Thumbed his nose at England’s Molluigheadly,
And told him very glolmondeley
That his uncle Tsniesakovsky
Died from a sneeze and coughski
Caught in pronouncing Cholmondeley.
Nicholas began to smile as he sorted it out from the phonetic tangle, and old Charndale rubbed his nose and said: “Sent it to old Molluigheadly in the hope that he’d get sense and spell it Mewdly. Ha! No use. Dug into his name like I’m dug into this club. Well, how the devil do I get down to that place Champ ton?”
“Well, dammit, it’s not far from me. Drive down with me. They can either meet you at my village, or I’ll get Blake to drive you on.”
They arranged that Charndale should telephone his host to meet him at the Barrington post office. Charndale thanked Nicholas. “That’s splendid. Might never have gone down if you hadn’t suggested this. Can’t dig myself out, you know.” Now Charndale seemed to be speaking to himself. “Always a bit nervous about going back into the country, you know.”
He put away the book of flies, and Nicholas guessed that he was not, after all, a dried-up old stick but an old man with some mortal wound in his soul. Evidently he was afraid to go into the country because he loved it, and it would only touch old chords to a sad music. Nicholas knew vaguely that Charndale had gone bust and sold his country place and had gathered hints that he was a picturesque character in his heyday. But there did not seem to be much sign of fallen glory in the old black-suited man in the chair. But what did the English ever know about an Englishman?
Nicholas looked about the room. By God, no Trappist monks in their silent monastery were so secluded from each other as all these members. What an extraordinary institution the St. James club was! Outside there were Hollywood cinemas and clubs with Negro music and theaters with Freudian plays and Manhattan leg shows and galleries that had paintings with square apples and all the higgle-piggledom of the jazz age as the world closed up to 1939: but in here they lived in a solitude of the past and woke now and again from their slumber to repose their eyes on the old prints of horses and carriages and asked Glynde to shut the windows to keep out the noise of taxis raucous in a traffic jam. And there was old Clibshaw, who insisted that Carraway should take out the carriage step each time he got into his old yellow car that was like Lonsdale’s mustard box, as near as a motorcar could be made to resemble a brougham. And sometimes Conkyrie came up from the shire and took down the post horn in the hall and sounded it to call a cab and hailed the driver as “Coachman!” And it was only five years ago at Ascot that Conkyrie had made his famous reply to an American who said: “Well, Dock, I want to know England!” Conkyrie had cocked up his cigar and replied in his grand manner: “I am England. Why the devil should I let you know me!” It was ridiculous, but grand.
Nicholas looked at Charndale and saw the yellowing skin on his bony face and how even the proud nose was beginning to wrinkle and noticed his eyes closing in his afternoon nap. And Nicholas suddenly thought of Elder and realized that Charndale also had a Chinese room. All of these men had a Chinese room in their minds. They slept, and went into their Chinese rooms, and waited for death in this club as a man might wait for death in his own coffin. The clubs were the coffins of old England. Nicholas looked at the clock. Charndale was down somewhere by a stream in the sunlight, his heart beating faintly underneath that wallet of gorgeous flies. Nicholas got up. England snored, as the world went up and down the street on busy engines.
Charndale was reinforcing himself with a three-decker brandy in an enormous glass when Nicholas called for him just after five o’clock.
“Got to brace myself for the country air. Knock me over if I don’t have some brandy in me. Glynde, two more of these!”
“Good God, is this all brandy?” said Nicholas when the drinks arrived.
“Dammit, you don’t think I’d order you water, Bude!”
“Lord, I can’t drink this at this time of day!”
“Good, God, what is England coming to! You can’t drink a three-decker at five o’clock! In my day, we drank by the bottle, not by the clock. Come on, man!”
Nicholas raised his glass. There was no use in arguing with Charndale. There was a nice rosy tinge in the old man’s face. Nicholas guessed that he was excited by his adventuring back into the country. He had an awful feeling that Charndale under the influence of the green fields and the golden brandy might open his soul to him on the journey down. Now that he had divined that Charndale buried himself in London because of his intolerable love for the countryside, he feared a disclosure of whatever history lay within the yellow page of his face. But now Charndale smacked home his brandy, and they went out into the hallway to find Carraway ready with an old shabby Gladstone bag.
