Antic Hay, Aldous Huxley [whitelam books .txt] 📗

Zoe jerked her head in Coleman’s direction. “I think ’e’s a bloody swine,” she said. They were the first words she had spoken since she had joined the party.

“Hear, hear!” cried Coleman, and he waved his stick.

In the warm yellow light of the coffee-stall at Hyde Park Corner loitered a little group of people. Among the peaked caps and the chauffeurs’ dust-coats, among the weather-stained workmen’s jackets and the knotted handkerchiefs, there emerged an alien elegance. A tall tubed hat and a silk-faced overcoat, a cloak of flame-coloured satin, and in bright, coppery hair a great Spanish comb of carved tortoiseshell.

“Well, I’m damned,” said Gumbril as they approached. “I believe it’s Myra Viveash.”

“So it is,” said Lypiatt, peering in his turn. He began suddenly to walk with an affected swagger, kicking his heels at every step. Looking at himself from outside, his divining eyes pierced through the veil of cynical je-m’en-fichisme to the bruised heart beneath. Besides, he didn’t want anyone to guess.

“The Viveash is it?” Coleman quickened his rapping along the pavement. “And who is the present incumbent?” He pointed at the top hat.

“Can it be Bruin Opps?” said Gumbril dubiously.

“Opps!” Coleman yelled out the name. “Opps!”

The top hat turned, revealing a shirt front, a long grey face, a glitter of circular glass over the left eye. “Who the devil are you?” The voice was harsh and arrogantly offensive.

“I am that I am,” said Coleman. “But I have with me”⁠—he pointed to Shearwater, to Gumbril, to Zoe⁠—“a physiologue, a pedagogue and a priapagogue; for I leave out of account mere artists and journalists whose titles do not end with the magic syllable. And finally,” indicating himself, “plain Dog, which being interpreted kabbalistically backwards, signifies God. All at your service.” He took off his hat and bowed.

The top hat turned back towards the Spanish comb. “Who is this horrible drunk?” it inquired.

Mrs. Viveash did not answer him, but stepped forward to meet the newcomers. In one hand she held a peeled, hard-boiled egg and a thick slice of bread and butter in the other, and between her sentences she bit at them alternately.

“Coleman!” she exclaimed, and her voice, as she spoke, seemed always on the point of expiring, as though each word were the last, utterly faintly and breakingly from a deathbed⁠—the last, with all the profound and nameless significance of the ultimate word. “It’s a very long time since I heard you raving last. And you, Theodore darling, why do I never see you now?”

Gumbril shrugged his shoulders. “Because you don’t want to, I suppose,” he said.

Myra laughed and took another bite at her bread and butter.⁠ ⁠… She laid the back of her hand⁠—for she was still holding the butt end of her hard-boiled egg⁠—on Lypiatt’s arm. The Titan, who had been looking at the sky, seemed to be surprised to find her standing there. “You?” he said, smiling and wrinkling up his forehead interrogatively.

“It’s tomorrow I’m sitting for you, Casimir, isn’t it?”

“Ah, you remembered.” The veil parted for a moment. Poor Lypiatt! “And happy Mercaptan? Always happy?”

Gallantly Mercaptan kissed the back of the hand which held the egg. “I might be happier,” he murmured, rolling up at her from the snouty face a pair of small brown eyes. “Puis-je espérer?”

Mrs. Viveash laughed expiringly from her inward deathbed and turned on him, without speaking, her pale unwavering glance. Her eyes had a formidable capacity for looking and expressing nothing; they were like the pale blue eyes which peer out of the Siamese cat’s black velvet mask.

“Bellissima,” murmured Mercaptan, flowering under their cool light.

Mrs. Viveash addressed herself to the company at large. “We have had the most appalling evening,” she said. “Haven’t we, Bruin?”

Bruin Opps said nothing, but only scowled. He didn’t like these damned intruders. The skin of his contracted brows oozed over the rim of his monocle, on to the shining glass.

“I thought it would be fun,” Myra went on, “to go to that place at Hampton Court, where you have dinner on an island and dance.⁠ ⁠…”

“What is there about islands,” put in Mercaptan, in a deliciously whimsical parenthesis, “that makes them so peculiarly voluptuous? Cythera, Monkey Island, Capri. Je me demande.”

“Another charming middle.” Coleman pointed his stick menacingly; Mr. Mercaptan stepped quickly out of range.

“So we took a cab,” Mrs. Viveash continued, “and set out. And what a cab, my God! A cab with only one gear and that the lowest. A cab as old as the century, a museum specimen, a collector’s piece.” They had been hours and hours on the way. And when they got there, the food they were offered to eat, the wine they were expected to drink! From her eternal deathbed Mrs. Viveash cried out in unaffected horror. Everything tasted as though it has been kept soaking for a week in the river before being served up⁠—rather weedy, with that delicious typhoid flavour of Thames water. There was Thames even in the champagne. They had not been able to eat so much as a crust of bread. Hungry and thirsty, they had re-embarked in their antique taxi, and here, at last, they were, at the first outpost of civilization, eating for dear life.

“Oh, a terrible evening,” Mrs. Viveash concluded. “The only thing which kept up my spirits was the spectacle of Bruin’s bad temper. You’ve no idea, Bruin, what an incomparable comic you can be.”

Bruin ignored the remark. With an expression of painfully repressed disgust he was eating a hard-boiled egg. Myra’s caprices were becoming more and more impossible. That Hampton Court business had been bad enough; but when it came to eating in the street, in the middle of a lot of filthy workmen⁠—well, really, that was rather too much.

Mrs. Viveash looked about her. “Am I never to know who this mysterious person is?” She pointed to Shearwater, who was standing a little apart from the group, his back leaning against the Park railings and staring thoughtfully at the ground.

“The physiologue,” Coleman explained, “and he has the key. The key, the