Antic Hay

“Already?” Mrs. Viveash had been reduced, by the violence of her headache, to coming home after her luncheon with Piers Cotton for a rest. She had fed her hungry pain on Pyramid...

Fan-shaped, blond, mounted on gauze and guaranteed undetectable, it arrived from the wig-maker, preciously packed in a stout cardboard box six times too large for it and accompa...

Two hundred and thirteen Sloane Street. The address, Rosie reflected, as she vaporized synthetic lilies of the valley over all her sinuous person, was decidedly a good one. It a...

One after another, they engaged themselves in the revolving doors of the restaurant, trotted round in the moving cage of glass and ejected themselves into the coolness and darkn...

Gumbril senior occupied a tall, narrow-shouldered and rachitic house in a little obscure square not far from Paddington. There were five floors, and a basement with beetles, and...

Mr. Boldero was a small dark man of about forty-five, active as a bird and with a bird’s brown, beady eyes, a bird’s sharp nose. He was always busy, always had twenty different...

The blackamoors had left the platform at the end of the hall. The curtains looped up at either side had slid down, cutting it off from the rest of the room—“making two worlds,”...

“Mister Gumbril!” Surprise was mingled with delight. “This is indeed a pleasure!” Delight was now the prevailing emotion expressed by the voice that advanced, as yet without a v...

It was between Whitefield Street and the Tottenham Court Road, in a ‘heavenly Mews,’ as he liked to call it (for he had a characteristic weakness for philosophical paronomasia),...

Gumbril had spent the afternoon at Bloxam Gardens. His chin was still sore from the spirit gum with which he had attached to it the symbol of the Complete Man; he was feeling al...

Gumbril, Theodore Gumbril Junior, B.A. Oxon., sat in his oaken stall on the north side of the School Chapel and wondered, as he listened through the uneasy silence of half a tho...

Lypiatt had a habit, which some of his friends found rather trying—and not only friends, for Lypiatt was ready to let the merest acquaintances, the most absolute strangers, even...

Mrs. Viveash descended the steps into King Street, and standing there on the pavement looked dubiously first to the right and then to the left. Little and loud, the taxis rolled...

Gumbril nodded. “It’s me,” he reassured her. “I’ve shaved; that’s all.” He had left his beard in the top right-hand drawer of the chest of drawers, among the ties and the collars.

The two o’clock snorted out of Charing Cross, but no healths were drunk, this time, to Viscount Lascelles. A desiccating sobriety made arid the corner of the third-class carriag...

Zoe ended the discussion by driving half an inch of pen-knife into Coleman’s left arm and running out of the flat, slamming the door behind her. Coleman was used to this sort of...

They stood outside, like beggars waiting abjectly at the doors of a banqueting-hall—stood and listened to the snatches of music that came out tantalizingly from within. A rattle...

After leaving Mr. Mercaptan, Lypiatt had gone straight home. The bright day seemed to deride him. With its shining red omnibuses, its parasols, its muslin girls, its young-leave...

Shearwater sat on his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingly like a man in a nightmare. The pedals were geared to a little wheel under the saddle and the rim of the wheel rub...

It was Press Day. The critics had begun to arrive; Mr. Albemarle circulated among them with a ducal amiability. The young assistant hovered vaguely about, straining to hear what...

Critically, in the glasses of Mr. Bojanus’s fitting-room, Gumbril examined his profile, his back view. Inflated, the Patent Small-Clothes bulged, bulged decidedly, though with a...

They were playing that latest novelty from across the water, “What’s he to Hecuba?” Sweet, sweet and piercing, the saxophone pierced into the very bowels of compassion and tende...