Rotting Hill

by Lewis, Wyndham

  But to return from the general to the particular, my visitor was a hulking forty-something, hatless, spectacled. Not come as the well-heeled patron, surely. Just dropped up from a by-no-means fashionable watering-place to get a glass of milk, trying to look at once commanding and appealing as the farmer’s wife comes to the door.

  My first impressions I was obliged later very radically to scrap, to Rymer’s advantage, I mean. I am the possessor of a tough eye. It does not soften what it sees: it hands me everything like a photographer’s untouched photograph. In this case, it noted with a relentless acuity what had narrowly escaped being a lantern jaw, which it was only prevented from degenerating into by his masterful vitality. It registered the eloquent feminine mouth which pursed itself almost primly and then shot out its lips at right angles, the rest of the mouth not moving, to be a spout for speech to rabble-rouse or to exhort—as urchins do in their word-battles. He reads verse better than anyone I have ever heard: he was the quietest crooner, he was soft like a man talking to himself about something he had seen, at once matter-of-fact and unearthly. And he knew the weight in Heaven of every word in the dictionary.

  As I saw him for the first time I observed of course the eyes of a somewhat worried but stubbornly amused, big dog. I saw that the nose was shapely, the brow large. Those first impressions did not have to be modified: but in the end one would forget the ecclesiastical chin-line; one would assess at their proper value the disfigurements associated with eloquent verbal discharges—such as the spout-like propensities of the shooting-lips, the wildly wrinkled brow.

  There was no clerical collar on his large weather-beaten neck. It was framed instead with the gaping collar of a soft blue shirt. “Where is your collar?” I demanded. Minus his master’s name upon a brass-plate, collarless and unidentifiable, this big dog was at large in London. But, “Got it in my pocket!” came popping out the brisk rejoinder: “Do you want me to put it on?” He had produced it and held it in his hand. “Not before coming in,” I said. “Not at once,” he echoed, putting the collar back in the pocket.

  The collar had looked authentic. “Please come this way,” said I, leading my incognito man-of-god upstairs, into my work room. I looked narrowly at him of course. We were there under the vast sculptor’s window: he exposed his rugged worried countenance to the glare of the sky without an unbecoming diffidence, but quite simply as if to say, “Well here I am. Since you seem inclined to scrutinize my person, this is what I look like.” I was searching for signs of the Rot, of course.

  What he actually said was: “You must have thought it great cheek for me to write to you. I feel I am here under false pretences.” “You must not feel that,” I said. “Why should you?”

  “It is very good of you to say so.”

  “Please sit down,” I told him as I sat down myself. He followed suit, silently. Rather stiffly expectant he sat there as if awaiting my next move. I sat studying him, however, and he did not look at me.

  It was not that he really felt in a false position, I’m sure of that: and there is nothing shy about Rymer. At this first meeting, for a little while, I had a sense of a youthful manner: of an attempt rather curious in view of his massive maturity—to suggest the early years of manhood. This did not survive our first meeting. It was perhaps a manner he adopted, under certain circumstances, with strangers. I think he produces (however battered it may be) the undergraduate he once was. In any case, it was a very different approach to the aggressive book-slapping of the Museum.

  “You like pictures?” I enquired, as I saw him looking at a Rowlandson which hung near him.

  “I do very much. I have some. Two or three, perhaps you might like.”

  “I understand you wish to add to your collection?” I then said, for this patron would have to be brought to the point, if he was a patron. And if he was not, it was best to find out what his errand was. His response was satisfactorily prompt and clear.

  “Yes. I should like to acquire a work of yours, unless it is altogether beyond my means.”

  After I had produced two small canvases, and perhaps a dozen drawings, he stuck one of the drawings up against the back of a chair, returned to where he had been sitting and proceeded to examine it (from much too far off, as a matter of fact). It was a large, strongly coloured, gouache of a number of nude horsemen. Rigidly stylized, certainly; but with the black arcs of the horses’ legs against a shining lagoon, and so on, possessing enough romantic literary appeal to recommend it to an intelligent clergyman. I knew it would look far better on his walls than he could foresee.

