Tono Bungay Part 23

I can't imagine where they get it! I must watch! There're people over there whispering! n.o.body ought to whisper!--There's something suggestive in the mere act! Then, pictures! In the museum--things too dreadful for words. Why can't we have pure art--with the anatomy all wrong and pure and nice--and pure fiction pure poetry, instead of all this stuff with allusions--allusions?... Excuse me! There's something up behind that locked door! The keyhole! In the interests of public morality--yes, Sir, as a pure good man--I insist--I'LL look--it won't hurt me--I insist on looking my duty--M'm'm--the keyhole!'"

He kicked his legs about extravagantly, and I laughed again.

"That's Grundy in one mood, Ponderevo. It isn't Mrs. Grundy. That's one of the lies we tell about women. They're too simple. Simple! Woman ARE simple! They take on just what men tell 'em."

Ewart meditated for a s.p.a.ce. "Just exactly as it's put to them," he said, and resumed the moods of Mr. Grundy.

"Then you get old Grundy in another mood. Ever caught him nosing, Ponderevo? Mad with the idea of mysterious, unknown, wicked, delicious things. Things that aren't respectable. Wow! Things he mustn't do!...

Any one who knows about these things, knows there's just as much mystery and deliciousness about Grundy's forbidden things as there is about eating ham. Jolly nice if it's a bright morning and you're well and hungry and having breakfast in the open air. Jolly unattractive if you're off colour. But Grundy's covered it all up and hidden it and put mucky shades and covers over it until he's forgotten it. Begins to fester round it in his mind. Has dreadful struggles--with himself about impure thoughts.... Then you set Grundy with hot ears,--curious in undertones. Grundy on the loose, Grundy in a hoa.r.s.e whisper and with furtive eyes and convulsive movements--making things indecent.

Evolving--in dense vapours--indecency!

"Grundy sins. Oh, yes, he's a hypocrite. Sneaks round a corner and sins ugly. It's Grundy and his dark corners that make vice, vice! We artists--we have no vices.

"And then he's frantic with repentance. And wants to be cruel to fallen women and decent harmless sculptors of the simple nude--like me--and so back to his panic again."

"Mrs. Grundy, I suppose, doesn't know he sins," I remarked.

"No? I'm not so sure.... But, bless her heart she's a woman.... She's a woman. Then again you get Grundy with a large greasy smile--like an accident to a b.u.t.ter tub--all over his face, being Liberal Minded--Grundy in his Anti-Puritan moments, 'trying not to see Harm in it'--Grundy the friend of innocent pleasure. He makes you sick with the Harm he's trying not to see in it...

"And that's why everything's wrong, Ponderevo. Grundy, d.a.m.n him! stands in the light, and we young people can't see. His moods affect us. We catch his gusts of panic, his disease of nosing, his greasiness. We don't know what we may think, what we may say, he does his silly utmost to prevent our reading and seeing the one thing, the one sort of discussion we find--quite naturally and properly--supremely interesting.

So we don't adolescence; we blunder up to s.e.x. Dare--dare to look--and he may dirt you for ever! The girls are terror-stricken to silence by his significant whiskers, by the bleary something in his eyes."

Suddenly Ewart, with an almost Jack-in-the-box effect, sat up.

"He's about us everywhere, Ponderevo," he said, very solemnly.

"Sometimes--sometimes I think he is--in our blood. In MINE."

He regarded me for my opinion very earnestly, with his pipe in the corner of his mouth.

"You're the remotest cousin he ever had," I said.

I reflected. "Look here, Ewart," I asked, "how would you have things different?"

He wrinkled up his queer face, regarded the wait and made his pipe gurgle for a s.p.a.ce, thinking deeply.

"There are complications, I admit. We've grown up under the terror of Grundy and that innocent but docile and--yes--formidable lady, his wife. I don't know how far the complications aren't a disease, a sort of bleaching under the Grundy shadow.... It is possible there are things I have still to learn about women.... Man has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. His innocence is gone. You can't have your cake and eat it. We're in for knowledge; let's have it plain and straight. I should begin, I think, by abolis.h.i.+ng the ideas of decency and indecency...."

"Grundy would have fits!" I injected.

