‘“Drawn on!” he says,’ drawled Maunders. ‘When I have not even distantly referred to Joseph’s Coat, or that she-devil Jezebel’s head-dress, or to the Grand Khan, or to the Princess Assinimova, or to the tanned Barbary kid cuirass of steel and emeralds in which Saladin met his end. A Firm that, apart from clients celebrated in Holy Writ, once happily wrote off bad debts incurred with such customers as Semiramis, Sappho, Paris, and the Arch – or, as we amused moderns suppose, the exceedingly arch – Druids, might well boast – though it didn’t – not only of its repute but also of its catholicity.
‘No, no’; he mooned slowly about him. ‘Your precious old “matter-of-fact”! As if you were a clerk in unholy orders, as if you bought your boots in Scotland Yard, as if you were a huckster of hardware. By all means you shall have the facts. But for heaven’s sake – for heaven’s sake, precocious K —, be careful with them. A friend of mine (an earnest man) was once given a fact, and it exploded – in his bathroom.’
Dangling the last-of-the-Lispet’s little basket on my forefinger, I awaited the facts.
‘The point is,’ Maunders murmured on, ‘what of the slightest interest to you can there be to say of a firm that is now dust, and that followed a tradition which in these days would within six months clap its partners into Bedlam or the Bankruptcy Court? You must confess that that kind of sweet reasonableness, hardly less than the modern variety, is at last death to any decent humanity. At long last, maybe. And how divine a decay! Anyhow, there they were – and there, too, are the ruins of them, edging the smooth sloping crest of Adderley Hill, on the other side of the town. Henrietta shall take you there tomorrow, if you’re a polite guest. She loves to expatiate on that kind of rubble – the Failures.
‘Still, try to imagine it, my dear K —, in its green and early days. A long range of low buildings, part half-timbered Tudor, with a few wombed-in bits of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century work, and a fringe of excellent eighteenth-century – weathered and lovely moulded brick. In its prime it must have been a ravishing sight, with its hanging sign of faded blue and gold, its walls and thatch, and shingles, cobbled alleys and water-conduits, worn and mellow with the peace of a thousand thousand sunsets, the mosses and rain-stains and frost-flowerings of centuries of autumns and winters – just England’s history, moral and actual, in antique stone and gable and mullion.
‘That’s as it may be. I have no wish to exaggerate. There is no particular virtue in mere age – except to the imagination. Still, your mere “facts” are something I suppose. The fact that they were spinning silk – here in England – before the Conqueror came over. The fact that they were worldrenowned glovers long before Elizabeth’s time. The fact that their Egyptian cotton must have been abob on the Mediterranean when Lancashire, please God, was a verdant solitude, and your forefathers, my poor dear, were gadding about in woad.
‘They had their foreign agents, of course, netting in handiwork from all over the globe, on which they themselves set the final seal. I won’t labour the point. All I suggest is that you should ask a Bond Street dealer to supply you with a Persian rug of L.L. & V. workmanship. But avoid the First of April for the enterprise. And yet, do you know, there was really nothing at the root of them but – well, a kind of instinct: to keep themselves clean. Animals share it. That, and the pride with which a single virtue darkens and suffocates a man if he isn’t for ever toiling to keep its growth under. The one secret of their stability, of their being, and, in times past, of their success, was simply this – that nothing they should, would, or could ever conceivably offer for sale need disturb for a breath of a sob or the weight of a dewdrop the ashes of their sleeping forefathers in Adderley Churchyard. The like of which their forefathers had done by their forefathers.
‘Why, if the ancient Hebrew Jews bequeath the very droop of their noses, why shouldn’t an old English “House” bequeath its tradition? They believed – not Athanasian fashion but in their insides, so to speak – they believed in that perfect quality and consummate workmanship which, naturally, only exorbitant prices can assure. Exorbitant prices, mind you, not profits. They valued their fair fame. Only what was good enough for a Lispet could hope to satisfy a partner who spelt his name with two t’s, and only what satisfied a Lispett left unashamed the conscience of a Vaine.
‘In plain Anglo-Saxon, the whole thing in decent practical moderation was merely the positive forecast of a Utopian dream. If ever you pass that way, rest for a moment at the mouth of the Well at the World’s End. And drink, pretty creature. Perhaps you will discover a cone supported by two doves scrawled on the bottom of its bronze bucket.’
