Money from Holme (14 page)

The first of Rumbelow’s two large sketches was called simply ‘Automation’. It represented the interior of a factory in which processes clearly so to be described were going ahead in a big and intricate way. Far more detail was represented than would commonly be found in a preliminary affair of this kind. It gave evidence of the most meticulous calculations and must have been achieved with great labour. The thought of the yet greater toil and sweat that would be required to produce the vast painting that was to be based on it made Cheel feel positively ill. And what made it so particularly awful was (to Cheel’s mind) the totally uninspired and (as one might say) triumphantly anaesthetic character of the whole thing. In short, it was the miserable Rumbelow all over.

And it was now that Cheel became aware of an audience: a potential audience. It wasn’t large, and it wasn’t exactly distinguished. It was, in fact, a couple of the tea-shop women. One, sure enough, had her nose in a catalogue. And the other had her nose in Rumbelow’s picture – so much in Rumbelow’s picture that she might be smelling whatever oily smells automation may be supposed to produce. Both women appeared to be perplexed. They looked as if they had been brought up on the art of Sir Edwin Landseer – or at most on the bilious females of Sir Edward Burne-Jones. What might be called Industrial Art was beyond them. Still, they were seekers after light. And Cheel was suddenly prompted to supply it. He stepped forward with a bow.

‘May I have the pleasure,’ he asked, ‘of offering an explanatory word?’

‘You must understand,’ Cheel pursued, courteously but instructively, ‘that the title refers not merely to the scene represented, but also to the method by which the representation has been achieved. The manufacturer, Mr Rumbelow (who happens to be a very old friend of mine, by the way), is among the most notable pioneers of Electronic Art.’

The two women glanced at each other uncertainly. They were doubtful about the propriety of letting themselves be spoken to by a male stranger. But Cheel was a person of gentlemanlike deportment and address, and Burlington House, after all, is a place where a certain bold Bohemianism in manners is admissible.

‘How intensely interesting!’ one of the women said.

‘Mr Rumbelow’s notice was first attracted by the spectacle of what is called Action Painting or
Tachisme
. This, as you know, is achieved by splashing or dribbling paint on canvas. What Mr Rumbelow observed was that it seemed a needlessly messy and laborious craft. He felt his sense of efficiency to be challenged, and he set his skill as an electronic engineer to work. Very soon he had perfected a simple machine. The operator need do no more than sit at an instrument panel. Simply by depressing a switch, a large and elaborate Action Painting could be produced virtually instantaneously. The saving in artistic man-hours was enormous.’

The woman with the catalogue was covertly consulting it. She must be seeking some confirmation in print of these extraordinary disclosures. Her companion, however, was of a less ungenerously sceptical temperament.

‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘Of course I’ve heard of it. But I haven’t actually seen anything done that way before.’

Cheel had to disguise a cackle of laughter as a dignified cough. Several more people had now gathered around him. He didn’t observe them very clearly, but they contributed, somehow, to his own sense of the enormous funniness of his joke.

‘But the exhibit before us now,’ he went on, something of the tones of a guide-lecturer coming into his voice, ‘represents a different order of achievement. Only a technologist as brilliant as Mr Rumbelow could have hoped to bring it off. You will see at a glance that a manufactured article like this, if it had to be made by hand, would involve the most monotonous and soul destroying labour. And remember, please, that this is only a preliminary design for something much larger, and to be realized in even more overwhelming detail. An unassisted human being could hardly hope to achieve it while retaining his sanity – and certainly not if he were a person of any imagination or sensibility. But Mr Rumbelow has once more risen to the occasion.’

Cheel paused impressively. Actually, his invention was beginning to fail – and moreover he was wondering just how he was going to bring his turn to a close. There were now more than a dozen people gathered around him, and in the attitude of some of them he sensed a certain disapproval. What if somebody called an attendant, or even a functionary of a superior order? He thought he heard a female of the landed-gentry contingent say ‘Turn him out’, and even the more credulous of the two women constituting his original audience was now looking suspicious. Such was his intrepidity of spirit, however, that these inauspicious circumstances only spurred him on.

