The music stopped. The single harmonious creature broke in two. Flushed, a little breathless, Anne swayed across the room to the pianola, laid her hand on Mr Wimbush’s shoulder.
‘A waltz this time, please, Uncle Henry,’ she said.
‘A waltz,’ he repeated, and turned to the cabinet where the rolls were kept. He trod off the old roll and trod on the new, a slave at the mill, uncomplaining and beautifully well bred. ‘Rum; Tum; Rum-ti-ti; Tum-ti-ti. . . .’ The melody wallowed oozily along, like a ship moving forward over a sleek and oily swell. The four-legged creature, more graceful, more harmonious in its movements than ever, slid across the floor. Oh, why was he born with a different face?
‘What are you reading?’
He looked up, startled. It was Mary. She had broken from the uncomfortable embrace of Mr Scogan, who had now seized on Jenny for his victim.
‘What are you reading?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Denis truthfully. He looked at the title page; the book was called The Stock Breeder’s Vade Mecum.
‘I think you are so sensible to sit and read quietly,’ said Mary, fixing him with her china eyes. ‘I don’t know why one dances. It’s so boring.’
Denis made no reply; she exacerbated him. From the armchair by the fireplace he heard Priscilla’s deep voice.
‘Tell me, Mr Barbecue-Smith – you know all about science, I know—’ A deprecating noise came from Mr Barbecue-Smith’s chair. ‘This Einstein theory. It seems to upset the whole starry universe. It makes me so worried about my horoscopes. You see . . .’
Mary renewed her attack. ‘Which of the contemporary poets do you like best?’ she asked. Denis was filled with fury. Why couldn’t this pest of a girl leave him alone? He wanted to listen to the horrible music, to watch them dancing – oh, with what grace, as though they had been made for one another! – to savour his misery in peace. And she came and put him through this absurd catechism! She was like ‘Mangold’s Questions’: ‘What are the three diseases of wheat?’ – ‘Which of the contemporary poets do you like best?’
‘Blight, Mildew, and Smut,’ he replied, with the laconism of one who is absolutely certain of his own mind.
It was several hours before Denis managed to go to sleep that night. Vague but agonizing miseries possessed his mind, It was not only Anne who made him miserable; he was wretched about himself, the future, life in general, the universe. ‘This adolescence business,’ he repeated to himself every now and then, ‘is horribly boring.’ But the fact that he knew his disease did not help him to cure it.
After kicking all the clothes off the bed, he got up and sought relief in composition. He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words. At the end of an hour, nine more or less complete lines emerged from among the blots and scratchings.
‘I do not know what I desire
When summer nights are dark and still,
When the wind’s many-voicèd quire
Sleeps among the muffled branches.
I long and know not what I will:
And not a sound of life or laughter stanches
Time’s black and silent flow.
I do not know what I desire,
I do not know.’
He read it through aloud; then threw the scribbled sheet into the waste-paper basket and got into bed again. In a very few minutes he was asleep.
CHAPTER XI
MR BARBECUE-SMITH WAS gone. The motor had whirled him away to the station; a faint smell of burning oil commemorated his recent departure. A considerable detachment had come into the courtyard to speed him on his way; and now they were walking back, round the side of the house, towards the terrace and the garden. They walked in silence; nobody had yet ventured to comment on the departed guest.
‘Well?’ said Anne, at last, turning with raised inquiring eyebrows to Denis. ‘Well?’ It was time for someone to begin.
Denis declined the invitation; he passed it on to Mr Scogan. ‘Well?’ he said.
Mr Scogan did not respond; he only repeated the question, ‘Well?’
It was left for Henry Wimbush to make a pronouncement. ‘A very agreeable adjunct to the week-end,’ he said. His tone was obituary.
They had descended, without paying much attention where they were going, the steep yew-walk that went down, under the flank of the terrace, to the pool. The house towered above them, immensely tall, with the whole height of the built-up terrace added to its own seventy feet of brick façade. The perpendicular lines of the three towers soared up, uninterrupted, enhancing the impression of height until it became overwhelming. They paused at the edge of the pool to look back.