Charndale sat himself in the Rolls-Royce as if he would have been happier in an old gig.
“Hate that damned fug-hole,” he grunted. “Don’t know why I live there!”
Nicholas was surprised by the rasp in his voice as he spoke of the club. Then Charndale relaxed into silence as they drove through London. He woke Up as they passed a block of stone by the curb of a street in which the old livery-stable sign still gave its name to a garage.
“Hum. Old mounting block still there! Takes a man to get on a horse. Any old woman can get into a car.” There was another long silence, and as they went into the suburbs Charndale grunted again and closed his eyes. Nicholas thought he was going to sleep, then realized that he might have shut his eyes to avoid seeing the ugly houses. Soon the gregarious suburb began to scatter into green outskirts, and at last, as if he smelled it, Charndale opened his eyes and cocked it on the first green field.
“Ha, beginning to feel at home now!”
Charndale rummaged in his old bag and got out a green stalking hat furnished with fly and feather and cocked it over his eye that seemed to get a permanent wink in it as he expanded suddenly into ribald and marvelous tales of moonlight gallops, elopements, wild gig races.
“Pah, these young people think we are fools to keep our horses and traps in the country still. Don’t know what they are talking about. Don’t know what hoofs say on the road, nor what the wheels of a carriage sing. Bah, this car—don’t mean to be rude—is just a glass cage to keep you from the country. Young people today always going somewhere. Never realize that somewhere is where they are. Think England’s always round the corner. Like a farmer coming to London to buy hay. Ridiculous. Whole damned world today going to its own funeral. So what the devil is the hurry? Might as well jog along as gallop to a graveyard. Bah.”
Charndale let down the window and felt the green oxygen come into his lungs, and somehow old England reddened on his tongue, and Nicholas felt that he could hear the heartbeat of hoofs on the turnpike road. He was surprised to find they had reached Barrington.
“Oh, lovely old village, Bude!”
“Yes.”
There was a limousine waiting on the road across from the post office, and Nicholas guessed it was for Charndale. Blake pulled up by the post office, and Nicholas leaned his head out to question the chauffeur of the limousine on the other side of the road.
Then he hear Charndale gasp and exclaim: “By the Lord Harry, a real fizzer! Didn’t think they bred ‘em like that any more!” Nicholas looked around. “Just gone into the post office, Bude. No wonder you live down here! Going to wait here until she comes out. Hope you know her! Is that the Molluigheadly car? Good? Well, I enjoyed the trip. Damned good of you. Green smell in my nose again. Old heart going for a canter over the fields...By Gad, here she comes I The real spunk in her! Just touch her and she’d jump like a trout. Look at the way she swings from the loin like a thoroughbred. Legs that are legs all the way up!” She stopped to talk to old Siddleby, the market gardener, and Charndale kept on talking about her with a ringside, look in his eye. “Like a thunderstorm of gold! Mouth that clings to the eye. Moist as a blood rose on a dewy morning. Go through the regiment in my day like a forest fire. Enough to make Byro
n rise in his grave. God, I wish I had the old rosin in me now. I’d be gone a mile down the road with her already. Take her from my own brother. Good on top, too. Like a woman with something in front. Most of ‘em built like a board now. Coffin-chested. Can feel a girl like her trembling like a blood filly on the rein. By Gad, there’s something still growing on the green fields of England. O for the young Lochinvar! Haven’t seen a woman like that since...Oh, she knows you!”
Blake touched his cap and opened the door.
“Hello, Nick, just walked down to get the post.”
“Hello. Do you know Lord Charndale? My wife.”
“Good God...Ahm, how dy’e do, Mrs. Bude.” Charndale was trying to get his wind again. “Your husband has just given me a lift down.” He turned to Nicholas. “I’ll be damned if I apologize to you! You could have stopped me.” He looked Muriel up and down. “I stand by all I said.”
Before they parted, Charndale had asked himself to lunch at Barrington on his way back from Champton. As he drove away in the Molluigheadly car, he muttered: “Whew! Where the hell did he get her! By the Lord Henry God, she’d salt Methuselah’s rump and send him bucking like a mustang!”