‘Perhaps,’ I echoed, as cheerfully as possible.
‘At an extreme, of course, this tradition became the very devil. I don’t say they made any claim to be gentry, or that they refused any kind of exalted alliance if nicely and unostentatiously proffered. There’s an old tale of one of their apprentices who went sightseeing in the fourteenth century. Among other little romantic adventures, he hunted the Unicorn, got a siren with child, fought a demon in Babylon, and bartered tiaras with the reigning Pope in Avignon – very much at that precise moment at a loose end.
‘Still a tale’s only a tale, though none the worse for that. You want naked facts – a most indecorous variety; and one of them is that during the nearer centuries the three families riotously intermarried, making the green one red, as the poet says. They were self-sufficient – like Leonardo. Except, of course, that they were artists only in the sense that they designed and distributed objects of flawless craftsmanship; while he was a consummate craftsman only by degree of his supreme art. And that was – or was not – between himself and the infinite, so to speak.’
‘I love your “so-to-speaks,” Maunders.’
‘It’s very nice of you,’ said Maunders. ‘But what I really want to say is that gradually the “standing” of the Firm lost everything in the nature of the precarious. Then, enter Beelzebub. Their only conceivable corruption could come from within, in one or two forms, putrefaction or petrifaction. Well, you shall see. In their earlier annals they can never so much as have tasted temptation to sink to trade devices. Progress, on the other hand, was practically denied to them. Their monopoly was the only one to be had for the asking – their integrity.
‘I am not joking. Their wares were as innocent of guile and as beautiful as the lilies of the field. All they needed for mere prosperity was the status quo. Does Nature? The high and mighty sought them out for precisely the same reason as a young man with imagination pursues that Will-o’-the-Wisp called Beauty. Have you ever noticed how different a respect one has for an advertised article and for an article whose virtues have been sweetly absorbed into one’s soul?
‘Compare, for instance, a cottage loaf with foie gras; or the Mr Anon of the Scottish Ballads with Sappho; or Lord Loveaduck’s “brilliance” with Gamma in Leo. Lispet, Lispett and Vaine would have as gladly catalogued their goods as have asked for references. Advertise! Why, a lady might as well advertise her great-grandmother’s wig. They were merchants of the one true tradition. Their profits were fees. Their arrogance was beyond the imagination of a Tamburlaine, and their – what shall we call them? – their principles were as perennial as the secret springs of the Oceans. It was on similar principles that Satan sold the fruit to Mother Eve.’
‘I see,’ said I. ‘If one can, Maunders – through a haze of contradictions.’
‘You cannot see,’ said Maunders. ‘But that is simply because your modern mind is vitiated by the conviction that you just pay a tradesman to sell you a decent article, that you can with money buy quality. You can’t. L.L. & V. merely graciously bestowed on their customers the excellence of their wares, of their “goods” in the true old meaning of the term – a peculiar something in the style and finish which only the assurance of their history and their intentions – their ideals, if you like – made possible.
‘Good heavens, man, isn’t there a kind of divination between one’s
very soul and a thing decently made – whether it’s a granite Rameses, or a Chelsea porringer? The mere look of a scarf or a snippet of damask or of lawn, or of velvet, a stomacher or a glove of L.L. & V. make is like seeing for the first time a bush of blowing hawthorn or a nymph in a dell of woodruff, when, say, you are nine. Or, for the last, when you are nine-and-ninety.’
‘My dear Maunders,’ I smiled benignly. ‘What on earth are you talking about? I have always supposed that speech was intended to disclose one’s meaning. Nymphs!’
‘Well,’ replied Maunders, imperturbably shoving his “Sheffield” candlestick at last into his slate-covered greatcoat pocket; ‘I merely mean that there is a kind of goodness in good work. It confers a sort of everlasting youth. Think of the really swagger old boys we call the masters. What do you actually get out of them? The power to be momentarily immortal, that’s all. But that’s beside the point. What I wanted to tell you about – and you are a poor receptacle – is, of course, the firm’s inevitable degradation. I have kept you pining too long. First they petrified, and then the stone began to rot away. The process must of course have been very gradual. It was Anthony Lispett who at the same time finished it off, and who yet – at least according to my notion of the thing, though Henrietta does not agree – and who yet redeemed the complete contraption.
