Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley Read Free Book Online Page A

without. It needs strength, more strength than I’ve got.’ He clutched his beard close under the chin and remained for a moment pensively silent. ‘The advantage of Porteous’s line of business,’ he went on at last, reflectively, ‘is that it can be carried on by oneself, without collaboration. There’s no need to appeal to any one outside oneself, or to have any dealings with other people at all, if one doesn’t want to. That’s so deplorable about architecture. There’s no privacy, so to speak; always this horrible jostling with clients and builders and contractors and people, before one can get anything done. It’s really revolting. I’m not good at people. Most of them I don’t like at all, not at all,’ Mr Gumbril repeated with vehemence. ‘I don’t deal with them very well; it isn’t my business. My business is architecture. But I don’t often get a chance of practising it. Not properly.’
    Gumbril Senior smiled rather sadly. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘I can do something. I have my talent, I have my imagination. They can’t take those from me. Come and see what I’ve been doing lately.’
    He led the way out of the room and mounted, two steps at a time, towards a higher floor. He opened the door of what should have been, in a well-ordered house, the Best Bedroom, and slipped into the darkness.
    â€˜Don’t rush in,’ he called back to his son, ‘for God’s sake don’t rush in. You’ll smash something. Wait till I’ve turned on the light. It’s so like these asinine electricians to have hidden the switch behind the door like this.’ Gumbril Junior heard him fumbling in the darkness; there was suddenly light. He stepped in.
    The only furniture in the room consisted of a couple of long trestle tables. On these, on the mantelpiece and all over the floor, were scattered confusedly, like the elements of a jumbled city, a vast collection of architectural models. There were cathedrals, there were town halls, universities, public libraries, there were three or four elegant little sky-scrapers, there were blocks of offices, huge warehouses, factories, and finally dozens of magnificent country mansions, complete with their terraced gardens, their noble flights of steps, their fountains and ornamental waters and grandly bridged canals, their little rococo pavilions and garden houses.
    â€˜Aren’t they beautiful?’ Gumbril Senior turned enthusiastically towards his son. His long grey hair floated wispily about his head, his spectacles flashed, and behind them his eyes shone with emotion.
    â€˜Beautiful,’ Gumbril Junior agreed.
    â€˜When you’re really rich,’ said his father, ‘I’ll build you one of these,’ And he pointed to a little village of Chatsworths clustering, at one end of a long table, round the dome of a vaster and austerer St Peter’s. ‘Look at this one, for example.’ He picked his way nimbly across the room, seized the little electric reading-lamp that stood between a railway station and a baptistery on the mantelpiece, and was back again in an instant, trailing behind him a long flex that, as it tautened out, twitched one of the crowning pinnacles off the top of a sky-scraper near the fireplace. ‘Look,’ he repeated, ‘look.’ He switched on the current, and moved the lamp back and forth, up and down in front of the miniature palace. ‘See the beauty of the light and shade,’ he said. ‘There, underneath the great, ponderous cornice, isn’t that fine? And look how splendidly the pilasters carry up the vertical lines. And then the solidity of it, the size, the immense, impending bleakness of it!’ He threw up his arms, he turned his eyes upwards as though standing overwhelmed at the foot of some huge precipitous façade. The lights and shadows vacillated wildly through all the city of palaces and