Lypiatt laughed derisively, and his face went all to pieces, like a pool of water into which a stone is suddenly dropped.
“You’ve merely said I was insincere, an actor, a mountebank, a quack, raving fustian, spouting mock heroics. That’s all.”
Mr. Mercaptan put on the expression of one who feels himself injured and misunderstood. He shut his eyes, he flapped deprecatingly with his hand. “I merely suggested,” he said, “that you protest too much. You defeat your own ends; you lose emphasis by trying to be over-emphatic. All this folie de grandeur, all this hankering after terribiltà——” sagely Mr. Mercaptan shook his head, “it’s led so many people astray. And, in any case, you can’t really expect me to find it very sympathetic.” Mr. Mercaptan uttered a little laugh and looked affectionately round his boudoir, his retired and perfumed poutery within whose walls so much civilization had finely flowered. He looked at his magnificent sofa, gilded and carved, upholstered in white satin, and so deep—for it was a great square piece of furniture, almost as broad as it was long—that when you sat right back, you had of necessity to lift your feet from the floor and recline at length. It was under the white satin that Crébillon’s spirit found, in these late degenerate days, a sympathetic home. He looked at his exquisite Condor fans over the mantelpiece; his lovely Marie Laurencin of two young girls, pale-skinned and berry-eyed, walking embraced in a shallow myopic landscape amid a troop of bounding heraldic dogs. He looked at his cabinet of bibelots in the corner where the nigger mask and the superb Chinese phallus in sculptured rock crystal contrasted so amusingly with the Chelsea china, the little ivory Madonna, which might be a fake, but in any case was quite as good as any mediæval French original, and the Italian medals. He looked at his comical writing-desk in shining black papier mâché and mother-of-pearl; he looked at his article on the “Jus Primæ Noctis,” black and neat on the page, with the red corrections attesting his tireless search for, and his, he flattered himself, almost invariable discovery of, the inevitable word. No, really, one couldn’t expect him to find Lypiatt’s notions very sympathetic.
“But I don’t expect you to,” said Lypiatt, “and, good God! I don’t want you to. But you call me insincere. That’s what I can’t and won’t stand. How dare you do that?” His voice was growing louder.
Once more Mr. Mercaptan deprecatingly flapped. “At the most,” he corrected, “I said that there was a certain look of insincerity about some of the pictures. Hardly avoidable, indeed, in work of this kind.”
Quite suddenly, Lypiatt lost his self-control. All the accumulated anger and bitterness of the last days burst out. His show had been a hopeless failure. Not a picture sold, a press that was mostly bad, or, when good, that had praised for the wrong, the insulting reasons. “Bright and effective work.” “Mr. Lypiatt would make an excellent stage designer.” Damn them! damn them! And then, when the dailies had all had their yelp, here was Mercaptan in the Weekly World taking him as a text for what was practically an essay on insincerity in art. “How dare you?” he furiously shouted. “You—how dare you talk about sincerity? What can you know about sincerity, you disgusting little bug!” And avenging himself on the person of Mr. Mercaptan against the world that had neglected him, against the fate that had denied him his rightful share of talent, Lypiatt sprang up and, seizing the author of the “Jus Primæ Noctis” by the shoulders, he shook him, he bumped him up and down in his chair, he cuffed him over the head. “How can you have the impudence,” he asked, letting go of his victim, but still standing menacingly over him, “to touch anything that even attempts to be decent and big?” All these years, these wretched years of poverty and struggle and courageous hope and failure and repeated disappointment; and now this last failure, more complete than all. He was trembling with anger; at least one forgot unhappiness while one was angry.
Mr. Mercaptan had recovered from his first terrified surprise. “Really, really” he repeated, “too barbarous. Scuffling like hobbledehoys.”
“If you knew,” Lypiatt began; but he checked himself. If you knew, he was going to say, what those things had cost me, what they meant, what thought, what passion——But how could Mercaptan understand? And it would sound as though he were appealing to this creature’s sympathy. “Bug!” he shouted instead, “bug!” And he struck out again with the flat of his hand. Mr. Mercaptan put up his hands and ducked away from the slaps, blinking.
“Really,” he protested, “really....”
Insincere? Perhaps it was half true. Lypiatt seized his man more furiously than before and shook him, shook him. “And then that vile insult about the vermouth advertisement,” he cried out. That had rankled. Those flaring, vulgar posters! “You thought you could mock me and spit at me with impunity, did you? I’ve stood it so long, you thought I’d always stand it? Was that it? But you’re mistaken.” He lifted his fist. Mr. Mercaptan cowered away, raising his arm to protect his head. “Vile bug of a coward,” said Lypiatt, “why don’t you defend yourself like a man? You can only be dangerous with words. Very witty and spiteful and cutting about those vermouth posters, wasn’t it? But you wouldn’t dare to fight me if I challenged you.”