CHAPTER XI
In Lucy’s neighbourhood life always tended to become exceedingly public. The more the merrier was her principle; or if ‘merrier’ were too strong a word, at least the noisier, the more tumultuously distracting. Within five minutes of her arrival, the corner in which Spandrell and the Rampions had been sitting all evening in the privacy of quiet conversation was invaded and in a twinkling overrun by a loud and alcoholic party from the inner room. Cuthbert Arkwright was the noisiest and the most drunken—on principle and for the love of art as well as for that of alcohol. He had an idea that by bawling and behaving offensively, he was defending art against the Philistines.
Tipsy, he felt himself arrayed on the side of the angels, of Baudelaire, of Edgar Allan Poe, of De Quincey, against the dull unspiritual mob. And if he boasted of his fornications, it was because respectable people had thought Blake a madman, because Bowdler had edited Shakespeare, and the author of Madame Bovary had been prosecuted, because when one asked for the Earl of Rochester’s Sodom at the Bodleian, the librarians wouldn’t give it unless one had a certificate that one was engaged on bona fide literary research. He made his living, and in the process convinced himself that he was serving the arts, by printing limited and expensive editions of the more scabrous specimens of the native and foreign literatures. Blond, beef-red, with green and bulging eyes, his large face shining, he approached vociferating greetings. Willie Weaver jauntily followed, a little man perpetually smiling, spectacles astride his long nose, bubbling with good humour and an inexhaustible verbiage. Behind him, his twin in height and also spectacled, but grey, dim, shrunken and silent, came Peter Slipe.
‘They look like the advertisement of a patent medicine,’ said Spandrell as they approached. Slipe’s the patient before, Weaver’s the same after one bottle, and Cuthbert Arkwright illustrates the appalling results of taking the complete cure.’
Lucy was still laughing at the joke when Cuthbert took her hand. ‘Lucy! ‘ he shouted. ‘My angel! But why in heaven’s name do you always write in pencil? I simply cannot read what you write. It’s a mere chance that I’m here to-night.’
So she’d written to tell him to meet her here, thought Walter. That vulgar, stupid lout.
Willie Weaver was shaking hands with Mary Rampion and Mark. ‘I had no idea I was to meet the great,’ he said. ‘Not to mention the fair.’ He bowed towards Mary, who broke into loud and masculine laughter. Willie Weaver was rather pleased than offended. ‘Positively the Mermaid Tavern!’ he went on.
‘Still busy with the bric-a-brac?’ asked Spandrell, leaning across the table to address Peter Slipe, who had taken the seat next to Walter’s. Peter was an Assyriologist employed at the British Museum.
‘But why in pencil, why in pencil?’ Cuthbert was roaring.
‘I get my fingers so dirty when I use a pen.’
‘I’ll kiss the ink away,’ protested Cuthbert, and bending over the hand he was still holding, he began to kiss the thin fingers.
Lucy laughed. ‘I think I’d rather buy a stylo,’ she said.
Walter looked on in misery. Was it possible? A gross and odious clown like that?’
Ungrateful!’ said Cuthbert. ‘But I simply must talk to Rampion.’
And turning away, he gave Rampion a clap on the shoulder and simultaneously waved his other hand at Mary.
‘What an agape!’ Willie Weaver simmered on, like a tea kettle. The spout was now turned towards Lucy, ‘what a symposium! What a—’ he hesitated for a moment in search of the right, the truly staggering phrase—’what Athenian enlargements! What a more than Platonic orgy!’
‘What is an Athenian enlargement?’ asked Lucy. Willie sat down and began to explain. ‘Enlargements, I mean, by contrast with our bourgeois and Pecksniffian smuggeries…’
‘Why don’t you give me something of yours to print?’ Cuthbert was persuasively enquiring.
Rampion looked at him with distaste. ‘Do you think I’m ambitious of having my books sold in the rubber shops?’
‘They’d be in good company,’ said Spandrell. ‘The Works of Aristotle…’ Cuthbert roared in protest.
‘Compare an eminent Victorian with an eminent Periclean,’ said Willie Weaver. He smiled, he was happy and eloquent.
On Peter Slipe the burgundy had acted as a depressant, not a stimulant. The wine had only enhanced his native dimness and melancholy.
