[ I ]
Bank pass-books and private account-books are revealing documents, strangely neglected by biographers. One of the most useful things to know about any hero is the extent of his income, whether earned or unearned, whether crescendo or diminuendo. Complicated états d’âme are the luxury of leisured opulence. Those who have to earn their living must accept Appearances as Reality, and have little time for metaphysical woes and passions. I once thought of beginning this section with an accurate facsimile of George’s private account and pass books. But that would be vérisme. It is enough to say that his unearned income was nil, and his earned income small but crescendo. Like most people who are too high-spirited to work for stated hours at a weekly wage, he drifted into journalism, which may be briefly but accurately defined as the most degrading form of that most degrading vice, mental prostitution. Its resemblance to the less reprehensible form is striking. Only the more fashionable cocottes of the dual trade make a reasonable income. The similarity between the conditions of the two parallel prostitutions becomes still more remarkable when you reflect that on the physical side you pretend to be a milliner, or a masseuse, or a clergyman’s daughter, or a lady of quality, or even a lady journalist in need of a little aid for which you are prepared to make suitable acknowledgment; and on the mental side you pretend to be a poet, or an expert in something, or a lady of quality, or a duke. Both require suppleness in a supreme degree, and in both the fatal handicaps are honesty, modesty and independence.
All of which George discovered very rapidly; and acted accordingly. But his powers of simulation were inadequate, and consequently he failed at all times to conceal the fact that he possessed some knowledge and beliefs, and held to them. This, of course, for a long time prevented his obtaining work from any but crank periodicals, of which London before the war possessed about three, which believed in allowing contributors to say what they thought. Needless to say, they have since perished; and London journalism is now one compact sun of sweetness and light. If this, or indeed anything, much mattered, one might be tempted to deplore it.
In the course of his naif peregrinations George became temporarily acquainted with numerous personages, whom he classified as morons, abject morons and queer-Dicks. The abject morons were those editors and journalists who sincerely believed in the imbecilities they perpetrated, virtuous apprentices gone to the devil, honest bootblacks out of a job. The morons were those who knew better but pretended not to, and who by long dabbling in pitch had become pitchy. The queer-Dicks were more or less honest cranks, or at least possessed so much vanity and obstinacy that they seemed honest. After a few vague and awkward struggles, George found himself limited to the queer-Dicks. Of these there were three, whom for convenience sake, I shall label Shobbe, Bobbe and Tubbe. Mr. or Herr Shobbe ran a literary review, one of those “advanced” reviews beloved by the English, which move rapidly forward with a crab-like motion. Herr Shobbe was a very great man. Comrade Bobbe ran a Socialist weekly which was subsidized by a demented eugenist and a vegetarian Theosophist. Since Marxian economics, eugenics, pure food and theosophy did not wholly fill its columns, the organ of the intellectual and wage-weary worker permitted regular comments on art and literature. And since none of the directors of the journal knew anything whatever about these subjects, they occasionally and by accident allowed them to be treated by some one with ideas and enthusiasm. Comrade Bobbe was a very great man. As for Mr. Waldo Tubbe, who hailed (why “hailed”?) from the Middle Western districts of the United States, he was an exceedingly ardent and patriotic British Tory, standing for Royalism in Art, Authority in Politics and Classicism in Religion. Unfortunately, there was no dormant peerage in the family; otherwise he would certainly have spent all his modest patrimony in endeavouring to become Lord Tubbe. Since he was an unshakable Anglo-Catholic there were no hopes of a Papal Countship; and Tory governments are proverbially shabby in their treatment of even the most distinguished among their intellectual supporters. Consequently, all Mr. Waldo Tubbe could do in that line was to hint at his aristocratic English ancestry, to use his (possibly authentic) coat-of-arms on his cutlery, stationery, toilette articles and book-plates, and know only the “best” people. How George ever got to know him is a mystery, still more how he came to write for a periodical which once advertised that its list of subscribers included four dukes, three marquesses and eleven earls. The only explanation is that Mr. Tubbe’s Americanized Toryism was a bit more lively than the native brand, or that he leaned so very far to the extreme Right that without knowing it he sometimes tumbled into the verge of the extreme Left. But, in any case, Mr. Waldo Tubbe was also a very great man.
Upon the charity of these three gentlemen our hero chiefly but not extravagantly subsisted, skating indeed upon very thin ice in his relations with them, and expending treasures of diplomacy and dissimulation which might have been employed in the service of his Country. It subsequently transpired (why “transpired”?) that his Country did not need his brains, but his blood.
