(“I’m twenty-two. It’s nearly the end of October. Life is thoroughly pleasant, although unfortunately there are a great number of fools about. One must apply oneself to something or other—God knows what. Everything is really very jolly—except getting up in the morning and wearing a tail coat.”)
“I say, Bonamy, what about Beethoven?”
(“Bonamy is an amazing fellow. He knows practically everything—not more about English literature than I do—but then he’s read all those Frenchmen.”)
“I rather suspect you’re talking rot, Bonamy. In spite of what you say, poor old Tennyson. …”
(“The truth is one ought to have been taught French. Now, I suppose, old Barfoot is talking to my mother. That’s an odd affair to be sure. But I can’t see Bonamy down there. Damn London!”) for the market carts were lumbering down the street.
“What about a walk on Saturday?”
(“What’s happening on Saturday?”)
Then, taking out his pocketbook, he assured himself that the night of the Durrants’ party came next week.
But though all this may very well be true—so Jacob thought and spoke—so he crossed his legs—filled his pipe—sipped his whisky, and once looked at his pocketbook, rumpling his hair as he did so, there remains over something which can never be conveyed to a second person save by Jacob himself. Moreover, part of this is not Jacob but Richard Bonamy—the room; the market carts; the hour; the very moment of history. Then consider the effect of sex—how between man and woman it hangs wavy, tremulous, so that here’s a valley, there’s a peak, when in truth, perhaps, all’s as flat as my hand. Even the exact words get the wrong accent on them. But something is always impelling one to hum vibrating, like the hawk moth, at the mouth of the cavern of mystery, endowing Jacob Flanders with all sorts of qualities he had not at all—for though, certainly, he sat talking to Bonamy, half of what he said was too dull to repeat; much unintelligible (about unknown people and Parliament); what remains is mostly a matter of guess work. Yet over him we hang vibrating.
“Yes,” said Captain Barfoot, knocking out his pipe on Betty Flanders’s hob, and buttoning his coat. “It doubles the work, but I don’t mind that.”
He was now town councillor. They looked at the night, which was the same as the London night, only a good deal more transparent. Church bells down in the town were striking eleven o’clock. The wind was off the sea. And all the bedroom windows were dark—the Pages were asleep; the Garfits were asleep; the Cranches were asleep—whereas in London at this hour they were burning Guy Fawkes on Parliament Hill.
VI
The flames had fairly caught.
“There’s St. Paul’s!” someone cried.
As the wood caught the city of London was lit up for a second; on other sides of the fire there were trees. Of the faces which came out fresh and vivid as though painted in yellow and red, the most prominent was a girl’s face. By a trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body. The oval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for background. As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the flames. Every muscle of her face was taut. There was something tragic in her thus staring—her age between twenty and twenty-five.
A hand descending from the chequered darkness thrust on her head the conical white hat of a pierrot. Shaking her head, she still stared. A whiskered face appeared above her. They dropped two legs of a table upon the fire and a scattering of twigs and leaves. All this blazed up and showed faces far back, round, pale, smooth, bearded, some with billycock hats on; all intent; showed too St. Paul’s floating on the uneven white mist, and two or three narrow, paper-white, extinguisher-shaped spires.
The flames were struggling through the wood and roaring up when, goodness knows where from, pails flung water in beautiful hollow shapes, as of polished tortoiseshell; flung again and again; until the hiss was like a swarm of bees; and all the faces went out.
“Oh Jacob,” said the girl, as they pounded up the hill in the dark, “I’m so frightfully unhappy!”
Shouts of laughter came from the others—high, low; some before, others after.
The hotel dining-room was brightly lit. A stag’s head in plaster was at one end of the table; at the other some Roman bust blackened and reddened to represent Guy Fawkes, whose night it was. The diners were linked together by lengths of paper roses, so that when it came to singing “Auld Lang Syne” with their hands crossed a pink and yellow line rose and fell the entire length of the table. There was an enormous tapping of green wineglasses. A young man stood up, and Florinda, taking one of the purplish globes that lay on the table, flung it straight at his head. It crushed to powder.
“I’m so frightfully unhappy!” she said, turning to Jacob, who sat beside her.
The table ran, as if on invisible legs, to the side of the room, and a barrel organ decorated with a red cloth and two pots of paper flowers reeled out waltz music.
Jacob could not dance. He stood against the wall smoking a pipe.
“We think,” said two of the dancers, breaking off from the rest, and bowing profoundly before him, “that you are the most beautiful man we have ever seen.”
So they wreathed his head with paper flowers. Then somebody brought out a white and gilt chair and made him sit on it. As they passed, people hung glass grapes on his shoulders, until he looked like the figurehead of a wrecked ship. Then Florinda got upon his knee and hid her face in his waistcoat. With one hand he held her; with the other, his pipe.
“Now let us talk,” said Jacob, as he walked down Haverstock Hill between four and five o’clock in the morning of November the sixth arm-in-arm with Timmy
