Gumbril

“ Gumbril, it’s the Best People that the other people resent. It’s their confidence, their ease, it’s the habit their money and their position give them of ordering people about, it’s the way they take their place in the world for granted, it’s their prestige, which the other people would like to deny, but can’t—it’s all that, Mr. Gumbril, that’s so galling.”
Gumbril nodded. He himself had envied his securer friends their power of ignoring the humanity of those who were not of their class. To do that really well, one must always have lived in a large house full of clockwork servants ”

“ In him, however, Gumbril had to admit, the opulence seemed a little misplaced and paradoxical. Still, if one has to suffer in order to be beautiful, one must also expect to be ugly in order not to suffer. Practically, the trousers were a tremendous success. He sat down heavily on the hard wooden bench of the fitting-room and was received as though on a lap of bounding resiliency; the Patent Small-Clothes, there was no doubt, would be proof even against marble. And the coat, he comforted himself, would mask with its skirts the too decided bulge. ”

“ Gumbril shut his eyes and ground his teeth together; he felt himself blushing with a retrospective shame.
And of course it was quite useless taking the train, like this, to Robertsbridge. She’d be gone, of course. Still, there was always the desperate hope. There was the mirage across the desiccated plains, the mirage one knew to be deceptive and which, on a second glance, proved not even to be a mirage, but merely a few livery spots behind the eyes. Still, it was amply worth doing—as a penance, and to satisfy the conscience and to deceive oneself with an illusion of action. ”

“ Gumbril Senior turned enthusiastically towards his son. His long grey hair floated wispily about his head, his spectacles flashed, and behind them his eyes shone with emotion.
“Beautiful,” Gumbril Junior agreed.
“When you’re really rich,” said his father, “I’ll build you one of these.” And he pointed to a little village of Chatsworths clustering, at one end of a long table, round the dome of a vaster and austerer St. Peter’s. ”

“ Mr. Gumbril was almost the last survivor of the old inhabitants. He liked his house, and he liked his square. Social decadence had not affected the fourteen plane trees which adorned its little garden, and the gambols of the dirty children did not disturb the starlings who came, evening by evening in summer-time, to roost in their branches.
On fine evenings he used to sit out on his balcony waiting for the coming of the birds. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Gumbril Senior pursued, “is that one can really live like an aristocrat, in privacy, by oneself. No need to look out on the dirty world or to let the dirty world look in on you. Here’s this great house, for example, looking out on the world through a few dark portholes and a single cavernous doorway. But look inside.” He held his lamp above the courtyard that was at the heart of the palace. Gumbril Junior leaned and looked, like his father. “All the life looks inwards—into a lovely courtyard, a more than Spanish patio. ”

“ “I wish they’d hurry up with the second scene,” said Mrs. Viveash. “If there’s anything that bores me, it’s entr’actes.”
“Most of one’s life is an entr’acte,” said Gumbril, whose present mood of hilarious depression seemed favourable to the enunciation of apophthegms. ”

“ He wanted Gumbril to tell him what she was really like. “She seems to me a very extraordinary woman,” he said.
“Like everybody else,” said Gumbril irritatingly. It amused him to see the rabbits scampering about at last.
“I’ve never known a woman like that before.”
Gumbril laughed. “You’d say that of any woman you happened to be interested in,” he said. “You’ve never known any women at all.” He knew much more about Rosie, already, than Shearwater did, or probably ever would.
Shearwater meditated. He thought of Mrs. Viveash, her cool, pale, critical eyes; her laughter, faint and mocking ”

“ Gumbril answered. “It’s appalling that human beings should have to live like that. Worse than dogs.”
“Dogs have nothing to complain of.” Shearwater went off at a tangent. “Nor guinea-pigs, nor rats. It’s these blasted anti-vivisection maniacs who make all the fuss.”
“But think,” cried Gumbril, “what these wretched people have had to suffer! Walking all the way to Portsmouth in search of work; and the woman with child. It’s horrifying. And then, the way people of that class are habitually treated. One has no idea of it until one has actually been treated that way oneself. ”