‘He must have come into the firm when he was a comparative youngster, say nineteen, towards the end of the eighteenth century. Needless to say, not a single one of the partners, not at least to my knowledge, ever went to a university or any fallalery of that kind. They held aloof from alien ideals. Their “culture” was in their history and in their blood; and not a Methuselah’s lifetime could exhaust even a fraction of that. They had no ambitions; did not mix; kept to themselves. Their ladies made their own county society – sparrowhawk-nosed, sloping-shouldered, high-boned, fair-haired beauties for the most part. It was an honour to know them; to be known by them; a privilege – and one arrogantly reserved, to be among their “customers”. They were Lispet, Lispett and Vaine.
‘Well, this Anthony seems to have been something of an exotic leaven. From the beginning, he was two-thirds himself, plus, if you like, three thirds a Lispett. There is a portrait of him in his youth – an efflorescent Georgian dandy, whiskers, hauteur, eyebrows all complete; a kind of antique Beau Brummel. No doubt the old boys squinted askew at him out of their spectacles, no doubt they nodded at each other about him over their port. No doubt their good ladies pursed their mouths at him over their teacups.
‘But they could no more resist the insidious growth of the creature than Jack’s mother could have held down the sprouting beanstalk. He was clearly the fruit of breeding-in, and of a kind of passive vain-gloriousness, as you will see when Henrietta exhibits the Family Tree.
‘Old John Vaine Lispet Lispett had married his first cousin Jemima Lispett, and Anthony, it seems, was their only child. There is a story that old John himself in his youth had – well, gossip is merely gossip, and gossamer’s merely gossamer, however prolific it may be. And, whether or not, there is no doubt that Anthony in his boyhood had made an attempt to run away. They picked him up seven miles from the coast – half-starved and practically shoeless. He must have been off to Tyre or Damascus, or something of that kind. One knows how one’s worm may turn.
‘Poor child – just that one whiff of freedom, and he was back once more, gluing his nose, beating his fledgling plumes, against an upper window of the house on the hill. The whole thing, top to bottom, was a kind of slavery, of course. The firm had its own Factory Laws.
‘No “hand”, for example was allowed to wear, at least within sight of those windows, any fabric not of the firm’s weaving. No hand ever came into direct contact with one of the partners. There was a kind of hereditary overseer – a family of the name of Watts. Every hand, again, was strictly forbidden to starve. If he or she misbecame himself or herself, instant dismissal followed; and a generous pension.
‘So drastic was the relation between the valley-village and the hill that for upwards of two hundred and fifty years, only one hand had so misbecome herself. She had smiled a little smile one spring morning out of her little bottle-glass casement above her loom at the middle-aged Vaine; and she drew her pension for six months! They say she drowned herself in the Marshes. It is as if you went and hanged yourself for having too short a nose.’
‘I cannot see the analogy,’ said I.
‘No,’ said Maunders, ‘but your Maker would – the Jehovah that blessed the race of the vulture that sold me this old replica of a candlestick. Can’t you understand that her smile was a natural thing (just out of herself), and that he was a kind of sacrosanct old Pharaoh? The discipline was abominable according to our sentimental modern notions. But then, the perquisites were pretty generous.
‘The long and the short of it was that every single one of the firm’s employees was happy. They were happy in the only sense one can be truly happy – in service. Corruptions have swarmed in now, but in the old days the village in the valley must have been as beautiful as a picture of this green old world hung up in the forecourt of Paradise.
‘It had houses contemporary with every wing of the Works on the hilltop. Its wages were for the most part the only decent wages one can accept. They were in kind. What, I ask you, in the sight of heaven is the fittest payment to John Keats for a sonnet – a thousand guineas or a plume of your little Elizabeth’s golden fuzz?
‘I don’t want to sentimentalize. J.K. had to live, I suppose (though why, we may be at loggerheads to explain). But what is porridge without cream, and what is cream if you loathe the cow? I ask you, my dear K., is not a living wage simply one that will keep the kind of life it represents fully alive?
