Nil, omnipresent nil, world-soul, spiritual informer of all matter. Nil in the shape of a black-breeched moon-basined Toreador. Nil, the man with the greyhound’s nose. Nil, as four blackamoors. Nil in the form of a divine tune. Nil, the faces, the faces one ought to know by sight, reflected in the mirrors of the hall. Nil this Gumbril whose arm is round one’s waist, whose feet step in and out among one’s own. Nothing at all.
That’s why there’ll be no wedding. No wedding at St. George’s, Hanover Square,—oh, desperate experiment!—with Nil Viveash, that charming boy, that charming nothing at all, engaged at the moment in hunting elephants, hunting fever and carnivores among the Tikki-tikki pygmies. That’s why there’ll be no wedding on Wednesday week. For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime. For the light strawy hair (not a lock left), the brown face, the red-brown hands and the smooth boy’s body, milk-white, milk-warm, are nothing at all, nothing, now, at all—nil these five years—and the shining blue eyes as much nil as the rest.
“Always the same people,” complained Mrs. Viveash, looking round the room. “The old familiar faces. Never any one new. Where’s the younger generation, Gumbril? We’re old, Theodore. There are millions younger than we are. Where are they?”
“I’m not responsible for them,” said Gumbril. “I’m not even responsible for myself.” He imagined a cottagey room, under the roof, with a window near the floor and a sloping ceiling where you were always bumping your head; and in the candlelight Emily’s candid eyes, her grave and happy mouth; in the darkness, the curve, under his fingers, of her firm body.
“Why don’t they come and sing for their supper?” Mrs. Viveash went on petulantly. “It’s their business to amuse us.”
“They’re probably thinking of amusing themselves,” Gumbril suggested.
“Well, then, they should do it where we can see them.”
“What’s he to Hecuba?”
“Nothing at all,” Gumbril clownishly sang. The room, in the cottage, had nothing to do with him. He breathed Mrs. Viveash’s memories of Italian jasmines, laid his cheek for a moment against her smooth hair. “Nothing at all.” Happy clown!
Way down in old Bengal, under the green Paradisiac palms, among the ecstatic mystagogues and the saints who scream beneath the divine caresses, the music came to an end. The four negroes wiped their glistening faces. The couples fell apart. Gumbril and Mrs. Viveash sat down and smoked a cigarette.