“ Zadig’s quatrain to his mistress, when the tablet on which it was written was broken in two, became a treasonable libel on the king. So this moustache, thought Gumbril, as gingerly he applied the spirit gum to his cheeks and chin, this moustache which by itself serves only to betray me, becomes, as soon as it is joined to its missing context, an amorous arm for the conquest of the fair sex. ”

“ Viveash, “that we haven’t really had a great deal. Did you genuinely want very much to see Mercaptan?”
“Not in the least,” said Gumbril. “But do you genuinely want to see me?”
Mrs. Viveash drew the corners of her mouth down into a painful smile and did not answer. “Aren’t we going to pass through Piccadilly Circus again?” she asked. “I should like to see the lights again. They give one temporarily the illusion of being cheerful.”
“No, no,” said Gumbril, “we are going straight to Victoria.” ”

“ But she made no comment.
“Some people think that it’s only possible to be happy if one makes a noise,” she said, after a pause. “I find it’s too delicate and melancholy for noise. Being happy is rather melancholy—like the most beautiful landscape, like those trees and the grass and the clouds and the sunshine to-day.”
“From the outside,” said Gumbril, “it even looks rather dull.” They stumbled up the dark staircase to his rooms. Gumbril lit a pair of candles and put the kettle on the gas ring. They sat together on the divan sipping tea. ”

“ From the middle of Goliath’s forehead there issued, like a narwhal’s budding horn, a curious excrescence. Was it the embedded pebble? Or perhaps the giant’s married life?
4“... with all thine heart,” declaimed the Reverend Pelvey, “and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”
No, but seriously, Gumbril reminded himself, the problem was very troublesome indeed. God as a sense of warmth about the heart, God as exultation, God as tears in the eyes, God as a rush of power or thought—that was all right. But God as truth, God as 2 + 2 = 4—that wasn’t so clearly all right. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Good. Beyond good and evil? We are all that nowadays. Or merely below them, like earwigs? I glory in the name of earwig. Gumbril made a mental gesture and inwardly declaimed. But good in any case, there was no getting out of that, good she had been. Not nice, not merely molto simpatica—how charmingly and effectively these foreign tags assist one in the great task of calling a spade by some other name!—but good. You felt the active radiance of her goodness when you were near her.... And that feeling, was that less real and valid than two plus two?
The Reverend Pelvey had nothing to reply. ”

“ Gumbril was much flattered. At the moment, it seemed supremely satisfying to be told that he was likely to make a good business man. The business man took on a radiance, began to glow, as it were, with a phosphorescent splendour.
“Then it’s very important,” continued Mr. Boldero, “to play on their snobbism; to exploit that painful sense of inferiority which the ignorant and ingenuous always feel in the presence of the knowing. We’ve got to make our trousers the Thing—socially right as well as merely personally comfortable. We’ve got to imply somehow that it’s bad form not to wear them. ”

“ Mrs. Viveash interrupted him, “will be as awful as to-day.” She breathed it like a truth from beyond the grave prematurely revealed, expiringly from her death-bed within.
“Come, come,” protested Gumbril.
In his hot box Shearwater sweated and pedalled. He was across the Channel now; he felt himself safe. Still he trod on; he would be at Amiens by midnight if he went on at this rate. He was escaping, he had escaped. He was building up his strong light dome of life. Proportion, cried the old man, proportion! ”

“ It must be pleasant, I should think, to hand oneself over to somebody else. It must give you a warm, splendid, comfortable feeling.”
Mr. Bojanus smiled and shook his head. “You and I, Mr. Gumbril,” he said, “we’re not the sort of people to be impressed with feathers or even by talking and ordering about. We may not be leaders ourselves. But at any rate we aren’t the ’erd.”
“Not the main herd, perhaps.”
“Not any ’erd,” Mr. Bojanus insisted proudly.
Gumbril shook his head dubiously and buttoned up his trousers. ”

