Олдос Хаксли - Antic Hay

'Dear me!' said Rosie, looking at the title–page.

'But now,' said Mr Mercaptan, sitting down beside her on the edge of Crébillon, 'won't you please explain? To what happy quiproquo do I owe this sudden and altogether delightful invasion of my privacy?'

'Well,' said Rosie, and hesitated. It was really rather difficult to explain. 'I was to meet a friend of mine.'

'Quite so,' said Mr Mercaptan encouragingly.

'Who sent me a telegram,' Rosie went on.

'He sent you a telegram!' Mr Mercaptan echoed.

'Changing the—the place we had fixed and telling me to meet him at this address.'

'Here?'

Rose nodded. 'On the s—second floor,' she made it more precise.

'But I live on the second floor,' said Mr Mercaptan. 'You don't mean to say your friend is also called Mercaptan and lives here too?'

Rosie smiled. 'I don't know what he's called,' she said with a cool ironical carelessness that was genuinely grande dame .

'You don't know his name?' Mr Mercaptan gave a roar and a squeal of delighted laughter. 'But that's too good,' he said.

'S—second floor, he wrote in the telegram.' Rosie was now perfectly at her ease. 'When I saw your name, I thought it was his name. I must say,' she added, looking sideways at Mr Mercaptan and at once dropping the magnolia petals of her eyelids, 'it seemed to me a very charming name.'

'You overwhelm me,' said Mr Mercaptan, smiling all over his cheerful, snouty face. 'As for your name—I am too discreet a galantuomo to ask. And, in any case, what does it matter? A rose by any other name…'

'But, as a matter of fact,' she said, raising and lowering once again her smooth, white lids, 'my name does happen to be Rose; or, at any rate, Rosie.'

'So you are sweet by right!' exclaimed Mr Mercaptan, with a pretty gallantry which he was the first to appreciate. 'Let's order tea on the strength of it.' He jumped up and rang the bell. 'How I congratulate myself on this astonishing piece of good fortune!'

Rosie said nothing. This Mr Mercaptan, she thought, seemed to be even more a man of the great artistic world than Toto.

'What puzzles me,' he went on, 'is why your anonymous friend should have chosen my address out of all the millions of others. He must know me, or, at any rate, know about me.'

'I should imagine,' said Rosie, 'that you have a lot of friends.'

Mr Mercaptan laughed—the whole orchestra, from bassoon to piccolo. ' Des amis, des amies —with and without the mute "e",' he declared.

The aged and forbidding servant appeared at the door.

'Tea for two, Mrs Goldie.'

Mrs Goldie looked round the room suspiciously. 'The other gentleman's gone, has he?' she asked. And having assured herself of his absence, she renewed her complaint. 'Shoving in like that,' she said. 'Bolshevism, that's what I—'

'All right, all right, Mrs Goldie. Let's have our tea as quickly as possible.' Mr Mercaptan held up his hand, authoritatively, with the gesture of a policeman controlling the traffic.

'Very well, Master Paster.' Mrs Goldie spoke with resignation and departed.

'But tell me,' Mr Mercaptan went on, 'if it isn't indiscreet—what does your friend look like?'

'W—well,' Rosie answered, 'he's fair, and though he's quite young he wears a beard.' With her two hands she indicated on her own unemphatic bosom the contours of Toto's broad blond fan.

'A beard! But, good heavens,' Mr Mercaptan slapped his thigh, 'it's Coleman, it's obviously and undoubtedly Coleman!'

'Well, whoever it was,' said Rosie severely, 'he played a very stupid sort of joke.'

'For which I thank him. De tout mon coeur. '

Rosie smiled and looked sideways. 'All the same,' she said, 'I shall give him a piece of my mind.'

Poor Aunt Aggie! Oh, poor Aunt Aggie, indeed! In the light of Mr Mercaptan's boudoir her hammered copper and her leadless glaze certainly did look a bit comical.

After tea Mr Mercaptan played cicerone in a tour of inspection round the room. They visited the papier mâché writing–desk, the Condor fans, the Marie Laurencin, the 1914 edition of Du Côté de chez Swann , the Madonna that probably was a fake, the nigger mask, the Chelsea figures, the Chinese object of art in sculptured crystal, the scale model of Queen Victoria in wax under a glass bell. Toto, it became clear, had been no more than a forerunner; the definitive revelation was Mr Mercaptan's. Yes, poor Aunt Aggie! And indeed, when Mr Mercaptan began to read her his little middle on the 'Droit du Seigneur', it was poor everybody. Poor mother, with her absurd, old–fashioned, prudish views; poor, earnest father, with his Unitarianism, his Hibbert Journal , his letters to the papers about the necessity for a spiritual regeneration.

'Bravo!' she cried from the depths of Crébillon. She was leaning back in one corner, languid, serpentine, and at ease, her feet in their mottled snake's leather tucked up under her. 'Bravo!' she cried as Mr Mercaptan finished his reading and looked up for his applause.

Mr Mercaptan bowed.

'You express so exquisitely what we—' and waving her hand in a comprehensive gesture, she pictured to herself all the other fastidious ladies, all the marchionesses of fable, reclining, as she herself at this moment reclined, on upholstery of white satin, 'what we all only feel and aren't clever enough to say.'

Mr Mercaptan was charmed. He got up from before his writing–desk, crossed the room and sat down beside her on Crébillon. 'Feeling,' he said, 'is the im por tant thing.'

Rosie remembered that her father had once remarked, in blank verse: 'The things that matter happen in the heart.'

'I quite agree,' she said.

Like movable raisins in the suet of his snouty face, Mr Mercaptan's brown little eyes rolled amorous avowals. He took Rosie's hand and kissed it. Crébillon creaked discreetly as he moved a little nearer.

It was on the evening of the same day. Rosie lay on her sofa—a poor, hire–purchase thing indeed, compared with Mr Mercaptan's grand affair in white satin and carved and gilded wood, but still a sofa—lay with her feet on the arm of it and her long suave legs exposed, by the slipping of the kimono, to the top of her stretched stockings. She was reading the little vellum–jacketed volume of Crébillon, which Mr Mercaptan had given her when he said 'good–bye' (or rather, ' À bientôt, mon amie '); given, not lent, as he had less generously offered at the beginning of their afternoon; given with the most graceful of allusive dedications inscribed on the fly–leaf:

To

BY–NO–OTHER–NAME–AS–SWEET,

WITH GRATITUDE,

FROM

CRÉBILLON DELIVERED.

À bientôt —she had promised to come again very soon. She thought of the essay on the 'Jus Primæ Noctis'—ah! what we've all been feeling and none of us clever enough to say. We on the sofas, ruthless, lovely and fastidious….

'I am proud to constitute myself'—Mr Mercaptan had said of it—' l'esprit d'escalier des dames galantes .'

Rosie was not quite sure what he meant; but it certainly sounded very witty indeed.

She read the book slowly. Her French, indeed, wasn't good enough to permit her to read it anyhow else. She wished it were better. Perhaps if it were better she wouldn't be yawning like this. It was disgraceful: she pulled herself together. Mr Mercaptan had said that it was a masterpiece.

In his study, Shearwater was trying to write his paper on the regulative functions of the kidneys. He was not succeeding.

Why wouldn't she see me yesterday? he kept wondering. With anguish he suspected other lovers; desired her, in consequence, the more. Gumbril had said something, he remembered, that night they had met her by the coffee–stall. What was it? He wished now that he had listened more attentively.