Sunday in London. In the City, nuts, bolts, infinite curious pieces of odd metal, embedded in the black shiny roads, frozen rivers of ink, may be examined without danger. The peace of commerce which passes all desolation. Puritan fervour relapsed to negative depression. Gigantic wings of Ennui folded irresistibly over millions. Vast trails of automobiles hopelessly hooting to escape. Epic melancholy of deserted side-streets where the rhythmic beat of a horse’s hoofs is an adagio of despair. Horrors of Gunnersbury. The spleen of the railway line between Turnham Green and Hammersmith, the villainous sordidness of Raynes Park, the ennui which always vibrates with the waiting train at Gloucester Road Station, emerge triumphant when the Lord is at rest and possess the streets. The rain is one melancholy, and the sun another. The supreme insult of pealing bells morning and evening. Dearly beloved brethren, miserable sinners, stand up, stand up for Jesus. Who will deliver us, who will deliver us from the Christians? O Lord Jesus, come quickly, and get it over.
It was a merry Sunday evening of merry England in the month of March, 1912. After a long day of unremitting but not very remunerative toil, George had gone to call on his friend, Mr. Frank Upjohn. The word “friend” is here, as nearly always, inexact, if by friend is meant one who feels for another a disinterested affection unaccompanied by sexual desire. (Friendship accompanied by sexual desire is love, the phœnix or unicorn of passions.) In the case of George and Mr. Upjohn there was at least a truce to the instinctive hostility and grudging which human beings almost invariably feel for one another. Ties of mutual self-interest bound them. George made jokes and Mr. Upjohn laughed at them: and vice versa. Mr. Upjohn desired to make George a disciple, and George was not averse from making use of Mr. Upjohn. Mutual admiration, implied if not expressed and perhaps not wholly insincere, enabled them to form a small protective nucleus against the oceanic indifference of mankind; and thus feel superior to it. They ate together, and even lent each other small sums of money without security. The word “friend” is therefore justified à peu près.
Needless to say, Mr. Upjohn was a very great man. He was a Painter. Since he was destitute of any intrinsic and spontaneous originality, he strove much to be original, and invented a new school of painting every season. He first created a sensation with his daring and brilliant “Christ in a Bloomsbury Brothel,” which was denounced in no unmeasured terms by the Press, ever tender for the Purity of Public Morals and the posthumous reputation of Our Lord. “The Blessed Damozel in Hell” passed almost unnoticed, when fortunately the model most unjustly obtained an affiliation order against Mr. Upjohn, and thus drew attention to a neglected masterpiece, which was immediately bought by a man who had made a fortune in intimate rubber goods. Mr. Upjohn then became aware of the existence of modern French art. One season he painted in gorgeous Pointilliste blobs, the next in monotone Fauviste smears, then in calamitous Futuriste accidents of form and colour. At this moment he was just about to launch the Suprematist movement in painting, to which he hoped to convert George, or at any rate to get him to write an article about it. Suprematist painting, which has now unfortunately gone out of fashion, was, as its name implies, the supreme point of modern art. Mr. Upjohn produced two pictures in illustration (the word is perhaps inaccurate) of his theories. One was a beautiful scarlet whorl on a background of the purest flake white. The other at first sight appeared to be a brood of bulbous yellow chickens, with thick elongated necks, aimlessly scattered over a grey-green meadow; but on closer inspection the chickens turned out to be conventionalized phalluses. The first was called Decomposition-Cosmos, and the second Op. 49. Piano.
Mr. Upjohn turned on both electric lights in his studio for George to study these interesting productions, at which our friend gazed with a feeling of baffled perplexity and the agonized certainty that he would have to say something about them, and that what he would say would inevitably be wrong. Fortunately, Mr. Upjohn was extremely vain and highly nervous. He stood behind George, coughing and jerking himself about agitatedly:
“What I mean to say is,” he said, puncturing his discourse with coughs, “there you’ve got it.”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“What I mean is, you’ve got precise expression of precise emotion.”
“Just what I was going to say.”
“You see, when you’ve got that, what I mean is, you’ve got something.”
“Why, of course!”
“You see, what I mean to say is, if you get two or three intelligent people to see the thing, then you’ve got it. I mean you won’t get those damned blockheaded sons of bitches like Picasso and Augustus John to see it, I mean, it simply smashes them, you see.”
“Did you expect them to?”
“You see, what you’ve got is complete originality and The Tradition. One doesn’t worry about the hacks, you see, but what I mean to say, one does mildly suppose Picasso had a few gleams of intelligence, but what I mean is they won’t take anything new.”
