Chapter 6

It was between Whitefield Street and the Tottenham Court Road, in a ‘heavenly Mews,’ as he liked to call it (for he had a characteristic weakness for philosophical paronomasia), that Casimir Lypiatt lived and worked. You passed under an archway of bald and sooty brick—and at night, when the green gas-lamp underneath the arch threw livid lights and enormous architectural shadows, you could fancy yourself at the entrance of one of Piranesi’s prisons—and you found yourself in a long cul-de-sac, flanked on either side by low buildings, having stabling for horses below and, less commodiously, stabling for human beings in the attics above. An old-fashioned smell of animals mingled with the more progressive stink of burnt oil. The air was a little thicker here, it seemed, than in the streets outside; looking down the mews on even the clearest day, you could see the forms of things dimming and softening, the colours growing richer and deeper with every yard of distance. It was the best place in the world, Lypiatt used to say, for studying aerial perspective; that was why he lived there. But you always felt about poor Lypiatt that he was facing misfortune with a jest a little too self-consciously.

Mrs. Viveash’s taxi drove in under the Piranesian arch, drove in slowly and as though with a gingerly reluctance to soil its white wheels on pavements so sordid. The cabman looked round inquiringly.

“This right?” he asked.

With a white-gloved finger Mrs. Viveash prodded the air two or three times, indicating that he was to drive straight on. Half-way down the mews she rapped the glass; the man drew up.

“Never been down ’ere before,” he said, for the sake of making a little conversation, while Mrs. Viveash fumbled for her money. He looked at her with a polite and slightly ironic curiosity that was frankly mingled with admiration.

“You’re lucky,” said Mrs. Viveash. “We poor decayed gentlewomen—you see what we’re reduced to.” And she handed him a florin.

Slowly the taxi-man unbuttoned his coat and put the coin away in an inner pocket. He watched her as she crossed the dirty street, placing her feet with a meticulous precision one after the other in the same straight line, as though she were treading a knife edge between goodness only knew what invisible gulfs. Floating she seemed to go, with a little spring at every step and the skirt of her summery dress—white it was, with a florid pattern printed in black all over it—blowing airily out around her swaying march. Decayed gentlewomen indeed! The driver started his machine with an unnecessary violence; he felt, for some reason, positively indignant.

Between the broad double-doors through which the horses passed to their fodder and repose were little narrow human doors—for the Yahoos, Lypiatt used to say in his large allusive way; and when he said it he laughed with the loud and bell-mouthed cynicism of one who sees himself as a misunderstood and embittered Prometheus. At one of these little Yahoo doors Mrs. Viveash halted and rapped as loudly as a small and stiff-hinged knocker would permit. Patiently she waited; several small and dirty children collected to stare at her. She knocked again and again waited. More children came running up from the farther end of the mews; two young girls of fifteen or sixteen appeared at a neighbouring doorway and immediately gave tongue in whoops of mirthless, hyena-like laughter.

“Have you ever read about the pied piper of Hamelin?” Mrs. Viveash asked the nearest child. Terrified, it shrank away. “I thought not,” she said, and knocked again.

There was a sound, at last, of heavy feet slowly descending steep stairs; the door opened.

“Welcome to the palazzo!” It was Lypiatt’s heroic formula of hospitality.

“Welcome at last,” Mrs. Viveash corrected, and followed him up a narrow, dark staircase that was as steep as a ladder. He was dressed in a velveteen jacket and linen trousers that should have been white, but needed washing. He was dishevelled and his hands were dirty.

“Did you knock more than once?” he asked, looking back over his shoulder.

“More than twenty times,” Mrs. Viveash justifiably exaggerated.

“I’m infinitely sorry,” protested Lypiatt. “I get so deeply absorbed in my work, you know. Did you wait long?”

“The children enjoyed it, at any rate.” Mrs. Viveash was irritated by a suspicion, which was probably, after all, quite unjustified, that Casimir had been rather consciously absorbed in his work; that he had heard her first knock and plunged the more profoundly into those depths of absorption where the true artist always dwells, or at any rate ought to dwell; to rise at her third appeal with a slow, pained reluctance, cursing, perhaps, at the importunity of a world which thus noisily interrupted the flow of his inspiration. “Queer, the way they stare at one,” she went on, with a note in her dying voice of a petulance that the children had not inspired. “Does one look such a guy?”

Lypiatt threw open the door at the head of the stairs and stood there on the threshold, waiting for her. “Queer?” he repeated. “Not a bit.” And as she moved past him into the room, he laid his hand on her shoulder and fell into step with her, leaving the door to slam behind them. “Merely an example of the mob’s instinctive dislike of the aristocratic individual. That’s all. ‘Oh, why was I born with a different face?’ Thank God I was, though. And so were you. But the difference has its disadvantages; the children throw stones.”

“They didn’t throw stones.” Mrs. Viveash was too truthful, this time.

They halted in the middle of the studio. It was not a very large room and there were too many things in it. The easel stood near the centre of the studio; round it Lypiatt kept a space permanently cleared. There was a broad fairway leading to the door, and another, narrower and tortuously winding between boxes and piled-up furniture and tumbled books, gave access to his bed. There was a piano and a table permanently set with dirty plates and strewed with the relics of two or three meals. Bookshelves stood on either side of the fireplace and lying on the floor were still more books, piles on dusty piles. Mrs. Viveash stood looking at the picture on the easel (abstract again—she didn’t like it), and Lypiatt, who had dropped his hand from her shoulder, had stepped back the better to see her, stood earnestly looking at Mrs. Viveash.

“May I kiss you?” he asked after a silence.

Mrs. Viveash turned towards him, smiling agonizingly, her eyebrows ironically lifted, her eyes steady and calm and palely, brightly inexpressive. “If it really gives you any pleasure,” she said. “It won’t, I may say, to me.”