"Grundy, Ponderevo, would have cold douches--publicly--if the sight was not too painful--three times a day.... But I don't think, mind you, that I should let the s.e.xes run about together. No. The fact behind the s.e.xes--is s.e.x. It's no good humbugging. It trails about--even in the best mixed company. Tugs at your ankle. The men get showing off and quarrelling--and the women. Or they're bored. I suppose the ancestral males have competed for the ancestral females ever since they were both some sort of grubby little reptile. You aren't going to alter that in a thousand years or so.... Never should you have a mixed company, never--except with only one man or only one woman. How would that be?...

"Or duets only?...

"How to manage it? Some rule of etiquette, perhaps."... He became portentously grave.

Then his long hand went out in weird gestures.

"I seem to see--I seem to see--a sort of City of Women, Ponderevo.

Yes.... A walled enclosure--good stone-mason's work--a city wall, high as the walls of Rome, going about a garden. Dozens of square miles of garden--trees--fountains--arbours--lakes. Lawns on which the women play, avenues in which they gossip, boats.... Women like that sort of thing.

Any woman who's been to a good eventful girls' school lives on the memory of it for the rest of her life. It's one of the pathetic things about women--the superiority of school and college--to anything they get afterwards. And this city-garden of women will have beautiful places for music, places for beautiful dresses, places for beautiful work.

Everything a woman can want. Nurseries. Kindergartens. Schools. And no man--except to do rough work, perhaps--ever comes in. The men live in a world where they can hunt and engineer, invent and mine and manufacture, sail s.h.i.+ps, drink deep and practice the arts, and fight--"

"Yes," I said, "but--"

He stilled me with a gesture.

"I'm coming to that. The homes of the women, Ponderevo, will be set in the wall of their city; each woman will have her own particular house and home, furnished after her own heart in her own manner--with a little balcony on the outside wall. Built into the wall--and a little balcony.

And there she will go and look out, when the mood takes her, and all round the city there will be a broad road and seats and great shady trees. And men will stroll up and down there when they feel the need of feminine company; when, for instance, they want to talk about their souls or their characters or any of the things that only women will stand.... The women will lean over and look at the men and smile and talk to them as they fancy. And each woman will have this; she will have a little silken ladder she can let down if she chooses--if she wants to talk closer..."

"The men would still be competing."

"There perhaps--yes. But they'd have to abide by the women's decisions."

I raised one or two difficulties, and for a while we played with this idea.

"Ewart," I said, "this is like Doll's Island.

"Suppose," I reflected, "an unsuccessful man laid siege to a balcony and wouldn't let his rival come near it?"

"Move him on," said Ewart, "by a special regulation. As one does organ-grinders. No difficulty about that. And you could forbid it--make it against the etiquette. No life is decent without etiquette.... And people obey etiquette sooner than laws..."

"H'm," I said, and was struck by an idea that is remote in the world of a young man. "How about children?" I asked; "in the City? Girls are all very well. But boys, for example--grow up."

"Ah!" said Ewart. "Yes. I forgot. They mustn't grow up inside.... They'd turn out the boys when they were seven. The father must come with a little pony and a little gun and manly wear, and take the boy away. Then one could come afterwards to one's mother's balcony.... It must be fine to have a mother. The father and the son..."

"This is all very pretty in its way," I said at last, "but it's a dream.

Let's come back to reality. What I want to know is, what are you going to do in Brompton, let us say, or Walham Green NOW?"

"Oh! d.a.m.n it!" he remarked, "Walham Green! What a chap you are, Ponderevo!" and he made an abrupt end to his discourse. He wouldn't even reply to my tentatives for a time.

"While I was talking just now," he remarked presently,

"I had a quite different idea."

"What?"

"For a masterpiece. A series. Like the busts of the Caesars. Only not heads, you know. We don't see the people who do things to us nowadays..."

"How will you do it, then?"

"Hands--a series of hands! The hands of the Twentieth Century. I'll do it. Some day some one will discover it--go there--see what I have done, and what is meant by it."

"See it where?"

"On the tombs. Why not? The Unknown Master of the Highgate Slope! All the little, soft feminine hands, the nervous ugly males, the hands of the flops, and the hands of the s.n.a.t.c.hers! And Grundy's loose, lean, knuckly affair--Grundy the terror!--the little wrinkles and the thumb!

Only it ought to hold all the others together--in a slightly disturbing squeeze....Like Rodin's great Hand--you know the thing!"

IV