palais de danse. It was very uncomfortable, like the preliminary
symptoms of a disease. He sat in one of the window-seats, glumly
pretending to read.
At the pianola, Henry Wimbush, smoking a long cigar through a
tunnelled pillar of amber, trod out the shattering dance music with serene
patience. Locked together, Gombauld and Anne moved with a
harmoniousness that made them seem a single creature, two- headed and
four-legged. Mr. Scogan, solemnly buffoonish, shuffled round the room
with Mary. Jenny sat in the shadow behind the piano, scribbling, so it
seemed, in a big red notebook. In arm-chairs by the fireplace, Priscilla
and Mr. Barbecue-Smith discussed higher things, without, apparently,
being disturbed by the noise on the Lower Plane.
"Optimism," said Mr. Barbecue-Smith with a tone of finality, speaking
through strains of the "Wild, Wild Women"--"optimism is the opening out
of the soul towards the light; it is an expansion towards and into God, it is
a h-piritual self-unification with the Infinite."
"How true!" sighed Priscilla, nodding the baleful splendours of her
coiffure.
"Pessimism, on the other hand, is the contraction of the soul towards
darkness; it is a focusing of the self upon a point in the Lower Plane; it is a
h-piritual slavery to mere facts; to gross physical phenomena."
"They're making a wild man of me." The refrain sang itself over in
Denis's mind. Yes, they were; damn them! A wild man, but not wild
enough; that was the trouble. Wild inside; raging, writhing--yes,
"writhing" was the word, writhing with desire. But outwardly he was
hopelessly tame; outwardly--baa, baa, baa.
There they were, Anne and Gombauld, moving together as though they
were a single supple creature. The beast with two backs. And he sat in a
49
corner, pretending to read, pretending he didn't want to dance, pretending
he rather despised dancing. Why? It was the baa-baa business again.
Why was he born with a different face? Why WAS he? Gombauld
had a face of brass--one of those old, brazen rams that thumped against the
walls of cities till they fell. He was born with a different face--a woolly
face.
The music stopped. The single harmonious creature broke in two.
Flushed, a little breathless, Anne swayed across the room to the pianola,
laid her hand on Mr. Wimbush's shoulder.
"A waltz this time, please, Uncle Henry," she said.
"A waltz," he repeated, and turned to the cabinet where the rolls were
kept. He trod off the old roll and trod on the new, a slave at the mill,
uncomplaining and beautifully well bred. "Rum; Tum; Rum-ti-ti; Tum-
ti-ti..." The melody wallowed oozily along, like a ship moving forward
over a sleek and oily swell. The four- legged creature, more graceful,
more harmonious in its movements than ever, slid across the floor. Oh,
why was he born with a different face?
"What are you reading?"
He looked up, startled. It was Mary. She had broken from the
uncomfortable embrace of Mr. Scogan, who had now seized on Jenny for
his victim.
"What are you reading?"
"I don't know," said Denis truthfully. He looked at the title page; the
book was called "The Stock Breeder's Vade Mecum."
"I think you are so sensible to sit and read quietly," said Mary, fixing
him with her china eyes. "I don't know why one dances. It's so boring."
Denis made no reply; she exacerbated him. From the arm-chair by
the fireplace he heard Priscilla's deep voice.
"Tell me, Mr Barbecue-Smith--you know all about science, I know--"
A deprecating noise came from Mr. Barbecue-Smith's chair. "This
Einstein theory. It seems to upset the whole starry universe. It makes
me so worried about my horoscopes. You see..."
Mary renewed her attack. "Which of the contemporary poets do you
like best?" she asked. Denis was filled with fury. Why couldn't this
50
pest of a girl leave him alone? He wanted to listen to the horrible music,
to watch them dancing--oh, with what grace, as though they had been
made for one another!--to savour his misery in peace. And she came and
put him through this absurd catechism! She was like "Mangold's
Questions": "What are the three diseases of wheat?"--"Which of the
contemporary poets do you like best?"