Nicholas sat almost silent in the car as Blake took them slowly up to Barrington. He looked at Muriel as if he had only just met her for the first time. Charndale wasn’t the kind to throw his tongue unless a woman was worth the music. Now she was glowing like a Polynesian girl, and her eyes, catching light from the blue jewel she wore below her throat, burned like Caribbean pools. She was a thunderstorm of gold, as Charndale had put it in his vivid phrasing. And her frock, a gypsy that laughed at Paris, could not burn up her golden skin in all its brilliant flames. Something throbbed out of her like electricity and rippled into his blood. What in God’s name was happening to her? Last summer she would not have sprung such an excitement in Charndale. Thoughts flared up in Nicholas like the flamenco lightnings in her frock and burned themselves out in air. He was glad when they got home. When he got out of the car he had a curious feeling that he had stepped down into a sudden silence. He wondered if her orchestra of colors had made that sensation of noise in the car. And then he realized that it wasn’t that or the humming of the engine. It had been his own tumultuous blood thrumming into his head.
Beyond the hills the sun in a phantasmagoria of clouds was an extravaganza of light. Muriel stood on the lawn within its glow, like a Tahitian girl in a tropical garden. Nicholas, standing on the gravel in his blue suit with his case in his hand, felt somehow like a tired clerk waiting for the six-fifteen at Waterloo and looking at a poster of a glorious island thousands of miles away. Muriel ran down the lawn with the dogs, and her frock glittered like a Brazilian bird and soon she was lost under a rainbow of light. Nicholas sat on the rustic seat by the steps and felt that he could no more reach her than he could read that strange Arabian script on the page that Elder had shown him. The woman who had been too familiar now had become too foreign. What the hell more did he know of her than he knew of Elder and Sidonie? They were all like Orientals in a Chinese room. He remembered his remark to Elder that he liked life to be clear and plain in black and white. What a damn fool Elder must have thought him, from his Chinese room. He looked down at the lodge that now was lost under a blue smoke like an opium haze. Whatever was the reason, ever since that crazy Fuidge girl had committed death by her own hand, the whole of his familiar world was revolving under his feet like a magic carpet that he could not get a foothold on. Elder was a Chinaman behind the green door in the mews; Sidonie was an Indian temple girl who purged him of lust; and now Muriel had become a Tahitian beauty with fragrant oils inside her golden belly. And he had got to the stage when he felt he knew as much about himself as he did about that Buddha shining in amber light in Elder’s house...
Ah, here was Margaret calling him for his teal He went into the drawing room and poured out a cup. Then he got up and went over and looked at the Chinese landscape that was as shining and transparent as if it had been got somehow on to a surface of air by a glass blower instead of being painted on cloth or wood or whatever solid the artist used. Then he looked out at the green lawn of Barrington with its single oaks and black Jerseys and suddenly he felt that he knew as much about what lay within and behind the Chinese landscape with its temples and yellow bullocks and languid drover as he did about this English lawn. Suddenly from nowhere a saying of his father’s came into his mind: “I must go and have a good talk with myself 1” He recalled the old mans hoary tongue and homely wisdom, and went upstairs and sat down in his bedroom and asked himself what the hell he wanted out of life or if he wanted anything at all or if he was getting anything at all or if there was anything at all to get.
After some time it began to sort itself out in his mind. From the time he had gone into the bank until he met Muriel, he had on the whole been content with the job of qualifying himself to be head of an important bank. That meant a knowledge of the Bourse and Wall Street and the City and enough political background to handle those profitable imperial loans and to understand the mind of that honest rogue, the Englishman. He knew that he was the youngest man in England, or perhaps in the world, to hold his position, and he tried to age his mind. After one year in the chair, he had become, like an Etonian after one year at Eton, an old man. One by one he had given up games, as he began to sit on government advisory boards and handle loans, and he had long lost any sense of importance in the’ fact that he was a Rowing Blue at Oxford. That kind of thing only mattered to one of those thousand-a-year fellows who sculled or batted their way into a good job or a good club. And now, at the moment, he was in Dorman’s Royal Flush, as the Council of Five who advised the Treasury was known. He was as good as in the Lords, and he might even get a ministry in the future, as the India loan business had practically bought him a Cabinet chair. In fact, the only thing that made him a doubtful man in the eyes of Whitehall was the suspicion that he was just an efficient robot with no ambition. Whitehall, indeed, had begun to suspect the plain truth that he was bored into his success. He simply did things well because they bored him so much that he wanted to get them out of the way, and thus got a decision out of a Whitehall pigeon hole by the ingenious method of forcing it out by the insertion of his own. He knew what Whitehall thought, and they had guessed the truth. He was bored by the multiplication of the same day over and over again and the piling of one penny upon another. He lived in the cage of Bude’s Bank and was as bored as a parrot whose week is seven Mondays.