‘The man who built this house knew his business,’ said Denis. ‘He was an architect.’
‘Was he?’ said Henry Wimbush reflectively. ‘I doubt it. The builder of this house was Sir Ferdinando Lapith, who flourished during the reign of Elizabeth. He inherited the estate from his father, to whom it had been granted at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries; for Crome was originally a cloister of monks and this swimming-pool their fish-pond. Sir Ferdinando was not content merely to adapt the old monastic buildings to his own purposes; but using them as a stone quarry for his barns and byres and outhouses, he built for himself a grand new house of brick – the house you see now.’
He waved his hand in the direction of the house and was silent. Severe, imposing, almost menacing, Crome loomed down on them.
‘The great thing about Crome,’ said Mr Scogan, seizing the opportunity to speak, ‘is the fact that it’s so unmistakably and aggressively a work of art. It makes no compromise with nature, but affronts it and rebels against it. It has no likeness to Shelley’s tower, in the “Epipsychidion,” which, if I remember rightly—
‘“Seems not now a work of human art,
But as it were titanic, in the heart
Of earth having assumed its form and grown
Out of the mountain, from the living stone,
Lifting itself in caverns light and high.”
No, no; there isn’t any nonsense of that sort about Crome. That the hovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown out of the earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, and suitable. But the house of an intelligent, civilized, and sophisticated man should never seem to have sprouted from the clods. It should rather be an expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish life. Since the days of William Morris that’s a fact which we in England have been unable to comprehend. Civilized and sophisticated men have solemnly played at being peasants. Hence quaintness, arts and crafts, cottage architecture, and all the rest of it. In the suburbs of our cities you may see, reduplicated in endless rows, studiedly quaint imitations and adaptations of the village hovel. Poverty, ignorance, and a limited range of materials produced the hovel, which possesses undoubtedly, in suitable surroundings, its own “as it were titanic” charm. We now employ our wealth, our technical knowledge, our rich variety of materials for the purpose of building millions of imitation hovels in totally unsuitable surroundings. Could imbecility go further?’
Henry Wimbush took up the thread of his interrupted discourse. ‘All that you say, my dear Scogan,’ he began, ‘is certainly very just, very true. But whether Sir Ferdinando shared your views about architecture or if, indeed, he had any views about architecture at all, I very much doubt. In building this house, Sir Ferdinando was, as a matter of fact, preoccupied by only one thought – the proper placing of his privies. Sanitation was the one great interest of his life. In 1573 he even published, on this subject, a little book – now extremely scarce – called, Certaine Priuy Counsels by One of Her Maiestie’s Most Honourable Priuy Counsel, F. L. Knight, in which the whole matter is treated with great learning and elegance. His guiding principle in arranging the sanitation of a house was to secure that the greatest possible distance should separate the privy from the sewage arrangements. Hence it followed inevitably that the privies were to be placed at the top of the house, being connected by vertical shafts with pits or channels in the ground.
It must not be thought that Sir Ferdinando was moved only by material and merely sanitary considerations; for the placing of his privies in an exalted position he had also certain excellent spiritual reasons. For, he argues in the third chapter of his Priuy Counsels, the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying them we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe. To counteract these degrading effects he advised that the privy should be in every house the room nearest to heaven, that it should be well provided with windows commanding an extensive and noble prospect, and that the walls of the chamber should be lined with bookshelves containing all the ripest products’ of human wisdom, such as the Proverbs of Solomon, Boëthius’s Consolations of Philosophy, the apophthegms of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the Enchiridion of Erasmus, and all other works, ancient or modern, which testify to the nobility of the human soul.
In Crome he was able to put his theories into practice. At the top of each of the three projecting towers he placed a privy. From these a shaft went down the whole height of the house, that is