“I get the originality, of course, but I admit I don’t quite see the traditional side of the movement.”
Mr. Upjohn sighed pettishly and waved his head from side to side in commiserating contempt.
“Of course, you wouldn’t. What intelligence you have was ruined by your lack of education, and your native obtuseness makes you instinctively prefer the academic. I mean, can’t you SEE that the proportions of Decomposition-Cosmos are exactly those of the Canopic vase in the Filangieri-Museum at Naples?”
“How could I see that,” said George, rather annoyed, “since I’ve never been to Naples?”
“That’s what I mean to say,” exclaimed Mr. Upjohn triumphantly, “you simply have no education what-so-ever!”
“Well, but what about the other?” said George, desiring to be placable, “is that in the Canopic vase tradition?”
“Christ-in-petticoats, NO! I thought even you’d see that. What I mean is, can’t you see it?”
“They might be free adaptations of Greek vase painting?” said George tentatively, hoping to soothe this excitable and irritated genius. Mr. Upjohn flung his palette knife on the floor.
“You’re too stupid, George. What I mean is the proportion and placing and colour-values are exactly in the best tradition of American-Indian blankets, and what I mean is, when you’ve got that, well, I mean, you’ve got something!”
“Of course, of course, it was stupid of me not to see. Forgive me, I’ve been working at hack articles all day, and my mind’s a bit muzzy.”
“I mildly supposed so!”
And Mr. Upjohn, with spasmodic movements, jerked the two easels round to the wall. There was a short pause in the conversation. Mr. Upjohn irritatedly cast himself at full length upon a sofa, and spasmodically ate candied apricots. He placed them in his mouth with his forefinger and thumb, holding his elbow at a right angle to his body, with his chin far extended; and bit them savagely in half. George watched this impressive and barbaric spectacle with the interest of one who at last discovers the meaning of the mysterious rite of Urim and Thummim. A timid effort at making conversation was repelled by Mr. Upjohn, with a gesture which George interpreted as meaning that Mr. Upjohn required complete silence to digest and sweeten with candied apricots the memory of George’s treasonable obtuseness. Suddenly George started, for Mr. Upjohn, after coughing once or twice, swung himself from his couch with incredible swiftness, hawked vigorously, flung open a window with unnecessary violence and spat voluminously into the street. He then turned and said calmly:
“You’d better come along to fat Shobbe’s.”
George, who was young enough to enjoy going to miscellaneous parties, gratefully acquiesced; and was still further gratified by being allowed to witness the strange and complex ablutions performed by Mr. Upjohn from a wash-basin startlingly concealed in a veneered mahogany tail-boy.
Mr. Upjohn was evidently a very clean man, at least in those portions of his body exposed to the public gaze. He washed and rinsed his face thoroughly, brushed his teeth until George apprehended lest the bristles be worn to the bone, gargled and spat freely. He soaped and pumiced his hands, which were large, yellow and slightly spatulate; and excavated his nails with singular industry and pertinacity. He then sat down before a folding table-mirror in three parts, which reflected both profiles as well as full-face and combed and brushed and re-brushed and re-combed his coarse hay-like hair until it crackled with induced electricity. When Mr. Upjohn judged that hygiene and beauty-culture had received their full due, he arrayed himself in a clean collar, a tie of remarkable lustre and size, and a narrow-waisted rather long coat which, taken in conjunction with the worn but elegant peg-top trousers he had on, gave him a pleasantly rake-helly and Regency look. This singular scene, which occupied the better part of an hour, was conducted by Mr. Upjohn with great gravity, varied by the emission of a singular and discordant chant or hum, and wild petulant oaths whenever any object of the toilet or of his apparel did not instantly present itself to his hand. Oddly enough, Mr. Upjohn was not a sodomist. He was a professedly ardent admirer of what our ignorant forefathers called the soft sex. Mr. Upjohn often asserted that after the immense toils of Suprematist painting nothing could rest him but the presence of several beautiful women. While gallantly and probably necessarily discreet as to his conquests, he was always prepared to talk about love, and to give subtle erotic advice, which led any man who had actually lain with a woman to suspect that Mr. Upjohn was at best a fumbler and probably still a virgin.
Mr. Upjohn then endued a very Regency thin grey overcoat, stuck a long ebony cane with no handle under his left arm-pit, tossed a soft grey hat rakishly on to his hair, and made for the door. George followed, half-impressed, half-amused by this childish swagger and self-conscious bounce.
