She considered him. She spoke quite calmly, but with an effect of relieving her mind of something that had been there too long. “No harm now in telling you that I don’t do literary work. He put that about. Amour propre. He had his pride, you know. He just hated to think I was a pirate dressmaker working myself to the bone with a roomful of hussies. That’s what I am, you know, He was sensitive—in that way. That’s all over now, and his feelings can’t be hurt any more.”
“I thought—” began old Mr Blake.
“No. I guess you guessed. Now I can go off to Torquay and run a decent business. I’ve always had a feeling for Torquay.”
“Why couldn’t you have done that before?”
“Because it wouldn’t have paid enough, and He would have insisted on mixed bathing when He was tight and getting into trouble in the water, and also, you know, He’d have had to have a season ticket to run up to London.”
She sat quite still for a moment and then shrugged her shoulders. “But why talk about these things now?”
Old Mr Blake turned that over in his mind and remarked afterwards to Edward Albert, since at the moment there was no one else to make his remark to: “That Mrs Thump is a pretty hard woman. Pretty hard. Very likely he didn’t succeed because she discouraged him. If only she’d believed in him more and shown it.”
“I don’t think she ought to have him cremated,” said Edward Albert. “I will say that....”
The more old Mr Blake thought over his relations to Harold Thump, the more they were transmuted from something very like hostility to profound understanding and affection. How good we can be to the dead! How easily and unwittingly they become our allies! We can quote things they never said in praise of us. Old Mr Blake knew what it was to be frustrated and pushed aside by inferior people—only too well. Harold Thump too, if he had had his proper opportunities and his proper support might have been a really very great man. But that hard woman had been too much for him.
A misogyny natural to old bachelors certainly influenced this judgment, which first he tried out on Edward Albert and then on other suitable listeners. Before she departed, Mrs Thump was under a shadow. It was felt that she had failed in her wifely duty and even perhaps deliberately dragged down this great man and had never really understood.
A certain callousness in her, to give it no harsher word, enabled her to disregard the one or two attempts that were made to convey these ideas to her.
After the cremation, Gawpy allowed the house to relax. Harold Thump became an exhausted topic almost at once. Mr Blake kept a faint glow of disapproval alight about Mrs Thump, until first she and then he departed. Nobody talked about the Thumps any more after that, and by degrees Doober’s was filled by a new generation of boarders that knew not Harold. New jokes arose and established themselves and prevailed; new voices bellowed in the bathroom....
So it was that the Thumps and Mr Blake followed Mr Frankincense and the others out of Edward Albert’s World and were replaced by others to whom he could present a firmer countenance.
VI. Mr Chamble Pewter
Mr Chamble Pewter, the man of thirty-five who had taken the room of Mr Frankincense, was a great reader of books. He liked old ripe rich books, and whenever he heard talk of a new book, it was his practice, he said, to read an old one. Reading and talking about reading, constituted his particular form of self-assertion. The current world might go its own way and invariably that way was despicable; and while Edward Albert dreamt of impressing Doober’s by departing to unknown entertainment in “faultless evening dress”, Mr Chamble Pewter got the same desired effect by producing a “well-thumbed” Horace. The flowering of Bloomsbury was yet to come, and he had still to face the arrogance of a movement that was at once congenial and contemporary. So what he said and did about Mr T.S. Eliot and Mr Aldous Huxley, is unfortunately outside the range of this story.
Edward Albert was as impressed by this book-reading as he was meant to be, and he was gratified to find Mr Chamble Pewter not unwilling to talk to him. It was necessary to Mr Chamble Pewter to talk to some one; he could not talk at large and contentiously because that would have been vulgar, but he found Edward Albert extremely docile. Edward Albert did not always get the drift of what Mr Chamble Pewter said, but since they talked in undertones it was effective to sit and nod as though you did. “I am afraid,” Mr Chamble Pewter would admit after some particularly dark saying,
“I must plead guilty to a sense of humour. I don’t know how I could get along in this absurd world without it.”
Sometimes it seemed to Edward Albert that this sense of humour was very closely akin to that useful sceptical phrase, “I don’t find,” which was spreading through the world, but he was not sure enough of the parallelism ever to use it to Mr Chamble Pewter.
One particular target for Mr Chamble Pewter’s confidential asides was a blond young American student full of enthusiasm for what the sound conservative instincts of Edward Albert and Mr Chamble Pewter convinced them were the meretricious and unstable inventions and discoveries of modern science. His form of self-assertion was informative. His formula was, “You haven’t an idea!” For a time you could hardly open your mouth at Doober’s without his saying,
“Oh, but that’s all changed now.” Did one talk of music? He announced that for the first time pure sounds could be produced, that new and wonderful instruments would presently replace the traditional orchestras. In a little while the “old music” would sound smudgy and limited, pitiful. We should listen to the records in amazement. There would have to be a complete re-orchestration of any of the old music that was worth while.... Did one talk of the cinema, which genteel people were beginning to recognise might be in its vulgar way, funny, what with Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford? At once our young man was talking of the sound and colour and solidity which were presently to invade the films. “Utter absurdity!” whispered Mr Chamble Pewter. “They never know when to stop. Laughable, it is.”
Then about flying? He talked of planes that would fly the Atlantic, carry gigantic bombs to Berlin, go to the very top of the air, go round the world in less than twenty-four hours, and then where will you be? Chamble Pewter caught Edward Albert’s eye. “And the moon?” he whispered. Particularly foolish sounded the young man’s talk upon those mad notions of psychoanalysis, relativity and the new missing links between men and the apes.
“A saucer full of rusty scraps of bone,” said Mr Chamble Pewter. “And so, good-bye to God!”
“The young American seemed to scent the evasive antagonism of Mr Chamble Pewter and trailed his coat. At last he provoked a skirmish and got the worst of it.
He was going on in his exasperating way, spoiling their dinners and trampling over their minds with some pretended find of another “human ancestor” from Rhodesia. “But surely,” remarked Mr Chamble Pewter in that mild, destructive voice of his, “you are being a little old-fashioned. This talk about human ancestors. Isn’t it what we used to call Darwinism and all that?”
“None the worse for that,” said the young American.
“But you are always being so very modern. Forgive me if I smile—I have rather a sense of humour—but surely you know Darwinism was completely exploded years and years ago?”
“First I’ve heard of that,” said the young American, rather taken aback.
“We’re none of us omniscient—even the youngest of us,” said Mr Chamble Pewter.
“But how do you mean exploded?”
“What everybody means by exploded. Blown to pieces. Nothing left of him.”
“But who exploded him?”
“Surely you know that! But I suppose we all have our limitations. Some professor at Montpellier—I forget his name—something about the birds and reptiles. A complete exposure. You should look into it. These disputes have never interested me very much, I must confess. But there it is.