‘Notice,’ he said, ‘the unbroken brick wall that is a notable feature of the design. It has been calculated that the full-scale version of the picture destined for Africa will call for the accurate reproduction of eleven million, forty-seven hundred thousand, twelve hundred and eighty-two individual bricks. One single operation on the part of the computing and other devices in Mr Rumbelow’s electronic machine will place these precisely in position on the canvas, at the same time observing the strictest canons of both linear and aerial perspective. And now a brief biographical note. My old friend’s achievement – I refer to Mr Rumbelow – my old friend’s achievement must appear the more notable when we consider the highly disadvantageous circumstances of his early life. His mother – perhaps through some grave defect of intellect, perhaps merely on account of the extremely humble walk of life in which she had been brought up – was never able either to read or write. His father, ostensibly a reputable pawnbroker in a small way of business, was in fact an incompetent and unsuccessful receiver of stolen goods. The boy himself, moreover, in addition to suffering from a distressing scrofulous complaint which he has never in fact overcome, was early discovered to be totally colour blind. This circumstance, in itself somewhat disabling in one whose ambition–’

Cheel broke off – his words suddenly strangled in his throat. Hard by, there had been a roar of rage. It came from a member of his audience who was none other than the evil Rumbelow himself.

There was but one course open to Mervyn Cheel in this hideous situation, and that course he immediately took. Not Hector himself, pursued by the stern Achilles thrice fugitive about Troy wall, made better speed than did Cheel in the direction of the turnstiles of the Royal Academy. Nor did he at all stand upon the order of his going, so far as the minor convenience of others was concerned. In fact he had to knock down two of the wretched children who were being dragged round the Exhibition, and was further constrained to give an intrusive old gentleman a vigorous shove in the face. An imaginative observer of the scene might have expected the pink-coated Masters of Foxhounds (of whom there was the usual quota on the Academy’s walls this year) to scramble out of their frames with cries of
Tally-ho
and
Gone Away
.

Cheel might well have made good his escape at once, but for one circumstance. His flight was taking place under the influence of an emotion not very compatible with clear thinking, or even clear seeing. To his fancy at least, Rumbelow’s pursuing breath was hot upon his neck – so that he was (to put it quite frankly) pretty well blind with terror. Pounding past the ladies who purvey catalogues and picture-postcards, he retained a dim vision of how one gets
in
to the Royal Academy, and none at all of how one gets
out
. But at least he glimpsed one door through which it was possible to tumble. It bore the inscription
Gentlemen
. Through this he bolted. He found himself instantly in the arms of somebody who was presumably attempting to emerge. It was, he supposed, an attendant. And to this attendant, in his extremity, he addressed an agonized appeal.

‘Save me!’ Cheel panted. ‘Save me, save me!’ he contrived breath enough to scream. ‘A maniac! Running amuck! Oh, save me, if you can!’

‘Steady, old boy, steady.’ The voice was not that of an attendant. ‘Bit of trouble, eh? Ha-ha! In there, and I’ll see you through.’

Cheel felt himself propelled firmly through a door which was then closed on him. He sank down, sobbing. His perambulation of the rooms of the Royal Academy had ended up in what was perhaps the Royal Academy’s smallest room of all.

‘No, no – nobody here.’ He heard the voice of his preserver speaking in large and jovial surprise. ‘Yes, a fellow did dash in. A thief or something, eh? Bobbed out again. Out of the building by now, I’d say. Find a copper, if I were you, sir. Deuced sorry, eh? Would have nabbed him, if I’d known.’

A door banged. There was silence. Cheel rose rather unsteadily from the object upon which he had collapsed, opened the door, and peered out. About the voice of his preserver there was something that had brushed his memory even in the midst of his panic. Now, at a single glance, he remembered. This was the man, corpulent in figure and crude in conversation, to whom he owed what champagne he had got upon the occasion of the Sebastian Holme Private View at the Da Vinci Gallery.

‘Well, well, well!’ It was instantly apparent that the corpulent man had lost nothing of his ebullience during the intervening weeks. ‘Having a bit of a lark, old chap? Jolly good fun!’

Cheel acquiesced in this description of his late activities. It was with some such notion, after all, that he had entered upon them. And at least the maniac Rumbelow was gone. Perhaps he was pounding down the length of Piccadilly by now, howling for Cheel’s blood.

‘Simply a fellow with a kind of
idée fixe
,’ Cheel said vaguely. ‘Has a sense of grievance, or something. I always try to avoid him. That’s why I was just slipping out of his way. But thanks a lot, old chap.’