In the street the Sabbath ennui of London emerged from its lair like a large dull grey octopus, and shot stealthy feelers of depression at them. Mr. Upjohn, safe as Achilles in the Stygian dip of his conceit, strode along energetically with an inward feeling that he had gone one better on James McNeill Whistler. The boredom of Mr. Upjohn came from within, not from without. He was so absorbed in Mr. Upjohn that he rarely noticed what was going on about him.
George fought at the monster and plunged desperately into talk.
“What about this coal strike? Will it ruin the country as the papers say? Isn’t it a foolish thing on both sides?”
This strike was George’s first introduction to the reality of the “social problem” and the bitter class hatred which smoulders in England and at times bursts into fierce crises of hatred, restrained only by that mingling of fear and “decency” which composes the servile character of the British working man.
“Well, what I mean to say is,” said Mr. Upjohn, who very rarely managed to say what he meant but always meant to say something original and startling, “it ain’t our affair. But what I mean is, if the miners get more money it’ll be all the better for us. They’re more likely to buy our pictures than sons of bitches like Mond and old Asquith.”
George was a bit staggered at this. In the first place, he had been looking at the problem from a national, not a personal, point of view. And, in the second place, he knew just a little about working men and their conditions. He could not see how five shillings a week more would convert the miners to collecting the Suprematist school of painting, or make them abandon their cultivated amusements of coursing, pigeon flying, gambling, wife-beating, and drinking. But Mr. Upjohn delivered his obiter dicta with so much aplomb that a boy of twenty might be excused for failing to see their complete absurdity.
They were walking up Church Street, Kensington, that dismal communication trench which links the support line of Kensington High Street with the front line of Notting Hill Gate. How curious are cities, with their intricate trench systems and perpetual warfare, concealed but as deadly as the open warfare of armies! We live in trenches, with flat revetments of house-fronts as parapet and parados. The warfare goes on behind the house-fronts—wives with husbands, children with parents, employers with employed, tradesmen with tradesmen, banker with lawyer, and the triumphal doctor rooting out life’s casualties. Desperate warfare—for what? Money as the symbol of power; power as the symbol or affirmation of existence. Throbbing warfare of men’s cities! As fierce and implacable and concealed as the desperate warfare of plants and the hidden carnage of animals. We walk up Church Street. Up the communication trench. We cannot see “over the top,” have no vista of the immense No-Man’s Land of London’s roofs. We cannot pierce through the house-fronts. What is going on behind those dingy unpierceable house-fronts? What tortures, what contests, what incests, what cruelties, what sacrifice, what horror, what sordid emptiness? We cannot pierce through the pavement and Belgian blocks, see the subterranean veins of electric cables, the arteries of gas and water mains, the viscera of underground railways. We cannot feel the water filtering through London clay, do not perceive the relics of ruined Londons waiting for archæologists from the antipodes, do not see, far, far down, the fossillised bones of extinct animals and their coprolites. Here in Notting Hill, the sabre-toothed tiger roared and savagely devoured its victims, the huge-horned deer darted in terror; wolves howled; the brown bear preyed; overhead by day screamed eagles and by night flitted huge bats. Mysterious forest murmurs, abrupt yells and threatening growls, and the amorous hatred of female beasts, were vocal when the Channel was the Rhine’s estuary.
“Time passes,” said George. “What do we know of Time? Prehistoric beasts, like the ichthyosaurus and Queen Victoria, have laired and copulated and brought forth....”
A motor-bus roared by, like a fabulous noisy red ox with fiery eyes and a luminous interior, quenching his words.
“Eh?” said Mr. Upjohn. “*****!”
“Now, look at these simian bipeds,” George pursued, pointing to an inoffensive pair of lovers and a suspicious cop, “more foul, more deadly, more incestuously blood-lustful....”
“You see, what I mean is, nothing matters to these people but our conversation.... Now, what I mean is, you get fat Shobbe to let you write an article on me and Suprematism.”
“We should go to the Zoo more often, and watch the monkeys. The chimpanzee leaps with the dexterity of a politician. The Irish-looking ourang smokes his pipe as placidly as a Camden Town murderer. The purple-bottomed mandrils on heat will initiate you into love. And the perpetual chatter of the small monkeys—how like ourselves! What ecstatic clicking about nothing! Go to the ape, thou poet.”
Mr. Upjohn laughed abruptly and spat with a raucous cough:
“An old idea, but what’s it got to do with le mouvement? Still, what I mean is, I might do something with it....”
Poor old George! He was a bloody fool. He never learned how fatally unwise it is to express any sort of an idea to a brother—still less to a sister—artist.
Mr. Upjohn discoursed on Suprematism and himself.
