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

Though she may be out all night. Zoe mou, sas agapo. Shall we risk it?”

“To me it’s quite indifferent,” said Mrs. Viveash faintly, as though wholly preoccupied with expiring.

“Or there’s my place,” Gumbril said abruptly, as though shaking himself awake out of some dream.

“But you live still farther, don’t you?” said Coleman. “With venerable parents, and so forth. One foot in the grave and all that. Shall we mingle hornpipes with funerals?” He began to hum Chopin’s “Funeral March” at three times its proper speed, and seizing the young stranger in his arms, two-stepped two or three turns on the pavement, then released his hold and let him go reeling against the area railings.

“No, I don’t mean the family mansion,” said Gumbril. “I mean my own rooms. They’re quite near. In Great Russell Street.”

“I never knew you had any rooms, Theodore,” said Mrs. Viveash.

“Nobody did.” Why should they know now? Because the wind seemed almost a country wind? “There’s drink there,” he said.

“Splendid!” cried the young man. They were all splendid people.

“There’s some gin,” said Gumbril.

“Capital aphrodisiac!” Coleman commented.

“Some light white wine.”

“Diuretic.”

“And some whisky.”

“The great emetic,” said Coleman. “Come on.” And he struck up the March of the Fascisti. “Giovinezza, giovinezza, primavera di bellezza.⁠ ⁠…” The noise went fading down the dark, empty streets.

The gin, the white wine, and even, for the sake of the young stranger, who wanted to sample everything, the emetic whisky, were produced.

“I like your rooms,” said Mrs. Viveash, looking round her. “And I resent your secrecy about them, Theodore.”

“Drink, puppy!” Coleman refilled the boy’s glass.

“Here’s to secrecy,” Gumbril proposed. Shut it tightly, keep it dark, cover it up. Be silent, prevaricate, lie outright. He laughed and drank. “Do you remember,” he went on, “those instructive advertisements of Eno’s Fruit Salt they used to have when we were young? There was one little anecdote about a doctor who advised the hypochondriacal patient who had come to consult him, to go and see Grimaldi, the clown; and the patient answered, ‘I am Grimaldi.’ Do you remember?”

“No,” said Mrs. Viveash. “And why do you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Or rather, I do know,” Gumbril corrected himself, and laughed again.

The young man suddenly began to boast. “I lost two hundred pounds yesterday playing chemin de fer,” he said, and looked round for applause.

Coleman patted his curly head. “Delicious child!” he said. “You’re positively Hogarthian.”

Angrily, the boy pushed him away. “What are you doing?” he shouted; then turned and addressed himself once more to the others. “I couldn’t afford it, you know⁠—not a bloody penny of it. Not my money, either.” He seemed to find it exquisitely humorous. “And that two hundred wasn’t all,” he added, almost expiring with mirth.

“Tell Coleman how you borrowed his beard, Theodore.”

Gumbril was looking intently into his glass, as though he hoped to see in its pale mixture of gin and Sauterne visions, as in a crystal, of the future. Mrs. Viveash touched him on the arm and repeated her injunction.

“Oh, that!” said Gumbril rather irritably. “No. It isn’t an interesting story.”

“Oh yes, it is! I insist,” said Mrs. Viveash, commanding peremptorily from her deathbed.

Gumbril drank his gin and Sauterne. “Very well then,” he said reluctantly, and began.

“I don’t know what my governor will say,” the young man put in once or twice. But nobody paid any attention to him. He relapsed into a sulky and, it seemed to him, very dignified silence. Under the warm, jolly tipsiness he felt a chill of foreboding. He poured out some more whisky.

Gumbril warmed to his anecdote. Expiringly Mrs. Viveash laughed from time to time, or smiled her agonizing smile. Coleman whooped like a Redskin.

“And after the concert to these rooms,” said Gumbril.

Well, let everything go. Into the mud. Leave it there, and let the dogs lift their hind legs over it as they pass.

“Ah! the genuine platonic fumblers,” commented Coleman.

“I am Grimaldi,” Gumbril laughed. Further than this it was difficult to see where the joke could go. There, on the couch, where Mrs. Viveash and Coleman were now sitting, she had lain sleeping in his arms.

“Towsing, in Elizabethan,” said Coleman.

Unreal, eternal in the secret darkness. A night that was an eternal parenthesis among the other nights and days.

“I feel I’m going to be sick,” said the young man suddenly. He had wanted to go on silently and haughtily sulking; but his stomach declined to take part in the dignified game.

“Good Lord!” said Gumbril, and jumped up. But before he could do anything effective, the young man had fulfilled his own prophecy.

“The real charm about debauchery,” said Coleman philosophically, “is its total pointlessness, futility, and above all its incredible tediousness. If it really were all roses and exhilaration, as these poor children seem to imagine, it would be no better than going to church or studying the higher mathematics. I should never touch a drop of wine or another harlot again. It would be against my principles. I told you it was emetic,” he called to the young man.

“And what are your principles?” asked Mrs. Viveash.

“Oh, strictly ethical,” said Coleman.

“You’re responsible for this creature,” said Gumbril, pointing to the young man, who was sitting on the floor near the fireplace, cooling his forehead against the marble of the mantelpiece. “You must take him away. Really, what a bore!” His nose and mouth were all wrinkled up with disgust.

“I’m sorry,” the young man whispered. He kept his eyes shut and his face was exceedingly pale.

“But with pleasure,” said Coleman. “What’s your name?” he asked the young man, “and where do you live?”

“My name is Porteous,” murmured the young man.

“Good lord!” cried Gumbril, letting himself fall on to the couch beside Mrs. Viveash. “That’s the last straw!”

XVII

The two o’clock snorted out of Charing Cross, but no healths were drunk, this time, to Viscount Lascelles. A desiccating sobriety made arid the corner of the third-class carriage in which Gumbril was sitting. His thoughts were an interminable desert of sand, with not a palm in sight, not so much as a comforting