"Blight, Mildew, and Smut," he replied, with the laconism of one who
is absolutely certain of his own mind.
It was several hours before Denis managed to go to sleep that night.
Vague but agonising miseries possessed his mind. It was not only Anne
who made him miserable; he was wretched about himself, the future, life
in general, the universe. "This adolescence business," he repeated to
himself every now and then, "is horribly boring. But the fact that he
knew his disease did not help him to cure it.
After kicking all the clothes off the bed, he got up and sought relief in
composition. He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words. At
the end of an hour, nine more or less complete lines emerged from among
the blots and scratchings.
"I do not know what I desire When summer nights are dark and still,
When the wind's many-voiced quire Sleeps among the muffled branches. I
long and know not what I will: And not a sound of life or laughter
stanches Time's black and silent flow. I do not know what I desire, I do not
know."
He read it through aloud; then threw the scribbled sheet into the wastepaper
basket and got into bed again. In a very few minutes he was
asleep.
51
CHAPTER XI.
Mr. Barbecue-Smith was gone. The motor had whirled him away to
the station; a faint smell of burning oil commemorated his recent departure.
A considerable detachment had come into the courtyard to speed him on
his way; and now they were walking back, round the side of the house,
towards the terrace and the garden. They walked in silence; nobody had
yet ventured to comment on the departed guest.
"Well?" said Anne at last, turning with raised inquiring eyebrows to
Denis.
"Well?" It was time for someone to begin.
Denis declined the invitation; he passed it on to Mr Scogan. "Well?"
he said.
Mr. Scogan did not respond; he only repeated the question, "Well?"
It was left for Henry Wimbush to make a pronouncement. "A very
agreeable adjunct to the week-end," he said. His tone was obituary.
They had descended, without paying much attention where they were
going, the steep yew-walk that went down, under the flank of the terrace,
to the pool. The house towered above them, immensely tall, with the
whole height of the built-up terrace added to its own seventy feet of brick
facade. The perpendicular lines of the three towers soared up,
uninterrupted, enhancing the impression of height until it became
overwhelming. They paused at the edge of the pool to look back.
"The man who built this house knew his business," said Denis. "He
was an architect."
"Was he?" said Henry Wimbush reflectively. "I doubt it. The
builder of this house was Sir Ferdinando Lapith, who flourished during the
reign of Elizabeth. He inherited the estate from his father, to whom it
had been granted at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries; for
Crome was originally a cloister of monks and this swimming-pool their
fish-pond. Sir Ferdinando was not content merely to adapt the old
monastic buildings to his own purposes; but using them as a stone quarry
for his barns and byres and outhouses, he built for himself a grand new
house of brick--the house you see now."
52
He waved his hand in the direction of the house and was silent. severe,
imposing, almost menacing, Crome loomed down on them.
"The great thing about Crome," said Mr. Scogan, seizing the
opportunity to speak, "is the fact that it's so unmistakably and aggressively
a work of art. It makes no compromise with nature, but affronts it and
rebels against it. It has no likeness to Shelley's tower, in the
'Epipsychidion,' which, if I remember rightly-
"'Seems not now a work of human art, But as it were titanic, in the
heart Of earth having assumed its form and grown Out of the mountain,
from the living stone, Lifting itself in caverns light and high.'
No, no, there isn't any nonsense of that sort about Crome. That the
hovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown out of the
earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, and suitable.
But the house of an intelligent, civilised, and sophisticated man should
never seem to have sprouted from the clods. It should rather be an
expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish life.