At Notting Hill Gate, George halted. The Sabbath ennui shot its tentacles at him, and enlaced his spirit, dragging him down into the whirlpool of wanhope. Why go on? Why affront the veiled hostility of people? Why suffer those eyes to search and those nimble unerring tongues to wound? Oh, wrap oneself in solitude, like an armoured shroud, and bend over the dead words of a dead language! A simian biped! O gods, gods! And Plato talks of Beauty.
“Come along,” shouted Mr. Upjohn, a few paces ahead, “this way. Holland Park. Old Shobbe’ll be waiting for me in that mob. What I mean is, he knows I’m the only other intelligent person in London.”
George still hesitated. He sank deeper in the maelstrom of unintelligible and causeless despair. Why go on? The adolescent love of death and suicide—corollary to youth’s vitality and vivid energy—swept over him in choking waves. To cease upon the midnight with no pain....
“I think I shan’t come,” he shouted after the retreating Mr. Upjohn.
Mr. Upjohn hurried back and seized George’s arm:
“What’s the matter with you? The best way to get an article out of Shobbe is to go and see him on his Sunday evenings. Come on. We shall be late.”
No Euripidean chorus uttered gnomic reflections on the inevitable and irresistible power of Ananke, the Destiny which is above the gods. No bright god warned him, no oracular voice spoke to him. Conflict of free-will and destiny! But is there a conflict? Whether we move or are still, whether we go to the right or the left, hesitate or rush blindly forward, the thread is inexorably spun. Ananke. Ananke.
George yielded reluctantly to the tug at his arm.
“All right, I’ll come.”
[ II ]
As they were shown into Mr. Shobbe’s large studio they encountered an indescribable babble of human voices, which gave strange point to George’s zoological remarks, since it sounded as if all the macaws at the Zoo had got into the monkey-house to argue with its inhabitants about theology. Mr. Shobbe’s studio, or “stew-joe,” as his humbler Cockney contributors called it, was already dim with cigarette smoke. The excited and elevated babble of voices was due to the fact that this was one of Mr. Shobbe’s rare caviar and champagne evenings, and not one of the ordinary beer and ham-sandwich débâcles. George and Mr. Upjohn were still in the doorway, hidden by the opening doors, when a couple of champagne corks popped. George noticed a look of horror and perplexity, mingled with the satisfaction always produced by the prospect of free alcohol, in Mr. Upjohn’s countenance. George wondered vaguely why, and followed the ebullient swagger of Mr. Upjohn into the large room. It was not until long afterwards that he realized the cause of this rapid and subtle flash of horror in Mr. Upjohn. The champagne and caviar evenings were reserved for the “better” contributors to, and the wealthier guarantors of, Mr. Shobbe’s periodical. Upjohn was County and Cambridge, with a small income and prospects of a large inheritance from a senile aunt—he was therefore one of the “better” contributors. George, on the other hand, was merely middle-class, talented, and penniless. Mr. Upjohn had thus committed a social error of hair-raising enormity by bringing George to the champagne reception under the false impression that it was merely a beer “do” for the common mob.
With genial bonhomie Mr. Shobbe greeted in Mr. Upjohn the potential inheritance from the senile aunt. Upon George he turned a coldly languid blue eye, and for a moment lent him a hand even limper, flabbier and clammier than usual. George noticed the difference, but ingenuously assumed that it was because he was younger than Mr. Upjohn and incapable of producing “Christ in a Bloomsbury Brothel” or the doctrines of Suprematism. But Mr. Upjohn, with more acute social ambitions, was aware of his gaffe. He mumbled his apology, which was almost lost in the surrounding babble:
“Brought ’m ’long discuss ’n article on Me ’n S’prematism.”
Mr. Shobbe only half-heard, and nodded vaguely. The slight awkwardness of the situation was ended by the appearance of Mrs. Shobbe, who greeted them both; and they passed into the room. George attributed the feeling of strain to his own shyness and aloofness. He was still naif enough to suppose that people are welcomed for their own sake.
In justice to the distinguished gathering in Mr. Shobbe’s studio (two “social” journalists were present) it must be said that the babble and the excitement were not wholly due to the champagne. Pre-war London was comparatively sober. Numbers of women did not even drink at all, and cocktails and communal copulation had not then been developed to their present state of intensity. Whether the art of scandal-mongering has suffered by this new social activity is hard to say, but as ever it remains the chief diversion of the British intelligentsia. Serious conversation is, of course, impossible, on account of the paper-pirates who are always hovering about to snatch up an idea. One definite improvement is that the bon mot, the recherché pun, the intentional witticism, are definitely discouraged. Indeed one of the brightest of the post-war reputations was created by a young man who had the self-restraint to sit through forty-five literary parties without saying a word. This frightened everybody so much that when this modern lay Trappist departed you heard on all sides: “Brilliant young man.”
