Antic Hay

Gumbril, Theodore Gumbril Junior, B.A. Oxon., sat in his oaken stall on the north side of the School Chapel and wondered, as he listened through the uneasy silence of half a thousand schoolboys to the First Lesson, pondered, as he looked up at the vast window opposite, all blue and jaundiced and bloody with nineteenth-century glass, speculated in his rapid and rambling way about the existence and the nature of God.

Standing in front of the spread brass eagle and fortified in his convictions by the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy (for this first Sunday of term was the Fifth after Easter), the Reverend Pelvey could speak of these things with an enviable certainty. “Hear, O Israel,” he was booming out over the top of the portentous Book: “the Lord our God is one Lord.”

One Lord; Mr. Pelvey knew; he had studied theology. But if theology and theosophy, then why not theography and theometry, why not theognomy, theotrophy, theotomy, theogamy? Why not theophysics and theo-chemistry? Why not that ingenious toy, the theotrope or wheel of gods? Why not a monumental theodrome?

In the great window opposite, young David stood like a cock, crowing on the dunghill of a tumbled giant. 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?

“… with all thine heart,” declaimed the Reverend Pelvey, “and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”

“Mister Gumbril!” Surprise was mingled with delight. “This is indeed a pleasure!” Delight was now the prevailing emotion expressed by the voice that advanced, as yet without a visible source, from the dark recesses of the shop.

“The pleasure, Mr. Bojanus, is mine.” Gumbril closed the shop door behind him.

A very small man, dressed in a frock-coat, popped out from a canyon that opened, a mere black crevice, between two stratified precipices of mid-season suitings, and advancing into the open space before the door bowed with an old-world grace, revealing a nacreous scalp thinly mantled with long damp creepers of brown hair.

“And to what, may I ask, do I owe this pleasure, sir?” Mr. Bojanus looked up archly with a sideways cock of his head that tilted the rigid points of his waxed moustache. The fingers of his right hand were thrust into the bosom of his frock-coat and his toes were turned out in the dancing-master’s First Position. “A light spring greatcoat, is it? Or a new suit? I notice,” his eye travelled professionally up and down Gumbril’s long, thin form, “I notice that the garments you are wearing at present, Mr. Gumbril, look⁠—how shall I say?⁠—well, a trifle negleejay, as the French would put it, a trifle negleejay.”

Gumbril looked down at himself. He resented Mr. Bojanus’s negleejay, he was pained and wounded by the aspersion. Negleejay? And he had fancied that he really looked rather elegant and distinguished (but, after all, he always looked that, even in rags)⁠—no, that he looked positively neat, like Mr. Porteous, positively soldierly in his black jacket and his musical comedy trousers and his patent leather shoes. And the black felt hat⁠—didn’t that just add the foreign, the Southern touch which saved the whole composition from banality?

In the warm yellow light of the coffee-stall at Hyde Park Corner loitered a little group of people. Among the peaked caps and the chauffeurs’ dust-coats, among the weather-stained workmen’s jackets and the knotted handkerchiefs, there emerged an alien elegance. A tall tubed hat and a silk-faced overcoat, a cloak of flame-coloured satin, and in bright, coppery hair a great Spanish comb of carved tortoiseshell.

“Well, I’m damned,” said Gumbril as they approached. “I believe it’s Myra Viveash.”

“So it is,” said Lypiatt, peering in his turn. He began suddenly to walk with an affected swagger, kicking his heels at every step. Looking at himself from outside, his divining eyes pierced through the veil of cynical je-m’en-fichisme to the bruised heart beneath. Besides, he didn’t want anyone to guess.

“The Viveash is it?” Coleman quickened his rapping along the pavement. “And who is the present incumbent?” He pointed at the top hat.

“Can it be Bruin Opps?” said Gumbril dubiously.

“Opps!” Coleman yelled out the name. “Opps!”

The top hat turned, revealing a shirt front, a long grey face, a glitter of circular glass over the left eye. “Who the devil are you?” The voice was harsh and arrogantly offensive.

“I am that I am,” said Coleman. “But I have with me”⁠—he pointed to Shearwater, to Gumbril, to Zoe⁠—“a physiologue, a pedagogue and a priapagogue; for I leave out of account mere artists and journalists whose titles do not end with the magic syllable. And finally,” indicating himself, “plain Dog, which being interpreted kabbalistically backwards, signifies God. All at your service.” He took off his hat and bowed.

The top hat turned back towards the Spanish comb. “Who is this horrible drunk?” it inquired.

He had just turned into the Queen’s Road and was sauntering past Whiteley’s with the air of one who knows that he has a right to a good place, to two or three good places even, in the sun, when he noticed just in front of him, peering intently at the New Season’s Models, a young woman whom in his mild and melancholy days he would have only hopelessly admired, but who now, to the Complete Man, seemed a destined and accessible prey. She was fairly tall, but seemed taller than she actually was, by reason of her remarkable slenderness. Not that she looked disagreeably thin, far from it. It was a rounded slenderness. The Complete Man decided to consider her as tubular⁠—flexible and tubular, like a section of boa constrictor, should one say. She was dressed in clothes that emphasized this serpentine slimness, in a close-fitting grey jacket that buttoned up to the neck and a long, narrow grey skirt that came down to her ankles. On her head was a small, sleek black hat, that looked almost as though it were made of metal. It was trimmed on one side with a bunch of dull golden foliage.

Those golden leaves were the only touch of ornament in all the severe smoothness and unbroken tubularity of her person. As for her face, that was neither strictly beautiful nor strictly ugly, but combined elements of both beauty and ugliness into a whole that was unexpected, that was oddly and somehow unnaturally attractive.

Mr. Boldero liked the idea of the Patent Small-Clothes. He liked it immensely, he said, immensely.

“There’s money in it,” he said.

Mr. Boldero was a small dark man of about forty-five, active as a bird and with a bird’s brown, beady eyes, a bird’s sharp nose. He was always busy, always had twenty different irons in the fire at once, was always fresh, clearheaded, never tired. He was also 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.