Antic Hay Aldous Huxley (philippa perry book .TXT) 📖

below had shaken its calm clarity to pieces. All this absurd business of passion⁠—he had always thought it nonsense, unnecessary. With a little strength of will one could shut it out. Women⁠—only for half an hour out of the twenty-four. But she had laughed, and his quiet, his security had vanished. “I can imagine,” he had said to her yesterday, “I can imagine myself giving up everything, work and all, to go running round after you.” “And do you suppose I should enjoy that?” Mrs. Viveash had asked. “It would be ridiculous,” he said, “it would be almost shameful.” And she had thanked him for the compliment. “And at the same time,” he went on, “I feel that it might be worth it. It might be the only thing.” His mind was confused, full of new thoughts. “It’s difficult,” he said after a pause, “arranging things. Very difficult. I thought I had arranged them so well.⁠ ⁠…”

“I never arrange anything,” said Gumbril, very much the practical philosopher. “I take things as they come.” And as he spoke the words, suddenly he became rather disgusted with himself. He shook himself; he climbed up out of his own morass. “It would be better, perhaps, if I arranged things more,” he added.

“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s,” said Shearwater, as though to himself; “and to God, and to sex, and to work.⁠ ⁠… There must be a working arrangement.” He sighed again. “Everything in proportion. In proportion,” he repeated, as though the word were magical and had power. “In proportion.”

“Who’s talking about proportion?” They turned round. In the doorway Gumbril Senior was standing, smoothing his ruffled hair and tugging at his beard. His eyes twinkled cheerfully behind his spectacles. “Poaching on my architectural ground?” he said.

“This is Shearwater,” Gumbril Junior put in, and explained who he was.

The old gentleman sat down. “Proportion,” he said⁠—“I was just thinking about it, now, as I was walking back. You can’t help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn’t exist. You can’t help pining for it. There are some streets⁠ ⁠… oh, my God!” And Gumbril Senior threw up his hands in horror. “It’s like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way. And the one street that was really like a symphony by Mozart⁠—how busily and gleefully they’re pulling it down now! Another year and there’ll be nothing left of Regent Street. There’ll only be a jumble of huge, hideous buildings at three-quarters of a million apiece. A concert of Brobdingnagian cats. Order has been turned into a disgusting chaos. We need no barbarians from outside; they’re on the premises, all the time.”

The old man paused and pulled his beard meditatively. Gumbril Junior sat in silence, smoking; and in silence Shearwater revolved within the walls of his great round head his agonizing thoughts of Mrs. Viveash.

“It has always struck me as very curious,” Gumbril Senior went on, “that people are so little affected by the vile and discordant architecture around them. Suppose, now, that all these brass bands of unemployed ex-soldiers that blow so mournfully at all the street corners were suddenly to play nothing but a series of senseless and devilish discords⁠—why, the first policeman would move them on, and the second would put them under arrest, and the passersby would try to lynch them on their way to the police station. There would be a real spontaneous outcry of indignation. But when at these same street corners the contractors run up enormous palaces of steel and stone that are every bit as stupid and ignoble and inharmonious as ten brass bandsmen each playing a different tune in a different key, there is no outcry. The police don’t arrest the architect; the passing pedestrians don’t throw stones at the workmen. They don’t notice that anything’s wrong. It’s odd,” said Gumbril Senior. “It’s very odd.”

“Very odd,” Gumbril Junior echoed.

“The fact is, I suppose,” Gumbril Senior went on, smiling with a certain air of personal triumph, “the fact is that architecture is a more difficult and intellectual art than music. Music⁠—that’s just a faculty you’re born with, as you might be born with a snub nose. But the sense of plastic beauty⁠—though that’s, of course, also an inborn faculty⁠—is something that has to be developed and intellectually ripened. It’s an affair of the mind; experience and thought have to draw it out. There are infant prodigies in music; but there are no infant prodigies in architecture.” Gumbril Senior chuckled with a real satisfaction. “A man can be an excellent musician and a perfect imbecile. But a good architect must also be a man of sense, a man who knows how to think and to profit by experience. Now, as almost none of the people who pass along the streets in London, or any other city of the world, do know how to think or to profit by experience, it follows that they cannot appreciate architecture. The innate faculty is strong enough in them to make them dislike discord in music; but they haven’t the wits to develop that other innate faculty⁠—the sense of plastic beauty⁠—which would enable them to see and disapprove of the same barbarism in architecture. Come with me,” Gumbril Senior added, getting up from his chair, “and I’ll show you something that will illustrate what I’ve been saying. Something you’ll enjoy, too. Nobody’s seen it yet,” he said mysteriously as he led the way upstairs. “It’s only just finished⁠—after months and years. It’ll cause a stir when they see it⁠—when I let them see it, if ever I do, that is. The dirty devils!” Gumbril Senior added good-humouredly.

On the landing of the next floor he paused, felt in his pocket, took out a key and unlocked the door of what should have been the second best bedroom. Gumbril Junior wondered, without very much curiosity, what the new toy would turn out to be. Shearwater wondered only how he could possess Mrs. Viveash.

“Come on,”