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

always unpunctual, always untidy. He had no sense of time or of order. But he got away with it, as he liked to say. He delivered the goods⁠—or rather the goods, in the convenient form of cash, delivered themselves, almost miraculously it always seemed, to him.

He was like a bird in appearance. But in mind, Gumbril found, after having seen him once or twice, he was like a caterpillar: he ate all that was put before him, he consumed a hundred times his own mental weight every day. Other people’s ideas, other people’s knowledge⁠—they were his food. He devoured them and they were at once his own. All that belonged to other people he annexed without a scruple or a second thought, quite naturally, as though it were already his own. And he absorbed it so rapidly and completely, he laid public claim to it so promptly that he sometimes deceived people into believing that he had really anticipated them in their ideas, that he had known for years and years the things they had just been telling him, and which he would at once airily repeat to them with the perfect assurance of one who knows⁠—knows by instinct, as it were, by inheritance.

At their first luncheon he had asked Gumbril to tell him all about modern painting. Gumbril had given him a brief lecture; before the savoury had appeared on the table, Mr. Boldero was talking with perfect familiarity of Picasso and Derain. He almost made it understood that he had a fine collection of their works in his drawing-room at home. Being a trifle deaf, however, he was not very good at names, and Gumbril’s all-too-tactful corrections were lost on him. He could not be induced to abandon his Bacosso in favour of any other version of the Spaniard’s name. Bacosso⁠—why, he had known all about Bacosso since he was a schoolboy! Bacosso was an old master, already.

Mr. Boldero was very severe with the waiters and knew so well how things ought to be done at a good restaurant, that Gumbril felt sure he must recently have lunched with some meticulous gormandizer of the old school. And when the waiter made as though to serve them with brandy in small glasses, Mr. Boldero was so passionately indignant that he sent for the manager.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he shouted in a perfect frenzy of righteous anger, “that you don’t yet know how brandy ought to be drunk?”

Perhaps it was only last week that he himself, Gumbril reflected, had learned to aerate his cognac in Gargantuan beakers.

Meanwhile, of course, the Patent Small-Clothes were not neglected. As soon as he had been told about the things, Mr. Boldero began speaking of them with a perfect and practised familiarity. They were already his, mentally his. And it was only Mr. Boldero’s generosity that prevented him from making the Small-Clothes more effectively his own.

“If it weren’t for the friendship and respect which I feel for your father, Mr. Gumbril,” he said, twinkling genially over the brandy, “I’d just annex your Small-Clothes. Bag and baggage. Just annex them.”

“Ah, but they’re my patent,” said Gumbril. “Or at least they’re in process of being patented. The agents are at work.”

Mr. Boldero laughed. “Do you suppose that would trouble me if I wanted to be unscrupulous? I’d just take the idea and manufacture the article. You’d bring an action. I’d have it defended with all the professional erudition that could be brought. You’d find yourself let in for a case that might cost thousands. And how would you pay for it? You’d be forced to come to an agreement out of court, Mr. Gumbril. That’s what you’d have to do. And a damned bad agreement it would be for you, I can tell you.” Mr. Boldero laughed very cheerfully at the thought of the badness of this agreement. “But don’t be alarmed,” he said. “I shan’t do it, you know.”

Gumbril was not wholly reassured. Tactfully, he tried to find out what terms Mr. Boldero was prepared to offer. Mr. Boldero was nebulously vague.

They met again in Gumbril’s rooms. The contemporary drawings on the walls reminded Mr. Boldero that he was now an art expert. He told Gumbril all about it⁠—in Gumbril’s own words. Every now and then, it was true, Mr. Boldero made a little slip. Bacosso, for example, remained unshakably Bacosso. But on the whole the performance was most impressive. It made Gumbril feel very uncomfortable, however, while it lasted. For he recognized in this characteristic of Mr. Boldero a horrible caricature of himself. He too was an assimilator; more discriminating, no doubt, more tactful, knowing better than Mr. Boldero how to turn the assimilated experience into something new and truly his own; but still a caterpillar, definitely a caterpillar. He began studying Mr. Boldero with a close and disgustful attention, as one might pore over some repulsive memento mori.

It was a relief when Mr. Boldero stopped talking art and consented to get down to business. Gumbril was wearing for the occasion the sample pair of Small-Clothes which Mr. Bojanus had made for him. For Mr. Boldero’s benefit he put them, so to speak, through their paces. He allowed himself to drop with a bump on to the floor⁠—arriving there bruiseless and unjarred. He sat in complete comfort for minutes at a stretch on the edge of the ornamental iron fender. In the intervals he paraded up and down before Mr. Boldero like a mannequin. “A trifle bulgy,” said Mr. Boldero. “But still.⁠ ⁠…” He was, taking it all round, favourably impressed. It was time, he said, to begin thinking of details. They would have to begin by making experiments with the bladders to discover a model combining, as Mr. Boldero put it, “maximum efficiency with minimum bulge.” When they had found the right thing, they would have it made in suitable quantities by any good rubber firm. As for the trousers themselves, they could rely for those on sweated female labour in the East End. “Cheap and good,” said Mr. Boldero.

“It sounds ideal,” said Gumbril.

“And then,” said Mr. Boldero, “there’s our advertising campaign. On that I