Since the days of William Morris that's a fact which we in England have
been unable to comprehend. Civilised and sophisticated men have
solemnly played at being peasants. Hence quaintness, arts and crafts,
cottage architecture, and all the rest of it. In the suburbs of our cities you
may see, reduplicated in endless rows, studiedly quaint imitations and
adaptations of the village hovel. Poverty, ignorance, and a limited range of
materials produced the hovel, which possesses undoubtedly, in suitable
surroundings, its own 'as it were titanic' charm. We now employ our
wealth, our technical knowledge, our rich variety of materials for the
purpose of building millions of imitation hovels in totally unsuitable
surroundings. Could imbecility go further?"
Henry Wimbush took up the thread of his interrupted discourse. "All
that you say, my dear Scogan," he began, "is certainly very just, very true.
But whether Sir Ferdinando shared your views about architecture or if,
indeed, he had any views about architecture at all, I very much doubt. In
building this house, Sir Ferdinando was, as a matter of fact, preoccupied
by only one thought--the proper placing of his privies. Sanitation was
the one great interest of his life. In 1573 he even published, on this
53
subject, a little book--now extremely scarce--called, 'Certaine Priuy
Counsels' by 'One of Her Maiestie's Most Honourable Priuy Counsels, F.L.
Knight', in which the whole matter is treated with great learning and
elegance. His guiding principle in arranging the sanitation of a house
was to secure that the greatest possible distance should separate the privy
from the sewage arrangements. Hence it followed inevitably that the
privies were to be placed at the top of the house, being connected by
vertical shafts with pits or channels in the ground. It must not be thought
that Sir Ferdinando was moved only by material and merely sanitary
considerations; for the placing of his privies in an exalted position he had
also certain excellent spiritual reasons. For, he argues in the third chapter
of his 'Priuy Counsels', the necessities of nature are so base and brutish
that in obeying them we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures
of the universe. To counteract these degrading effects he advised that the
privy should be in every house the room nearest to heaven, that it should
be well provided with windows commanding an extensive and noble
prospect, and that the walls of the chamber should be lined with
bookshelves containing all the ripest products of human wisdom, such as
the Proverbs of Solomon, Boethius's 'Consolations of Philosophy', the
apophthegms of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the 'Enchiridion' of
Erasmus, and all other works, ancient or modern, which testify to the
nobility of the human soul. In Crome he was able to put his theories into
practice. At the top of each of the three projecting towers he placed a
privy. From these a shaft went down the whole height of the house, that
is to say, more than seventy feet, through the cellars, and into a series of
conduits provided with flowing water tunnelled in the ground on a level
with the base of the raised terrace. These conduits emptied themselves
into the stream several hundred yards below the fish- pond. The total
depth of the shafts from the top of the towers to their subterranean
conduits was a hundred and two feet. The eighteenth century, with its
passion for modernisation, swept away these monuments of sanitary
ingenuity. Were it not for tradition and the explicit account of them left
by Sir Ferdinando, we should be unaware that these noble privies had ever
existed. We should even suppose that Sir Ferdinando built his house
54
after this strange and splendid model for merely aesthetic reasons."
The contemplation of the glories of the past always evoked in Henry
Wimbush a certain enthusiasm. Under the grey bowler his face worked
and glowed as he spoke. The thought of these vanished privies moved
him profoundly. He ceased to speak; the light gradually died out of his
face, and it became once more the replica of the grave, polite hat which
shaded it. There was a long silence; the same gently melancholy
thoughts seemed to possess the mind of each of them. Permanence,
transience--Sir Ferdinando and his privies were gone, Crome still stood.
How brightly the sun shone and how inevitable was death! The ways of
God were strange; the ways of man were stranger still...
"It does one's heart good," exclaimed Mr. Scogan at last, "to hear of
these fantastic English aristocrats. To have a theory about privies and to
build an immense and splendid house in order to put it into practise--it's
magnificent, beautiful! I like to think of them all: the eccentric milords
rolling across Europe in ponderous carriages, bound on extraordinary
errands. One is going to Venice to buy La Bianchi's larynx; he won't get
it till she's dead, of course, but no matter; he's prepared to wait; he has a