He had known all this long ago. Before he met Muriel he had tried to find an interest in woman and had put his head on a few casual pillows—and snored. Always he had dreamed of love as a sudden thunderclap in the blood. His soul would tremble like a seismograph at the earthquake in his belly. It would be something terrible and delicate, like a steaming bull in a grove of spring violets. The peasant in him dreaded it like a storm, and he waited for it to come round the corner of Pall Mall and shake the foundations of the world. In the end it came down St. James on a winter evening on a pair of high-heeled shoes and made no more noise than the whisper of pink knickers coming off in a Clarge’s Street flat. The next one had a coronet on her handbag and a bedroom striped like a tigress. She had snapped at him like a passionate Pomeranian bitch and thought he had gone out because she had scared him with her tremendous jungle lust.
The other five were about the same, and then he had given it up for a couple of years until he met Muriel.
It was the long engagement, Nicholas knew, which had done the harm. But, his parents dead, with no brother or sister in England, he felt like a social orphan, and Mrs. Brampton had adopted him. That extraordinary woman, Mrs. Canjole, had stuck The Times notice of the engagement under his nose, and snapped: “Here’s the obituary notice of another happy marriage!”
He had been angry, but he knew she was right. As the number of bridesmaids grew from two to eight, the wedding began to expand in Mrs. Brampton’s mind until she saw it as the marriage of the Bank
of England to the War Office. She moved it from the village church to a cathedral, dropped the parson for a bishop, when, as Mrs. Cajole had said, all they wanted was a special license and a haycock. In the end everything was according to Who’s Who and The Tatler. And Muriel, a spoke in the wheel of the great English social juggernaut, her ribs almost cracked, as Mrs. Canjole put it, by her mother’s elbow jogging, became more and more wrought up and crushed every day, until, at last, he dreaded to go out with her alone. She knew that her nuptial bed had become a social tombstone long before they got to the wedding. Even in the bright sunlight of their wedding day, Nicholas had a curious feeling that the confetti fell on them as cold as flakes of Siberian snow. All about them baronial England and banking England laughed on the champagne, and their laughter sounded to Nicholas like the rattle of coins made on those colonial loans to dark and profitable corners of the Empire. All day at the reception he could see nothing but his father swinging his pick and rooting out the natural gold from the earth, with salt drops of sweat falling into his mouth and the muscles humped on his back and polished by the sun. And then a Pharaoh back in Cosmopolis, he built the magnificent tomb of Bude’s Bank for the internment of his son.
All that day Nicholas was haunted by the old man who had pioneered with his pick and then pioneered with his loans out into those secret pockets of the Empire until he had got the Colonial Office in the hollow of his hand. Once he had dug for himself, and then he had a hundred thousand black boys digging for him in those blood-red acres on the map of the world where the younger sons of England go. Old Jock Bude would smack his money on the table and spurn the men in the Colonial Office with his tongue and tell them to put their blarney about helping the natives where the Aberdeen men put the sixpence, and again they had to come back to him, for he stood by his saying: “Wherever a pick will go, a pound will travel. Plant money, plow it into the ground, and it will grow.” So he sent it out to grow, and it grew in most places, and, therefore, now The Tatler man was busy photographing Mrs. Brampton talking to a brace of Cabinet ministers, and Nicholas was enjoying his own wedding as much as a corpse enjoys the wake.
The Chinese Room Page 12
