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

hands on his knees, bent forward and laughed, “Ha, ha, ha!” He had a profound bell-like laugh that was like the croaking of a very large and melodious frog. “You won’t,” he said, and shook his head till the hair fell into his eyes. “You won’t,” and he laughed again.

“To make money,” said Mr. Porteous, “one must be really interested in money.”

“And he’s not,” said Gumbril Senior. “None of us are.”

“When I was still uncommonly hard up,” Mr. Porteous continued, “we used to lodge in the same house with a Russian Jew, who was a furrier. That man was interested in money, if you like. It was a passion, an enthusiasm, an ideal. He could have led a comfortable, easy life, and still have made enough to put by something for his old age. But for his high abstract ideal of money he suffered more than Michelangelo ever suffered for his art. He used to work nineteen hours a day, and the other five he slept, lying under his bench, in the dirt, breathing into his lungs the stink and the broken hairs. He is now very rich indeed and does nothing with his money, doesn’t want to do anything, doesn’t know what one does do with it. He desires neither power nor pleasure. His desire for lucre is purely disinterested. He reminds me of Browning’s ‘Grammarian.’ I have a great admiration for him.”

Mr. Porteous’s own passion had been for the poems of Notker Balbulus and St. Bernard. It had taken him nearly twenty years to get himself and his family out of the house where the Russian furrier used to lodge. But Notker was worth it, he used to say; Notker was worth even the weariness and the pallor of a wife who worked beyond her strength, even the shabbiness of ill-dressed and none too well-fed children. He had readjusted his monocle and gone on. But there had been occasions when it needed more than the monocle and the careful, distinguished clothes to keep up his morale. Still, those times were over now; Notker had brought him at last a kind of fame⁠—even, indirectly, a certain small prosperity.

Gumbril Senior turned once more towards his son. “And how do you propose,” he asked, “to make this money?”

Gumbril Junior explained. He had thought it all out in the cab on the way from the station. “It came to me this morning,” he said, “in chapel, during service.”

“Monstrous,” put in Gumbril Senior, with a genuine indignation, “monstrous these medieval survivals in schools! Chapel, indeed!”

“It came,” Gumbril Junior went on, “like an apocalypse, suddenly, like a divine inspiration. A grand and luminous idea came to me⁠—the idea of Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.”

“And what are Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes?”

“A boon to those whose occupation is sedentary”; Gumbril Junior had already composed his prospectus and his first advertisements: “a comfort to all travellers, civilization’s substitute for steatopygism, indispensable to first-nighters, the concert-goers’ friend, the.⁠ ⁠…”

“Lectulus Dei floridus,” intoned Mr. Porteous.

“Gazophylacium Ecclesiæ,
Cithara benesonans Dei,
Cymbalum jubilationis Christi,
Promptuarium mysteriorum fidei, ora pro nobis.

Your small-clothes sound to me very like one of my old litanies, Theodore.”

“We want scientific descriptions, not litanies,” said Gumbril Senior. “What are Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes?”

“Scientifically, then,” said Gumbril Junior, “my Patent Small-Clothes may be described as trousers with a pneumatic seat, inflateable by means of a tube fitted with a valve; the whole constructed of stout seamless red rubber, enclosed between two layers of cloth.”

“I must say,” said Gumbril Senior on a tone of somewhat grudging approbation, “I have heard of worse inventions. You are too stout, Porteous, to be able to appreciate the idea. We Gumbrils are all a bony lot.”

“When I have taken out a patent for my invention,” his son went on, very businesslike and cool, “I shall either sell it to some capitalist, or I shall exploit it commercially myself. In either case, I shall make money, which is more, I may say, than you or any other Gumbril have ever done.”

“Quite right,” said Gumbril Senior, “quite right”; and he laughed very cheerfully. “And nor will you. You can be grateful to your intolerable Aunt Flo for having left you that three hundred a year. You’ll need it. But if you really want a capitalist,” he went on, “I have exactly the man for you. He’s a man who has a mania for buying Tudor houses and making them more Tudor than they are. I’ve pulled half a dozen of the wretched things to pieces and put them together again differently for him.”

“He doesn’t sound much good to me,” said his son.

“Ah, but that’s only his vice. Only his amusement. His business,” Gumbril Senior hesitated.

“Well, what is his business?”

“Well, it seems to be everything. Patent medicine, trade newspapers, bankrupt tobacconist’s stock⁠—he’s talked to me about those and heaps more. He seems to flit like a butterfly in search of honey, or rather money.”

“And he makes it?”

“Well, he pays my fees and he buys more Tudor houses, and he gives me luncheons at the Ritz. That’s all I know.”

“Well, there’s no harm in trying.”

“I’ll write to him,” said Gumbril Senior. “His name is Boldero. He’ll either laugh at your idea or take it and give you nothing for it. Still,” he looked at his son over the top of his spectacles, “if by any conceivable chance you ever should become rich; if, if, if.⁠ ⁠…” And he emphasized the remoteness of the conditional by raising his eyebrows a little higher, by throwing out his hands in a dubious gesture a little farther at every repetition of the word, “if⁠—why, then I’ve got exactly the thing for you. Look at this really delightful little idea I had this afternoon.” He put his hand in his coat pocket and after some sorting and sifting produced a sheet of squared paper on which was roughly drawn the elevation of a house. “For anyone with eight or ten thousand to spend, this would be⁠—this would be.⁠ ⁠…” Gumbril Senior smoothed his hair and hesitated, searching