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

before I’d finished one of them, this time in Rome.” Mrs. Viveash shook her head. “Disillusion after disillusion.”

They walked down the dark passage into the street.

“We’ll go home,” said Mrs. Viveash. “I really haven’t the spirit to do anything else this afternoon.” To the commissionaire who opened the door of the cab she gave the address of her house in St. James’s.

“Will one ever recapture the old thrills?” she asked rather fatiguedly as they drove slowly through the traffic of Regent Street.

“Not by chasing after them,” said Gumbril, in whom the clown had quite evaporated. “If one sat still enough they might perhaps come back of their own accord.⁠ ⁠…” There would be the faint sound as it were of feet approaching through the quiet.

“It isn’t only food,” said Mrs. Viveash, who had closed her eyes and was leaning back in her corner.

“So I can well believe.”

“It’s everything. Nothing’s the same now. I feel it never will be.”

“Never more,” croaked Gumbril.

“Never again,” Mrs. Viveash echoed. “Never again.” There were still no tears behind her eyes. “Did you ever know Tony Lamb?” she asked.

“No,” Gumbril answered from his corner. “What about him?”

Mrs. Viveash did not answer. What, indeed, about him? She thought of his very clear blue eyes and the fair, bright hair that had been lighter than his brown face. Brown face and neck, red-brown hands; and all the rest of his skin was as white as milk. “I was very fond of him,” she said at last. “That’s all. He was killed in 1917, just about this time of the year. It seems a very long time ago, don’t you think?”

“Does it?” Gumbril shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. The past is abolished. Vivamus, mea Lesbia. If I weren’t so horribly depressed, I’d embrace you. That would be some slight compensation for my”⁠—he tapped his foot with the end of his walking-stick⁠—“my accident.”

“You’re depressed too?”

“One should never drink at luncheon,” said Gumbril. “It wrecks the afternoon. One should also never think of the past and never for one moment consider the future. These are treasures of ancient wisdom. But perhaps after a little tea⁠—” He leaned forward to look at the figures on the taximeter, for the cab had come to a standstill⁠—“after a nip of the tannin stimulant”⁠—he threw open the door⁠—“we may feel rather better.”

Mrs. Viveash smiled excruciatingly. “For me,” she said, as she stepped out on to the pavement, “even tannin has lost its virtues now.”

Mrs. Viveash’s drawing-room was tastefully in the movement. The furniture was upholstered in fabrics designed by Dufy⁠—racehorses and roses, little tennis players clustering in the midst of enormous flowers, printed in grey and ochre on a white ground. There were a couple of lampshades by Balla. On the pale rose-stippled walls hung three portraits of herself by three different and entirely incongruous painters, a selection of the usual oranges and lemons, and a rather forbidding contemporary nude painted in two tones of green.

“And how bored I am with this room and all these beastly pictures!” exclaimed Mrs. Viveash as she entered. She took off her hat and, standing in front of the mirror above the mantelpiece, smoothed her coppery hair.

“You should take a cottage in the country,” said Gumbril, “buy a pony and a governess cart and drive along the twiddly lanes looking for flowers. After tea you open the cottage piano,” and suiting his action to the words, Gumbril sat down at the long-tailed Blüthner, “and you play, you play.” Very slowly and with parodied expressiveness he played the opening theme of the Arietta. “You wouldn’t be bored then,” he said, turning round to her, when he had finished.

“Ah, wouldn’t I!” said Mrs. Viveash. “And with whom do you propose that I should share my cottage?”

“Anyone you like,” said Gumbril. His fingers hung, as though meditating over the keys.

“But I don’t like anyone,” cried Mrs. Viveash with a terrible vehemence from her deathbed.⁠ ⁠… Ah, now it had been said, the truth. It sounded like a joke. Tony had been dead five years now. Those bright blue eyes⁠—ah, never again. All rotted away to nothing.

“Then you should try,” said Gumbril, whose hands had begun to creep softly forward into the Twelfth Sonata. “You should try.”

“But I do try,” said Mrs. Viveash. Her elbows propped on the mantelpiece, her chin resting on her clasped hands, she was looking fixedly at her own image in the glass. Pale eyes looked unwaveringly into pale eyes. The red mouth and its reflection exchanged their smiles of pain. She had tried; it revolted her now to think how often she had tried; she had tried to like someone, anyone, as much as Tony. She had tried to recapture, to re-evoke, to revivify. And there had never been anything, really, but a disgust. “I haven’t succeeded,” she added, after a pause.

The music had shifted from F major to D minor; it mounted in leaping anapæsts to a suspended chord, ran down again, mounted once more, modulating to C minor, then, through a passage of trembling notes to A flat major, to the dominant of D flat, to the dominant of C, to C minor, and at last, to a new clear theme in the major.

“Then I’m sorry for you,” said Gumbril, allowing his fingers to play on by themselves. He felt sorry, too, for the subjects of Mrs. Viveash’s desperate experiments. She mightn’t have succeeded in liking them⁠—for their part, poor devils, they in general only too agonizingly liked her.⁠ ⁠… Only too.⁠ ⁠… He remembered the cold, damp spots on his pillow, in the darkness. Those hopeless, angry tears. “You nearly killed me once,” he said.

“Only time kills,” said Mrs. Viveash, still looking into her own pale eyes. “I have never made anyone happy,” she added, after a pause. “Never anyone,” she thought, except Tony, and Tony they had killed, shot him through the head. Even the bright eyes had rotted, like any other carrion. She too had been happy then. Never again.

A maid came in with the tea-things.

“Ah, the tannin!” exclaimed Gumbril with enthusiasm, and broke off his playing. “The