  I left him in front of the drawing, and went downstairs to answer the telephone. When I returned he was standing up. He asked me whether I would sell the drawing—he liked it very much. I told him I was glad and the price of it was thirty pounds.

  He began making out a cheque, saying as he did so, “May I take it away with me?” There was no objection of course, and shortly he handed me that cheque and received the drawing wrapped in brown paper, with an arrow to show where it should be held. I pushed cigarettes over; he took a horrific pipe from his pocket and asked if he might be allowed to smoke. We neither of us wished to terminate the interview with the production of the cheque (I was quite prepared to find that it bounced). We talked for a short while about pictures—my hours of work, my training in Paris—the disadvantages of the naked overhead sky as a source of light. Then he had pipe-trouble, and when we were able to converse again I asked him about himself. What manner of life did he live at Bagwick Rectory and if he came up to London?

  No, he did not come to London often. He could not afford to: and very quickly I found we had passed into astonishingly uninhibited intercourse. Yielding to my discreet invitations he opened up, and I looked in, as if into a woman’s handbag. I must confess that what I saw there in the matter of hard cash embarrassed me for a moment. The thirty pounds in my pocket (in the form of a cheque) had left about tuppence three farthings; all mixed up with the bus-tickets and hair-pins and little girlish secrets. And far from being averse, I found, from laying bare economic secrets, he relished exposing them. Somewhat abashed, as I have said, by his unexpected exhibitions, I steered off on to more general subjects. I attempted to distract him with racontars and perhaps a few caustic indiscretions. In these early hours of our friendship, I recall, Rymer played the parson a little. For instance, in response to one of my exposures of a colleague’s vanity he exclaimed “You wicked man!” as parsons had in England in the heyday of the Cloth, over muffins and seed cake—the parsons the inimitable du Maurier, and Trollope, too, of course, were acquainted with.

  While these pleasantries were occurring I had time to think. My new patron’s annual income as Rector of Bagwick was, he disclosed, theoretically six pounds a week, but naturally it was not tax-free and neither he nor his wife had any means of their own. The pound sterling slides downhill all the time, but there is one thing that is stationary as a rock in England, namely the clergyman’s stipend. That does not rise correspondingly. Clergymen cannot strike so their wages are not adjustable to meet rises in the cost of living. Had I unaware got a dustman for a patron I should have been amused: as it was I said a little crossly, “So you are paying me a month’s salary?” “Yes,” with firm relish he assented—it amused him as much as if he had been a ragpicker: “Yes—about.”

  I privately examined the likelihood of his being a phoney. Of course I could have given him the thing. If he was really so poor a clergyman I would do that. I decided to be cautious. Then I enquired, “Why are you indulging, Mr. Rymer, in this absurd extravagance?” and something like the following dialogue ensued:

  Myself. “You have about five shillings a week pocket money?”

  Rev. Rymer. “Sometimes!”

  Myself. “Is not this drawing an absurd extravagance?”

  Rev. Rymer. “That’s what my daughter says!” (In a classy rhetorical whine—apt to terminate in a comic wail—to which he was sometimes addicted.)

  Myself. “Y
ou’re a wicked man!”

  Rev. Rymer. “Yes,” with unabated promptitude, “I’m a miserable sinner!”

  Myself (kindly). “Does not your conscience prick you?”

  Rev. Rymer. “Ought it to?” (Parsonically quizzical.)

  Myself. “I know mine ought to, if I accept money for that drawing, now I know your circumstances.”

  Rev. Rymer. “That is absurd. It was generous of you to let me have it so cheaply. I make a little money on the side.”

  Myself. “How?”

  Rev Rymer. “Oh, by coaching. Not very much, but it is a little. I only spend that, on my London trips—and this, of course.”

  Myself. “I have a special cheap rate for poor men of religion, ‘rich of holy thought and work’. You could have availed yourself of that. Had I known…”

  Rev. Rymer. “Have you a special fee?” (He gurgled merrily.) “Have you many of us as clients?”

