“Ah, the classical remedy.... But not to shoot big game, I hope?” She thought of Viveash among the Tikki-tikkis and the tsetses. He was a charming creature; charming, but ... but what? “Good heavens!” exclaimed Gumbril. “What do you take me for? Big game!” He leaned back in his chair and began to laugh, heartily, for the first time since he had returned from Robertsbridge, yesterday evening. He had felt then as though he would never laugh again. “Do you see me in a pith helmet, with an elephant gun?” Mrs. Viveash put her hand to her forehead. “I see you, Theodore,” she said, “but I try to think you would look quite normal; because of my head.” “I go to Paris first,” said Gumbril. “After that, I don’t know. I shall go wherever I think people will buy pneumatic trousers. I’m travelling on business.” This time, in spite of her head, Mrs. Viveash laughed. “I thought of giving myself a farewell banquet,” Gumbril went on. “We’ll go round before dinner, if you’re feeling well enough, that is, and collect a few friends. Then, in profoundest gloom, we’ll eat and drink. And in the morning, unshaved, exhausted and filled with disgust, I shall take the train from Victoria, feeling thankful to get out of England.” “We’ll do it,” said Mrs. Viveash faintly and indomitably from the sofa that was almost genuinely a death-bed. “And, meanwhile, we’ll have a second brew of tea and you shall talk to me.” The tannin was brought in. Gumbril settled down to talk and Mrs. Viveash to listen—to listen and from time to time to dab her brows with eau-de-Cologne, to take a sniff of hartshorn. Gumbril talked. He talked of the marriage ceremonies of octopuses, of the rites intricately consummated in the submarine green grottos of the Indian Ocean. Given a total of sixteen arms, how many permutations and combinations of caresses? And in the middle of each bunch of arms a mouth like the beak of a macaw. On the backside of the moon, his friend Umbilikoff, the mystic, used to assure him, the souls of the dead in the form of little bladders—like so much swelled sago—are piled up and piled up till they squash and squeeze one another with an excruciating and ever-growing pressure. In the exoteric world this squeezing on the moon’s backside is known, erroneously, as hell. And as for the constellation, Scorpio—he was the first of all constellations to have a proper sort of backbone. For by an effort of the will he ingurgitated his external armour, he compressed and rebuilt it within his body and so became the first vertebrate. This, you may well believe, was a notable day in cosmic history. The rents in these new buildings in Regent Street and Piccadilly run to as much as three or four pounds a square foot. Meanwhile, all the beauty imagined by Nash has departed, and chaos and barbarism once more reign supreme, even in Regent Street. The ghost of Gumbril Senior stalked across the room.