“Extraordinarily clever.”
“I hear he’s writing a book on metaphysics in the Stone Age.”
“No, really?”
“They say he’s the greatest living authority on pre-Columbian literature.”
“How quite too marvellous.”
But in those distant pre-war days people strove to chatter themselves into notice through a chaos of witticisms. On this particular evening, however, witticisms were in the background, for an event had occurred to stagger this small cosmos of affectation into sincerity. With the exception of George (who was too young and unknown to matter) and a few women, almost everybody present had been connected with a publishing firm which had suddenly gone bankrupt. On Mr. Shobbe’s recommendation some of his wealthier guarantors had put money into the firm; the painters were “doing” illustrated editions or writing books on the Renaissance artists still popular in those unenlightened days; and the writers had received contracts for an almost unlimited number of works. Money had been lavishly spent and some rather amusing things had been begun. Then suddenly the publisher vanished with the lady typist-secretary and the remainder of the cash. Hence the excited babble.
George stood, a little dazed, beside a small group of youngish men and women. A dark, rather sinister-looking young man kept saying:
“Le crapule! Ah! le crapule!”
George wondered vaguely who was a crapule and why, and half-listened to the conversation.
“He was paying me three hundred a year and...”
“My last novel did so well that he gave me a five years’ contract and an advance of...”
“Yes, and I was getting twenty per cent...”
“Yes, but do let me tell you this. Shobbe says that the lawyers told him four thousand pounds of the money came from the diocesan funds of...”
“Yes, I know. Shobbe told us.”
“Le crapule!”
“What’ll the archbishop say?”
“Oh, they’ll smother that up.”
“Yes, but look here—do shut up for a minute, Bessie—what I want to know is how do we stand? What about our copyrights? Shobbe told me the legal position is...”
“Hang the legal position. What do we get out of it?”
“Crapule!”
“Nothing, probably. You won’t get much anyhow. He hadn’t even published your book, and I was to get three hundred a year and...”
“It isn’t so much the money I mind as having my book off the market when it was going so well—did you see the long article on me in last week’s...”
“Crapule!”
George glanced almost affectionately at the sinister-looking young man. It struck him that the repeated “crapule” was addressed as much to his present audience as to the unknown perpetrator of these calamities. At that moment Mr. Upjohn came along, and George took him aside.
“I say, Frank, what’s all this talk about?”
“Dear Bertie has eloped with Olga and the cash.”
“Dear Bertie? Oh, you mean—. But the firm will go on, won’t it?”
“Go on the streets. You see, there isn’t a cent left. What I mean is, I shall have to find some one else to do my Suprematist book. What I mean to say is, Bertie had a glimmering of intelligence....”
“Who’s Olga?”
But at that moment a lady with two unmarried daughters and private information about the senile aunt’s fortune plunged sweetly at Mr. Upjohn.
“Oh, Mr. Upjohn, how nice to see you again! How are you?”
“Mildly surviving.”
“You never came to my last at-home. Now, you must come and have dinner next week. Sir George was so much impressed last week by what you said about the new school of painting you have founded—what is the name? I’m so stupid about remembering names.”
Mr. Upjohn introduced them:
“Lady Carter—George Winterbourne. He’s a painter—of sorts.”
Lady Carter took in George at a glance—shabby clothes, old tie carelessly knotted, hair too long, abstracted gaze, poor, too young anyway—and was politely insolent. After a few words, she and Mr. Upjohn walked away. She pretended to be amused by Mr. Upjohn’s conversation.
George went over to the table and took a sandwich and a glass of champagne. The ceaseless babble of petty talk about petty interests irritated and bored him. He felt isolated and hate-obstinate. So this was Upjohn’s “only intelligent group in London!” If this is “intelligence” then let me be a fool for God’s sake. Better the great octopus ennui outside than these jelly-fish tentacles stinging with conceit, self-interest and malice.
