At seven o’clock Mrs. Viveash woke up. She shook her head to feel if the pain were still rolling about loose inside her skull.
“I really believe I’m all right,” she said. She jumped up. “Come on,” she cried. “I feel ready for anything.”
“And I feel like so much food for worms,” said Gumbril. “Still, Versiam’ a tazza piena il generoso umor.” He hummed the Drinking Song out of Robert the Devil, and to that ingenuously jolly melody they left the house.
Their taxi that evening cost them several pounds. They made the man drive back and forth, like a shuttle, from one end of London to the other. Every time they passed through Piccadilly Circus Mrs. Viveash leant out of the window to look at the sky signs dancing their unceasing St. Vitus’s dance above the monument to the Earl of Shaftesbury.
“How I adore them!” she said the first time they passed them. “Those wheels that whizz round till the sparks fly out from under them: that rushing motor, and that lovely bottle of port filling the glass and then disappearing and reappearing and filling it again. Too lovely.”
“Too revolting,” Gumbril corrected her. “These things are the epileptic symbol of all that’s most bestial and idiotic in contemporary life. Look at those beastly things and then look at that.” He pointed to the County Fire Office on the northern side of the Circus. “There stands decency, dignity, beauty, repose. And there flickers, there gibbers and twitches—what? Restlessness, distraction, refusal to think, anything for an unquiet life....”
“What a delicious pedant you are!” She turned away from the window, put her hands on his shoulders and looked at him. “Too exquisitely ridiculous!” And she kissed him.
“You won’t force me to change my opinion.” Gumbril smiled at her. “Eppur’ si muove—I stick to my guns like Galileo. They move and they’re horrible.”
“They’re me,” said Mrs. Viveash emphatically. “Those things are me.”
They drove first to Lypiatt’s mews. Under the Piranesian arch. The clothes-lines looped from window to window across the street might have been those ropes which form so essential and so mysterious a part of the furniture of the Prisons. The place smelt, the children were shouting; the hyena-like laughter of the flappers reverberated between the close-set walls. All Gumbril’s sense of social responsibility was aroused in a moment.