Олдос Хаксли - Antic Hay

'But really,' Gumbril insisted, 'you can't say "dream". Can you now, seriously?' He had drunk the best part of a bottle of Burgundy and he felt good–humoured, obstinate and a little bellicose.

'And why not?' Lypiatt asked.

'Oh, because one simply can't.' Gumbril leaned back in his chair, smiled and caressed his drooping blond moustache. 'Not in this year of grace, nineteen twenty–two.'

'But why?' Lypiatt repeated, with exasperation.

'Because it's altogether too late in the day,' declared precious Mr Mercaptan, rushing up to his emphasis with flutes and roaring, like a true Conquistador, to fall back, however, at the end of the sentence rather ignominiously into a breathless confusion. He was a sleek, comfortable young man with smooth brown hair parted in the centre and conducted in a pair of flowing curves across the temples, to be looped in damp curls behind his ears. His face ought to have been rather more exquisite, rather more refinedly dix–huitième than it actually was. It had a rather gross, snouty look, which was sadly out of harmony with Mr Mercaptan's inimitably graceful style. For Mr Mercaptan had a style and used it, delightfully, in his middle articles for the literary weeklies. His most precious work, however, was that little volume of essays, prose poems, vignettes and paradoxes, in which he had so brilliantly illustrated his favourite theme—the pettiness, the simian limitations, the insignificance and the absurd pretentiousness of Homo soi–disant Sapiens . Those who met Mr Mercaptan personally often came away with the feeling that perhaps, after all, he was right in judging so severely of humanity.

' Too late in the day,' he repeated. 'Times have changed. Sunt lacrymae rerum, nos et mutamur in illis. ' He laughed his own applause.

' Quot homines, tot disputandum est ,' said Gumbril, taking another sip of his Beaune Supérieure. At the moment, he was all for Mercaptan.

'But why is it too late?' Lypiatt insisted.

Mr Mercaptan made a delicate gesture. ' Ça se sent, mon cher ami ,' he said, ' ça ne s'explique pas .' Satan, it is said, carries hell in his heart; so it was with Mr Mercaptan—wherever he was, it was Paris. 'Dreams in nineteen twenty–two….' He shrugged his shoulders.

'After you've accepted the war, swallowed the Russian famine,' said Gumbril. 'Dreams!'

'They belonged to the Rostand epoch,' said Mr Mercaptan, with a little titter. ' Le Rève —ah!'

Lypiatt dropped his knife and fork with a clatter and leaned forward, eager for battle. 'Now I have you,' he said, 'now I have you on the hip. You've given yourselves away. You've given away the secret of your spiritual poverty, your weakness and pettiness and impotence….'

'Impotence? You malign me, sir,' said Gumbril.

Shearwater ponderously stirred. He had been silent all this time, sitting with hunched shoulders, his elbows on the table, his big round head bent forward, absorbed, apparently, in the slow meticulous crumbling of a piece of bread. Sometimes he put a piece of crust in his mouth and under the bushy black moustache his jaw moved slowly, ruminatively, with a sideways motion, like a cow's. He nudged Gumbril with his elbow. 'Ass,' he said, 'be quiet.'

Lypiatt went on torrentially. 'You're afraid of ideals, that's what it is. You daren't admit to having dreams. Oh, I call them dreams,' he added parenthetically. 'I don't mind being thought a fool and old–fashioned. The word's shorter and more English. Besides, it rhymes with gleams. Ha, ha!' And Lypiatt laughed his loud Titan's laugh, the laugh of cynicism which seems to belie, but which, for those who have understanding, reveals the high, positive spirit within. 'Ideals—they're not sufficiently genteel for you civilized young men. You've quite outgrown that sort of thing. No dream, no religion, no morality.'

'I glory in the name of earwig,' said Gumbril. He was pleased with that little invention. It was felicitous; it was well chosen. 'One's an earwig in sheer self–protection,' he explained.

But Mr Mercaptan refused to accept the name of earwig at any price. ' What there is to be ashamed of in being civilized, I really don't know,' he said, in a voice that was now the bull's, now the piping robin's. 'No, if I glory in anything, it's in my little rococo boudoir, and the conversations across the polished mahogany, and the delicate, lascivious, witty little flirtations on ample sofas inhabited by the soul of Crebillon Fils. We needn't all be Russians, I hope. These revolting Dostoievskys.' Mr Mercaptan spoke with a profound feeling. 'Nor all Utopians. Homo au naturel —' Mr Mercaptan applied his thumb and forefinger to his, alas! too snout–like nose, ' ça pue . And as for Homo à la H.G. Wells— ça ne pue pas assez . What I glory in is the civilized, middle way between stink and asepsis. Give me a little musk, a little intoxicating feminine exhalation, the bouquet of old wine and strawberries, a lavender bag under every pillow and potpourri in the corners of the drawing–room. Readable books, amusing conversation, civilized women, graceful art and dry vintage, music, with a quiet life and reasonable comfort—that's all I ask for.'

'Talking about comfort,' Gumbril put in, before Lypiatt had time to fling his answering thunders, 'I must tell you about my new invention. Pneumatic trousers,' he explained. 'Blow them up. Perfect comfort. You see the idea? You're a sedentary man, Mercaptan. Let me put you down for a couple of pairs.'

Mr Mercaptan shook his head. 'Too Wellsian,' he said. 'Too horribly Utopian. They'd be ludicrously out of place in my boudoir. And besides, my sofa is well enough sprung already, thank you.'

'But what about Tolstoy?' shouted Lypiatt, letting out his impatience in a violent blast.

Mr Mercaptan waved his hand. 'Russian,' he said, 'Russian.'

'And Michelangelo?'

'Alberti,' said Gumbril, very seriously, giving them all a piece of his father's mind—'Alberti was much the better architect, I assure you.'

'And pretentiousness for pretentiousness,' said Mr Mercaptan, 'I prefer old Borromini and the baroque.'

'What about Beethoven?' went on Lypiatt. 'What about Blake? Where do they come in under your scheme of things?'

Mr Mercaptan shrugged his shoulders. 'They stay in the hall,' he said. 'I don't let them into the boudoir.'

'You disgust me,' said Lypiatt, with rising indignation, and making wilder gestures. 'You disgust me—you and your odious little sham eighteenth–century civilization; your piddling little poetry; your art for art's sake instead of for God's sake; your nauseating little copulations without love or passion; your hoggish materialism; your bestial indifference to all that's unhappy and your yelping hatred of all that's great.'

'Charming, charming,' murmured Mr Mercaptan, who was pouring oil on his salad.

'How can you ever hope to achieve anything decent or solid, when you don't even believe in decency or solidity? I look about me,' and Lypiatt cast his eyes wildly round the crowded room, 'and I find myself alone, spiritually alone. I strive on by myself, by myself.' He struck his breast, a giant, a solitary giant. 'I have set myself to restore painting and poetry to their rightful position among the great moral forces. They have been amusements, they have been mere games for too long. I am giving my life for that. My life.' His voice trembled a little. 'People mock me, hate me, stone me, deride me. But I go on, I go on. For I know I'm right. And in the end they too will recognize that I've been right.' It was a loud soliloquy. One could fancy that Lypiatt had been engaged in recognizing himself.

'All the same,' said Gumbril with a cheerful stubbornness, 'I persist that the word "dreams" is inadmissible.'