‘Give them the credit, then. L.L. & V. kept their hands positively blossoming with life. I don’t mean they theorized, Marx is merely the boiledup sentiment of a civilization gone wrong. They weren’t philanthropists. Nor am I, please heaven. The quality of the L.L. & V. merchandise ensured quality in their hands. Where we walk now – this macadamized road – was once a wood of birches and bluebells. Can you even imagine its former phantom denizens to have been knocked-kneed or under-hung?’
‘Perhaps not,’ said I, ‘but are you intending to imply that the “phantom denizens,” as you call them, manufacture the bluebells?’
Maunders made an indescribably guttural noise in his throat.
‘What I am saying,’ he replied, ‘is that the village was as lovely a thing to see and live and laugh and love and dream in as were the bodies of the human beings that occupied it. Their stock, too, had climbed from grace to grace. They enjoyed a recognizable type of beauty. The girls were as fair-skinned as a plucking of apricots, with hair of a spidery fine silkenness, and eyes worthy of their veiling. Just Nature’s mimicry, I suppose; like an Amazonian butterfly, or the praying mantis or – or the stick caterpillar.
‘I can see them – and so could you, if you had the eyes – I can see them dancing in the first of early moonlight, or bathing in what, prior to the human spawning of tin cans and old boots, was a stream crystal as Pharpar. I can see them sallying out and returning on their chattering to-and-fro in the morning dews and the greying twilight. No set hours; only a day as long or as short as love of its task could make it. What indeed is breeding, my dear K —, but the showing forth of a perfectly apt and peculiar excellency? Just fitness for its job. Puma, pelican, Patagonian papalja, pretty Poll.’
‘What is a papalja, Maunders?’ I inquired.
‘I don’t know,’ said Maunders, ‘But imagine them – with whatever effort is necessary – ascending and descending that hill-side through their Fruit Walk! It is about the nearest approach to any earthly vision I can achieve of Jacob’s ladder. Give even your abominable old London a predominant L.L. & V. – well, then, but not till then, you may invite me to the Mansion House for its annual November 9th. But there, I’m not an iconoclast.’
‘I wish, Maunders,’ said I, ‘you wou
ld at your leisure re-read Unto this Last; and that you would first make the ghost of an attempt to tell a decent story. What was the Fruit Walk?’
The Town’s puddly, petrol-perfumed, outlying streets were still busy with pedestrians – nurses and perambulators, children in woollen gaiters, and young ladies with red hair. It was, therefore, almost as difficult to keep abreast with Maunders as it was to follow his obscure meanderings.
‘Oh, the Fruit Walk,’ he muttered, staring vacantly through a dairyman’s window at an earthenware green-and-grey pelican with a fish in its bill. ‘The Fruit Walk was merely the cherries and quinces and crab-apples and damsons that had been planted in rosy, snowy, interlacing, discontinuous quincunx fashion; half circling and straggling over and down the green mounting and mounded hill to the very edge of the quarry. Not a miserable avenue, of course, but a kind of to-and-fro circuitous chace between village and Works. Once, your eyes might actually have seen that divine chimneyed cluster, tranquil as an image in water, on the dark emerald hilltop in the dying, gaudy sunset. And, shelving down, that walk in bloom! One might almost assume that L.L. & V. weather habitually haunted the scene. Things do react on one another, you know; and Nature wears fourteenth-century sleeves.’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake, Maunders, let’s get back to Anthony. What about Anthony?’
Maunders, softly striding along like an elephant in his flat square-toed shoes, appeared to be pondering.
‘Well,’ he began slowly, ‘the “what-about” of Anthony covers a rather wide field. I fancy, do you know, there was a tinge of Traherne in his composition. The beau was only the chrysalis stage. Of course it was Blake’s era. I fancy Anthony sowed pretty early his wild oats. There are many varieties, and his were mainly of the mind.
‘He was not, I venture to add, to make things quite clear to you, either a marrying or an un-marrying man. And, of course, like all instinctive creatures with a never-waning fountain of life in them, he shed. Some of us shed feathers, some fur, some innocence, some principles, and all shed skin – the seven year’s spring-cleaning, you know, that leaves the house in the flooding May-day sunlight a little bit dingier that it was before.
Short Stories 1895-1926 Page 16