He went over to talk to Comrade-Editor Bobbe. Mr. Bobbe was a sandy-haired, narrow-chested little man with spiteful blue eyes and a malevolent class-hatred. He exercised his malevolence with comparative impunity by trading upon his working-class origin and his heart disease, of which he had been dying for twenty years. Nobody of decent breeding could hit Mr. Bobbe as he deserved, because his looks were a perpetual reminder of his disease, and his behaviour and habits gave continual evidence of his origin. He was the Thersites of the day, or rather that would have been the only excuse for him. Intellectually he was Rousseau’s sedulous and somewhat lousy ape. His conversation rasped. His vanity and class-consciousness made him yearn for affairs with upper class women, although he was obviously a homosexual type. Admirable energy, a swift and sometimes remarkable intuition into character, a good memory and excellent faculty of imitation, a sharp tongue and brutal frankness, gave him power. He was a little snipe, but a dangerous one. Although biassed and sometimes absurd, his weekly political articles were by far the best of the day. He might have been a real influence in the rapidly growing Socialist Party if he could have controlled his excessive malevolence, curbed his hankering for aristocratic alcoves, and dismissed his fatuous theories of the Unconscious, which were a singular mixture of misapprehended theosophy and ill-digested Freud. George admired his feverish energy and talents, pitied him for his ill-health and agonized sense of class inferiority, disliked his malevolence, and ignored his theories.
“What are you doing here, Winterbourne? I shouldn’t have thought Shobbe would invite you. You haven’t any money, have you?”
“Upjohn brought me along.”
“Upjohn-and-at-’em? What’s he want of you?”
“An article on his new school of painting, I think.”
Mr. Bobbe tittered, screwing up his eyes and nose in disgust, and flapping his right hand with a gesture of take-it-away-it-stinks.
“Suprematist painting! Suprematist dung-bags! Suprematist conceit and empty-headed charlatanism. Did you see him toady to that Carter woman, Lady Carter? Puh!”
There was such vindictiveness in that “puh” that George was disconcerted. True, he himself suspected Mr. Upjohn was a bit of a charlatan and knew he was odiously conceited; at the same time, there was something very kind-hearted and generous in poor Upjohn-and-at-’em, who had received that nickname for his furious onslaughts on any one who was established and successful in alleged defence of any one who was struggling and neglected. Unfortunately, these vituperative efforts of poor Mr. Upjohn did no good to his friends and served only to bring himself advertisement—the advertisement of ridiculousness. But George felt he ought to say something in defence.
“Well, of course, he’s eccentric and sometimes offensive, but he’s got a streak of curious genius and real generosity.”
Mr. Bobbe snarled rather than tittered.
“He’s an insignificant toadying little cheese-worm. That’s what he is, a toadying little cheese-worm. And you won’t be much better, my lad, if you let yourself drift with these people. You’ll go to pieces, you’ll just go com-plete-ly to pieces. But humanity’s rotten. It’s all rotten. It stinks. It’s worm-eaten. Look at those mingy fellows prancing round those women on the tips of their toes. Cold-hearted, ****-********* mingy sneaks! Look at the women, pining for a bit o’ real warm-hearted man’s love, and what do they get? Mingy cold-hearted ********! I know ’em, I know ’em. Curse the mingy lot of ’em. But it won’t last long, it can’t. The workers won’t stand it. There’ll be a revolution and a bloody one, and soon too. Mingy sons of spats and eye-glasses!”
George was amazed and embarrassed by this outburst. He did, indeed, feel repelled by most of the gathering, particularly by persons like Mr. Robert Jeames, the Poets’ Friend, who made anthologies of all the worst authors, wore a monocle and spats, and lisped through a wet tooth. But after all Mr. Jeames was harmless and quite amiable. One might not agree with his taste; one might not feel attracted by him, or indeed by most of the people present. But there was certainly a wide difference between such a feeling and “mingy sneaks” and “cheese-worms.” Moreover, George was a little offended by Mr. Bobbe’s proletarian vocabulary, while he failed to see exactly why the sexual frigidity of a few men in dinner jackets should cause the workers to rise in bloody revolution.
“I shouldn’t think the workers care a hoot. If it’s as you say, the women are more likely to join the suffragettes.”
“Faugh!” said Mr. Bobbe, “puh! Suffragettes? Take them away. They smell. They’re unclean. They’re obscene. Women and votes! It’s the last stage of decomposition of the mingy world. When the women start to get power, it’s the end. It means the men are done for, mingy cold-hearted sneaks. Once let the women in, and nothing can save the world. Socialism, perhaps, and a genuine out-reaching of the inward unconscious Male-life to the dark Womb-life in Woman. But no, they’re not worthy of it. Let ’em go. You’ll see, my lad, you’ll see. Within five years there’ll be a...”
“Oh, Mr. Bobbe,” said Mrs. Shobbe’s voice, and a timid little greyish lady, all in grey and silver, appeared, gentle and fluttering, beside them, like a large gentle grey moth. “Oh, Mr. Bobbe, do forgive me for interrupting your interesting conversation. Lady Carter is so anxious to meet you and admires you so much. I’m sure you’ll like her and her two daughters—such beautiful girls.”
