Mr. Mercaptan made a delicate gesture. “Ça se sent, mon cher ami,” he said, “ça ne s’explique pas.” Satan, it is said, carries hell in his heart; so it was with Mr. Mercaptan—wherever he was, it was Paris. “Dreams in nineteen twenty-two....” He shrugged his shoulders.
“After you’ve accepted the war, swallowed the Russian famine,” said Gumbril. “Dreams!”
“They belonged to the Rostand epoch,” said Mr. Mercaptan, with a little titter. “Le Rève—ah!”
Lypiatt dropped his knife and fork with a clatter and leaned forward, eager for battle. “Now I have you,” he said, “now I have you on the hip. You’ve given yourselves away. You’ve given away the secret of your spiritual poverty, your weakness and pettiness and impotence....”
“Impotence? You malign me, sir,” said Gumbril.
Shearwater ponderously stirred. He had been silent all this time, sitting with hunched shoulders, his elbows on the table, his big round head bent forward, absorbed, apparently, in the slow meticulous crumbling of a piece of bread. Sometimes he put a piece of crust in his mouth and under the bushy brown moustache his jaw moved slowly, ruminatively, with a sideways motion, like a cow’s. He nudged Gumbril with his elbow. “Ass,” he said, “be quiet.”
Lypiatt went on torrentially. “You’re afraid of ideals, that’s what it is. You daren’t admit to having dreams. Oh, I call them dreams,” he added parenthetically. “I don’t mind being thought a fool and old-fashioned. The word’s shorter and more English. Besides, it rhymes with gleams. Ha, ha!” And Lypiatt laughed his loud Titan’s laugh, the laugh of cynicism which seems to belie, but which, for those who have understanding, reveals the high, positive spirit within. “Ideals—they’re not sufficiently genteel for you civilized young men. You’ve quite outgrown that sort of thing. No dream, no religion, no morality.”
“I glory in the name of earwig,” said Gumbril. He was pleased with that little invention. It was felicitous; it was well chosen. “One’s an earwig in sheer self-protection,” he explained.
But Mr. Mercaptan refused to accept the name of earwig at any price. “What there is to be ashamed of in being civilized, I really don’t know,” he said, in a voice that was now the bull’s, now the piping robin’s. “No, if I glory in anything, it’s in my little rococo boudoir, and the conversations across the polished mahogany, and the delicate, lascivious, witty little flirtations on ample sofas inhabited by the soul of Crebillon Fils. We needn’t all be Russians, I hope. These revolting Dostoievskys.” Mr. Mercaptan spoke with a profound feeling. “Nor all Utopians. Homo au naturel——” Mr. Mercaptan applied his thumb and forefinger to his, alas! too snout-like nose, “ça pue. And as for Homo à la H. G. Wells—ça ne pue pas assez. What I glory in is the civilized, middle way between stink and asepsis. Give me a little musk, a little intoxicating feminine exhalation, the bouquet of old wine and strawberries, a lavender bag under every pillow and pot-pourri in the corners of the drawing-room. Readable books, amusing conversation, civilized women, graceful art and dry vintage, music, with a quiet life and reasonable comfort—that’s all I ask for.”
“Talking about comfort,” Gumbril put in, before Lypiatt had time to fling his answering thunders, “I must tell you about my new invention. Pneumatic trousers,” he explained. “Blow them up. Perfect comfort. You see the idea? You’re a sedentary man, Mercaptan. Let me put you down for a couple of pairs.”