This expression went down well with the corpulent man. It also seemed to stir his memory. He laid a heavy hand on Cheel’s shoulder.

‘Long time since we met – what?’ he asked. ‘Deuce of a long time since we lived it up together, eh? Not since St Tropez, I’d say. How’s dear old Meg?’

‘As a matter of fact, you and I ran into each other not all that long ago at a picture show. At the Da Vinci Gallery.’ Having nothing to report about Meg, Cheel said this as the first thing that came into his head.

‘So we did!’ The corpulent man was delighted. ‘And you came out with Debby and me and had a bite at the Caprice.’ The corpulent man, whose recollections seemed to be conducted singularly at random, was more delighted still. ‘Dear old boy!’ he said. ‘I wish I could remember what I called you in those golden days.’

‘Mervyn,’ Cheel replied. He had lately been discovering a reluctance too readily to reveal his identity to the world on casual acquaintance.

‘Mervyn, to be sure. And I’m still old Duffy, you know ha-ha!’ The corpulent man, who had presumably been drinking, was now cheerfully pawing Cheel’s back. ‘What about a quick one?’ he asked. ‘We’ll go out and find Debby and Wuggles – and old Meg, if she’s here.’

‘Meg isn’t here,’ Cheel said. He was now wondering how he was going to get away from this mildly pestilential – even if lately providential– person. ‘And I’m afraid–’

‘By Jove! It was at that fellow Sebastian Holme’s show, wasn’t it?’ The man calling himself Duffy accompanied this fragmentary command of truth by turning his pawing into a vigorous slap between the shoulder blades. ‘That’s why we’re here now – Debby and me. And Wuggles. Particularly Wuggles.’

‘Because of Holme?’ Cheel, puzzled, had pricked up his ears ‘But there aren’t any of Holme’s things here in Burlington House.’

‘Of course not. They’re damned scarce. That’s why I snapped one up at that exhibition. Sure to show growth, you know assets like that. I aim at a whole portfolio of them. Not Holmes, of course. The issue’s exhausted, as you might say. Oversubscribed in a week, eh? But fellows of the same sort. Now, let’s collect the crowd.’

Duffy led the way out of the place of retirement in which this colloquy had taken place. Cheel followed with caution. Nor did he immediately bolt on seeing that the coast was clear. That instinct which had of late been so brilliantly guiding his affairs was whispering to him that – just possibly – there was (once more) something in this for
him
.

‘Dash it all, where
are
Debby and Wuggles?’ Duffy was looking about him in amiable impatience. ‘What’s the good of having a wife, eh, if she won’t wait while a fellow’s in the loo? But Wuggles will have dragged her off to see this whatever-it-is. Affair by a fellow called Rumbelow. Being done for the godless place that chap Holme worked in. Wamba, eh? Territory Wuggles comes from, you know. Lived there for years. That’s why he’s interested.’

A strong light of recollection suddenly shone upon Cheel. He remembered, in fact, his recent reading in the newspaper paragraph called Wamba-Wamba Diary.

‘Would the real name of – um – Wuggles be Wutherspoon?’ he asked.

‘It damned well would. I knew you must know Wuggles. All good men know Wuggles. And there they are!’ Duffy seized Cheel by the elbow, and propelled him in the direction of a man and woman who were emerging from a farther room. ‘Debby – Wuggles,’ he shouted, ‘here’s old Mervyn. We’ll all go out and have a spot.’

Mr Wutherspoon (or perhaps, Cheel thought, he was Sir Wuggles Wutherspoon) responded to this informal introduction without cordiality. He was older than Duffy, and a great deal older than Debby; his expression was melancholy; his complexion was of an order which made Cheel want to back away, so powerfully did it answer to his notion of what must be the effect of yellow fever. Nevertheless Wutherspoon looked tough. Indeed, he would have to be called desiccated. In the wilds of Wamba, one felt, he might have been two or three times in and out of some communal
bouillon
pot without ever having very notably contributed to the nutritional needs of the natives.

Debby was different. Cheel felt drawn to her, since she would – so to speak – pinch superbly. But there seemed no immediate sign that she felt correspondingly drawn to him. She was looking at him silently and with disdain. She powerfully suggested one of the larger cats that has gone temporarily off its feed.