves across the temples, to be looped in damp curls behind his ears. His face ought to have been rather more exquisite, rather more refinedly dix-huitième than it actually was. It had a rather gross, snouty look, which was sadly out of harmony with Mr Mercaptan’s inimitably graceful style. For Mr Mercaptan had a style and used it, delightfully, in his middle articles for the literary weeklies. His most precious work, however, was that little volume of essays, prose poems, vignettes and paradoxes, in which he had so brilliantly illustrated his favourite theme – the pettiness, the simian limitations, the insignificance and the absurd pretentiousness of Homo soidisant sapiens. Those who met Mr Mercaptan personally often came away with the feeling that perhaps, after all, he was right in judging so severely of humanity.
‘Too late in the day,’ he repeated. ‘Times have changed. Sunt lacrymae rerum, nos et mutamur in illis.’ He laughed his own applause.
‘Quot hominess, tot disputandum est,’ said Gumbril, taking another sip of his Beaune Supérieure. At the moment, he was all for Mercaptan.
‘But why is it too late?’ Lypiatt insisted.
Mr Mercaptan made a delicate gesture. ‘Ça se sent, mon cher ami,’ he said, ‘ça ne s’explique pas.’ Satan, it is said, carries hell in his heart; so it was with Mr Mercaptan – wherever he was, it was Paris. ‘Dreams in nineteen twenty-two . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders.
‘After you’ve accepted the war, swallowed the Russian famine,’ said Gumbril. ‘Dreams!’
‘They belonged to the Rostand epoch,’ said Mr Mercaptan, with a little titter. ‘Le Rève – ah!’
Lypiatt dropped his knife and fork with