‘What about Beatrice?’ he said to Walter, ‘Beatrice Gilray?’ he hiccoughed and tried to pretend that he had coughed. ‘I suppose you see her often, now that she works on the Literary World.’
Walter saw her three times a week and always found her well.
‘Give her my love, when you see her next,’ said Slipe.
‘The stertorous borborygms of the dyspeptic Carlyle!’ declaimed Willie Weaver, and beamed through his spectacles. The mot, he flattered himself, could hardly have been more exquisitely juste. He gave the little cough which was his invariable comment on the best of his phrases. ‘I would laugh, I would applaud,’ the little cough might be interpreted; ‘but modesty forbids.’
‘Stertorous what?’ asked Lucy. ‘Do remember that I’ve never been educated.’
‘Warbling your native woodnotes wild!’ said Willie. ‘May I help myself to some of that noble brandy? The blushful Hippocrene.’
‘She treated me badly, extremely badly.’ Peter Slipe was plaintive. ‘But I don’t want her to think that I bear her any grudge.’
Willie Weaver smacked his lips over the brandy. ‘Solid joys and liquid pleasures none but Zion’s children know,’ he misquoted and repeated his little cough of selfsatisfaction.
‘The trouble with Cuthbert,’ Spandrell was saying, ‘is that he’s never quite learnt to distinguish art from pornography.’
‘Of course,’ continued Peter Slipe, ‘she had a perfect right to do what she liked with her own house. But to turn me out at such short notice.’
At another time Walter would have been delighted to listen to poor little Slipe’s version of that curious story. But with Lucy on his other hand, he found it difficult to take much interest.
‘But I sometimes wonder if the Victorians didn’t have more fun than we did,’ she was saying. ‘The more prohibitions, the greater the fun. If you want to see people drinking with real enjoyment, you must go to America. Victorian England was dry in every department. For example, there was a nineteenth amendment about love. They must have made it as enthusiastically as the Americans drink whiskey. I don’t know that I really believe in Athenian enlargements—that is, if we’re one of them.’
‘You prefer Pecksniff to Alcibiades,’ Willie Weaver concluded.
Lucy shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’ve had no experience of Pecksniff.’
‘I don’t know,’ Peter Slipe was saying, ‘whether you’ve ever been pecked by a goose.’
‘Been what?’ asked Walter, recalling his attention. ‘Been pecked by a goose.’
‘Never, that I can remember.’
‘It’s a hard, dry sensation.’ ‘Slipe jabbed the air with a tobacco-stained forefinger. ‘Beatrice is like that. She pecks; she enjoys pecking. But she can be very kind at the same time. She insists on being kind in her way, and she pecks if you don’t like it. Pecking’s part of the kindness; so I always found. I never objected. But why should she have turned me out of the house as though I were a criminal? And rooms are so difficult to find now. I had to stay in a boarding house for three weeks. The food…’ He shuddered.
Walter could not help smiling.
‘She must have been in a great hurry to instal Burlap in your place.’
‘But why in such a hurry as all that?’
‘When it’s a case of off with the old love and on with the new…’
‘But what has love to do with it?’ asked Slipe. ‘In Beatrice’s case.’
‘A great deal,’ Willie Weaver broke in. ‘Everything. These superannuated virgins—always the most passionate.’
‘But she’s never had a love affair in her life.’
‘Hence the violence,’ concluded Willie triumphantly. ‘Beatrice has a nigger sitting on the safety valve. And my wife assures me that her underclothes are positively Phrynean. That’s most sinister.’
‘Perhaps she likes being well dressed,’ suggested Lucy.
Willie Weaver shook his head. The hypothesis was too simple.
‘That woman’s unconscious as a black hole.’ Willie hesitated a moment. ‘Full of batrachian grapplings in the dark,’ he concluded and modestly coughed to commemorate his achievement.
Beatrice Gilray was mending a pink silk camisole. She was thirtyfive, but seemed younger, or rather seemed ageless. Her skin was clear and fresh. From shallow and unwrinkled orbits the eyes looked out, shining. In a sharp, determined way her face was not unhandsome, but with something intrinsically rather comic about the shape and tilt of the nose, something slightly absurd about the bright beadiness of the eyes, the pouting mouth and round defiant chin. But one laughed with as well as at her; for the set of her lips was humorous and the expression