“ The minds of dogs, Gumbril reflected, do not benefit by being treated as though they were the minds of men.
“O Lord, have mercy upon us: have mercy upon us.”
Gumbril shrugged his shoulders and looked round the chapel at the faces of the boys. Lord, indeed, have mercy upon us! He was disturbed to find the sentiment echoed on a somewhat different note in the Second Lesson, which was drawn from the twenty-third chapter of St. Luke. “Father, forgive them,” said Mr. Pelvey in his unvaryingly juicy voice; “for they know not what they do.” ”

“ Gumbril was saying. “Look at those children. It ought to be punishable by law to produce children in this street.”
“They always take me for the Pied Piper,” said Mrs. Viveash. Lypiatt got up and crept to the window. He could hear all they said.
“I wonder if Lypiatt’s in. I don’t see any sign of a light.”
“But he has heavy curtains,” said Mrs. Viveash, “and I know for a fact that he always composes his poetry in the dark. He may be composing poetry.”
Gumbril laughed.
“Knock again,” said Mrs. Viveash. “Poets are always absorbed, you know. And Casimir’s always the poet.” ”

“ Porteous’s departure. Gumbril Senior came upstairs again into the big room on the first floor smoothing down his hair, which the impetuosity of his ascent had once more disarranged.
“That’s a good fellow,” he said of his departed guest, “a splendid fellow.”
“I always admire the monocle,” said Gumbril Junior irrelevantly. But his father turned the irrelevance into relevance.
“He couldn’t have come through without it, I believe. It was a symbol, a proud flag. Poverty’s squalid, not fine at all. The monocle made a kind of difference, you understand. ”

“ She waved her hand towards the sizzling brilliance of the portrait. “Before and after. Like the advertisements, you know. Every picture tells a story.” She laughed faintly, then made a little grimace and, sucking in the breath between her lips, she put her hand to her forehead.
“My poor Myra.” Gumbril pulled up a chair to the sofa and sat there like a doctor at his patient’s bedside. “But before and after what?” he asked, almost professionally.
Mrs. Viveash gave an all but imperceptible shrug. “I don’t know,” she said. ”

“ Viveash.
Most lovers, Gumbril reflected, picture to themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see every day. They are in love with somebody else—their own invention. And sometimes there is a secret 167reality; and sometimes reality and appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to cause a shock. “I don’t know,” he said. “How should I know? You must find out for yourself.”
“But you knew her, you know her well,” said Shearwater, almost with anxiety in his voice. ”

“ Work will bind him. (dim.) Work is (pp) prayer.
Work, thought Gumbril, work. Lord, how passionately he disliked work! Let Austin have his swink to him reserved! Ah, if only one had work of one’s own, proper work, decent work—not forced upon one by the griping of one’s belly! Amen! Dr. Jolly blew the two sumptuous jets of reverence into the air; Gumbril accompanied them with all his heart. Amen, indeed.
Gumbril sat down again. It might be convenient, he thought, to have the tail so long that one could blow up one’s trousers while one actually had them on. ”

“ Or perhaps he was just made like that—a moody young poet; that seemed, on the whole, the most likely explanation; 135it was also the most pleasing and romantic. She waited. They both waited.
Gumbril looked at her and was put to shame by the spectacle of her quiet serenity. He must do something, he told himself; he must recover the Complete Man’s lost morale. ”

“ Bloxam Gardens—perhaps one of his aunts had lived there once?
“It’s a dr—dreadful little maisonnette,” she explained. “Full of awful things. We had to take it furnished. It’s so impossible to find anything now.”
Gumbril leaned back in his corner, wondering, as he studied that averted profile, who or what this young woman could be. She seemed to be in the obvious movement, to like the sort of things one would expect people to like; she seemed to be as highly civilized, in Mr. Mercaptan’s rather technical sense of the term, as free of all prejudices as the great exponent of civilization himself. ”