Short Stories 1895-1926 (18 page)

‘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 would 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.

‘Well, Anthony seems to have shed what one mistakes for artificialities. He shed his ringlets, his foppish clothes, his pretences of languor, his dreamy superiority. He shed his tacit acceptance of the firm's renown, and so discovered his own imagination. Only in the “tip-toppers” do intellect and imagination lie down together, as will the lion and the lamb.

‘Then, of course, he seems gradually or suddenly to have shed the L.L. & V. pride and arrogance. He must have begun to think. All these centuries, please remember, the firm had been gradually realizing why, actually
why,
their stuff was super-excellent in the eyes of humanity. And that – Oh, I don't know; but to realize that, perhaps, is to discount its merits elsewhere. Anthony, on the other hand, had come to realize, in his own queer vague fashion, that one's only salvation is to set such eyes squinting. And yet, not of set and deliberate purpose. He was not a wit. Art, my dear, dear K —, whatever you may like to say,
is
useless; unless one has the gumption to dissociate use from materialism.'

‘I was not aware,' said I, ‘that I had said anything. You mean, I suppose, that a man has only to realize that his work is excellent for it to begin to lose its virtue. Like beauty, Maunders, and the rouge-pot and powder-puff? Still, I prefer Anthony to trade ethics. What did the rest of them do?'

‘What I was about to tell you,' replied Maunders mildly, ‘is that Anthony had bats in his belfry. Not the vampire variety; just
extra
-terrestrial bats. He was “queer”. Perhaps more in him that in most of us had come from elsewhere. And the older he grew the more the hook-winged creatures multiplied. No doubt the Firm would have edged him out if it had been practicable. No doubt the young hedge-sparrows would edge out the squab-cuckoo, if that were manageable. But it was not. Anthony was double-dyed, a Lispett with two t's, and it would have been
lèse majesté,
domestic high-treason, to acknowledge to the world at large that he was even eccentric.