  Myself. “Quite a few. But you can’t even afford… You would be straining your resources if you bought a picture-postcard Sunflower of Van Gogh!”

  Rev. Rymer. “Oh well, provided we can laugh at such embarrassments.”

  Myself. “Poverty is not a laughing matter—for an artist. For a priest it is the preordained condition and affluence is disgraceful. You can go on laughing.”

  Rev. Rymer. “But I am not really poor. I live in the country. You do not realize how inexpensive life is at Bagwick.”

  Myself. “You six-quid-a-week capitalist!”

  Rymer is an individual not without dignity. He is large and serious and worried. And he is quite exceptionally arrogant. If he heard this he would not like it, but he is the most aggressive dogmatist I know, as was indicated in my preamble. If your electric oven is a serious problem, or your studio painfully hot in summer, he will, with his invariable promptitude and patness, and with an affectation of salesmanship technique, propose a gadget to regulate the first, and install (in theory) a novel ventilation system to correct the second. There is no handicap he will not convert in the twinkling of an eye into a triumphant asset. Should you suffer from asthma he will be your doctor: if you are a philosopher assailed with doubt he will overhaul your system—or if you do not fancy a system, he will show you the best way to get on without one, as a light-hearted empiricist.

  It is easy to see how a village-priest is apt to develop into a wiseacre, and where this technique might be highly appropriate. Of course with me he has to behave himself up to a point, but he would be a bad man to have around if one were in a wordly position defenceless against this amateur lawgiver. Though a kind man, he could not resist the opportunity. He literally boils with the heat of his private absolute. Sometimes I have had to wrestle jovially for hours with this didactic dragon.

  If this is a fault which takes up a good deal of room here, out of proportion to its importance, his virtues are unusual. He is one of those men with whom one finds oneself conversing at once with the freedom of two tramps meeting at a dusty cross-road, open to one another in the freemasonry of the propertyless. He is touched with the heroism of the destitute, even if it is malgré lui that he is of that caste. He is not a throw-back to the religious mendicant, he is an advance copy (imperfect but authentic) of the hobo-holiness of Tomorrow. So actually we get on because both are poor, and a fastidious absence of dignity (the intelligent hall-mark of English education) neutralizes, in its operation, such faults as the relic of class-bossiness, in its parsonic form, which I have described. Oxford has cooked Rymer so successfully that whatever else he may be he is not raw. At times I have felt he is over-cooked, or perhaps it would be better to say overoxfordized.

  A clerical playboy he emphatically is not. But at times il en a l’air. Much is, as I have suggested, mannerism induced by métier. I hope the man of parts I write of is not disappearing beneath such elaboration: not this poor clergyman who forgets he has no money, who yearns for honour—who certainly has dreamt of fame, but who dreams incessantly now of social justice and a new, bright, bossy, fraternal world—a new Jerusalem. He comes from a part of England that has bred rebels like rabbits. His verse is of a wizard elegance, the song of a rather mechanically cheerful bird, on the highest and frostiest bough in a frost like the last frost of all, celebrating the winter of our discontent as though it were the morning of the world.

  With a brave curl of the chapped lip Rymer is ready to take on his cavernous jaw whatever buffet, in spite of his prayers, cruel Providence swings at him. This, if not mute, inglorious Rymer, eating his heart out in a remote rectory, risks going short of fuel or food every time he buys a ticket for King’s Cross for no strictly clerical purpose—just to come up for air: to spend a few days in London, go to hear Grosser preach, go to see a high-brow film at the Academy, or stare at paintings in the small Galleries.

  It took quite some time to digest Rymer. It was like overcoming the flamboyance of French prose in an author who by chance has something to say. His verse is the reverse of the personality however. If he conversationally bludgeons his way through the world, if that is the outer animal, within he is attentive and quiet. On top of all is social splashings, but beneath there abides in the Rymerian deeps something which is only seen in his verse, which has at times a submerged quality of great intensity. It might be the noiseless canticle of a cephalopod. I shall have to take back the wintry mechanical bird, this is a better image.

