Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley Page A

violent blast.
    Mr Mercaptan waved his hand. ‘Russian,’ he said, ‘Russian.’
    â€˜And Michelangelo?’
    â€˜Alberti,’ said Gumbril, very seriously, giving them all a piece of his father’s mind – ‘Alberti was much the better architect, I assure you.’
    â€˜And pretentiousness for pretentiousness,’ said Mr Mercaptan, ‘I prefer old Borromini and the baroque.’
    â€˜What about Beethoven?’ went on Lypiatt. ‘What about Blake? Where do they come in under your scheme of things?’
    Mr Mercaptan shrugged his shoulders. ‘They stay in the hall,’ he said. ‘I don’t let them into the boudoir.’
    â€˜You disgust me,’ said Lypiatt, with rising indignation, and making wilder gestures. ‘You disgust me – you and your odious little sham eighteenth-century civilization; your piddling little poetry; your art for art’s sake instead of for God’s sake; your nauseating little copulations without love or passion; your hoggish materialism; your bestial indifference to all that’s unhappy and your yelping hatred of all that’s great.’
    â€˜Charming, charming,’ murmured Mr Mercaptan, who was pouring oil on his salad.
    â€˜How can you ever hope to achieve anything decent or solid, when you don’t even believe in decency or solidarity? I look about me,’ and Lypiatt cast his eyes wildly round the crowded room, ‘and I find myself alone, spiritually alone. I strive on by myself, by myself.’ He struck his breast, a giant, a solitary giant. ‘I have set myself to restore painting and poetry to their rightful position among the great moral forces. They have been amusements, they have been mere games for too long. I am giving my life for that. My life.’ His voice trembled a little. ‘People mock me, hate me, stone me, deride me. But I go on, I go on. For I know I’m right. And in the end they too will recognize that I’ve been right.’ It was a loud soliloquy. One could fancy that Lypiatt had been engaged in recognizing himself.
    â€˜All the same,’ said Gumbril with a cheerful stubbornness, ‘I persist that the word “dreams” is inadmissible.’
    â€˜Inadmissible,’
repeated Mr Mercaptan, imparting to the word an additional significance by giving it its French pronunciation. ‘In the age of Rostand, well and good. But now . . .’
    â€˜Now,’ said Gumbril, ‘the word merely connotes Freud.’
    â€˜It’s a matter of literary tact,’ explained Mr Mercaptan. ‘Have you no literary tact?’
    â€˜No,’ said Lypiatt, with emphasis, ‘thank God, I haven’t. I have no tact of any kind. I do things straightforwardly, frankly, as the spirit moves me. I don’t like compromises.’
    He struck the table. The gesture startlingly let loose a peal of cracked and diabolic laughter. Gumbril and Lypiatt and Mr Mercaptan looked quickly up; even Shearwater lifted his great spherical head and turned towards the sound the large disk of his face. A young man with a blond, fan-shaped beard stood by the table, looking down at them through a pair of bright blue eyes and smiling equivocally and disquietingly as though his mind were full of some nameless and fantastic malice.
    â€˜
Come sta la Sua Terribiltà
?’ he asked; and, taking off his preposterous bowler hat, he bowed profoundly to Lypiatt. ‘How I recognize my Buonarroti!’ he added affectionately.
    Lypiatt laughed, rather uncomfortably, and no longer on the Titanic scale. ‘How I recognize my Coleman!’ he echoed, rather feebly.
    â€˜On the contrary,’ Gumbril corrected, ‘how almost completely I fail to recognize. This beard’ – he pointed to the blond fan – ‘why, may I ask?’
    â€˜More Russianism,’ said Mr Mercaptan, and shook his head.
    â€˜Ah, why indeed?’ Coleman lowered