  How it was we came, at our first meeting, to be communicating with such rugged readiness immediately will be a little plainer presently perhaps. Rymer did not come in as a stranger you see—almost with a “hallo!” He refuses to be a stranger to anybody. He has the secret I think of his divine Master, he is no mere official of the Church. Within five minutes, with someone he had never seen before in his life, he would be telling him how to fix his lighter, the best way to get to sleep at night, or in what to invest his money.

  The talk about his status as a patron, to go back to that, died down. Further personal revelations however followed. His situation looked to me a very ugly one. At this point the actual field-work began. What he was telling me, now, concerned his position as Rector, and it was related to the new standing of all the rural clergy in England. The final ruin of the landed society was factor number one, though Heaven knows no traditional Squire would have tolerated Rymer—he himself representing a new brand of parson. However, before I proceed I ought to say that the information I am about to impart was not all acquired on the first day we met. Nor, of course, was Rymer the Rymer I now know yet. The process of progressive understanding by means of which density is acquired by the phantom stranger, even with such an extrovert as Rymer demands some little time. Again, the facts he divulged concerning his life at Bagwick I only fully grasped the meaning of when a little later I passed some time in the different parts of the post-war English countryside. I went where he lived and functioned too, and checked at first-hand. So what is the narrative proper will now begin, ending with the last news I have had of him—most disagreeable events which I fear will change his life for the worse.

  English village life until quite recently was, of course, dominated by the Squire: the old order, which had long ceased to have any meaning in the towns, clung on in the English villages. It was with the Squire that the Rector, or Vicar, had to deal. Often he owed his appointment to the local big landowner, and in any case he was apt to have the most say in questions relating to the Church. That is still the position in many places, certainly, though it is manifest that this last faint shadow of the feudal situation is about to disappear completely. From the fifteenth to the twentieth century has been an interminable fade-out. In what an American magazine described as “the Crippsean Ice Age” there is no room for the “country gentleman”; even a clergyman in the old sense must be an outrageous exotic.

  Those of the landowning class who have disposed of their “seats”, parks and estates, may even now not be the majority. Comedy to which they are not averse, lightens the lot of those who will not be frozen out of
their seats, or who retain a toe-hold in some cumbersome seventeenth-century Renaissance palace. Some convert their country seats into apartment houses for local businessmen (I know of such cases in Wales for instance), themselves occupying a modest suite in one of the flanking towers—from which vantage-point they can keep an eye on their lodgers. One, I know, lived alone with a man-servant and his now decrepit nannie, in a house about the size of Wellington Barracks. The Park is now a golf-links, the Club-house a hundred yards or so from the Hall: tradesmen from the neighbouring city put and stibble all around the main entrance. Then I remember being told of a well-known Marquess and his Marchioness who dig and hoe side by side in the vegetable garden adjacent to their palace (which they would describe of course as a “country-house”), inhabiting the few rooms that can be kept clean with a vacuum cleaner wielded by an elderly domestic or by the not very robust Marchioness. Finally, there are those who live in a gardener’s house upon the estate and act as cicerone to sightseers come to visit the huge and ostentatious shell where one of the greatest lords of England used to live in state. There is one case of this sort in which a handsome young Countess, a former “school teacher”, married to the earl during the blitz, escorts parties around. It is reported that she levels some very caustic cracks at her husband’s ancestors, whose portraits snootily placard the towering walls of the rooms of state.

  Seeing how long ago the feudal age ended, it is remarkable how intense a sentiment of pleasurable inferiority still subsisted in the English countryside as late as the first years of the present century, from which the Church derived advantage, and which sentiment it encouraged. Anyone familiar with the countryside before the radio and the automobile, would be inclined to feel that the end of the Manor must mean the end of the Church. But Rymer has a quite different destiny for the Church. What he would really like, I believe, is that it should replace the Manor.