George watched Mr. Bobbe as he bowed servilely to Lady Carter and entered into an animated conversation with that living rung in the social ladder. He watched the scene for several minutes, and was just thinking of leaving when Mr. Waldo Tubbe came near him.
“Well, Winterbourne,” he remarked in his neat, mincing English, “you appeared sunk in thought. What was the precise object of your contemplation?”
“Bobbe was inveighing against Upjohn for toadying to Lady Carter, and then as soon as Mrs. Shobbe came and asked him to be introduced, he rushed off and you can see him there sitting at Lady Carter’s feet with clasped hands.”
Mr. Tubbe looked unnecessarily grave.
“O-oh,” he said with a very genteel roll to the “o,” and an air of suggesting unutterable things. This was a very great asset to Mr. Tubbe in social intercourse. He found that an interrogative silence on his part forced other people to talk, and made them slightly ill at ease, so that they betrayed what they did not always wish to express. He would then gravely remark “Oe-oh” or “In-deed?” or “Really?” with a deportmental air which was highly impressive and somehow slightly reproving. It was reported that Mr. Tubbe spent hours practising in private the exact intonation of his “Oe-ohs,” “Reallys” and “Indeeds.” He had certainly brought them to a high pitch of gentility and suppressed significance. Mr. Tubbe drank a good deal—gin mostly—but it must be said for him that the drunker he got the more genteel and darkly significant he became.
There was a pause after Mr. Tubbe’s “Oe-oh.” His interrogative silence did its work. George plunged into talk, saying the first thing which came into his head.
“I came along with Upjohn, after seeing his new pictures.”
“In-deed?”
“He would like me to write an article on them, but it’s very difficult. Honestly, I don’t understand them and think they’re rather nonsense, don’t you?”
“Oe-oh.”
“Have you seen them?”
“Noe-o.”
Say something, blast you!
Another long pause.
“Well, my dear Winterbourne, I am very happy to have had some conversation with you. Come in and see me soon, quite soon. Will you excuse me? I must ask Lord Congreve a question. Good-bye. Good-bye!”
George observed the greeting between Mr. Waldo Tubbe and Lord Congreve.
“Hullo, Waldo!”
“My dear Bernard...!”
Mr. Tubbe shook hands with an air of restrained but very considerable emotion. He treated Lord Congreve with a kind of dignified familiarity, rather like Phélypeaux playing billiards with Louis Quatorze. Mr. Shobbe, who was the third party to this interesting re-union, behaved more easily, with a puissance-à-puissance geniality. George could not hear what they were saying, and did not want to. He was watching Mrs. Shobbe, who was talking gently with two younger women on a couch in one corner of the studio. Poor Mrs. Shobbe, of whom one always thought as a soft, kind, grey moth, for ever fluttering with kindly intent and for ever fluttering wrong. She had that sweet exasperating gentleness and refined incompetence which marked so many women of the wealthier class whose youth was blighted by Ruskin and Morris. Her portrait had been painted by Burne-Jones—there it was on the wall, over-sweet, over-wistful, stylized to look like one of his Arthurian damosels. And there she was, grey and moth-like, the sweetness gone insipid, the wistfulness become empty and regretful. Had she ever looked like that portrait? No one would have known it was she, unless they had been told.
Poor Mrs. Shobbe! In turns one pitied, almost loved, despised and was exasperated by her. Such crushed insipidity. And yet such a gallant effort to do “what is right.” Yet she somehow disgusted one with refinement and trying to do what is right, and made one yearn sympathetically towards a hard-swearing, hard-working, hard-drinking motor mechanic. Her life must have been very unhappy. Her well-off Victorian parents (wholesale wine trade, retired) had given her a good education of travel and accomplishments, and had systematically and gently crushed her. It was chiefly the mother, of course, that abominable mother-daughter “love” which is compact of bullying, jealousy, parasitism and baffled sexuality. With what ghastly pertinacity does a disappointed wife “take it out” on her daughter! Not consciously, of course; but the unconscious cruelty and oppression of human beings seem the most dreadful. To escape, she had married Shobbe.
Nothing can be more fatal for a girl than to marry an artist of any kind. Have affairs with them, my dears, if you like. They can teach you a great deal about life, human nature and sex, because they are directly interested in these matters, whereas other men are cluttered with prejudices, ideals and literary reminiscences. But do not marry them, unless you have a writing of divorcement in the pocket of your night-gown. If you are poor, life will be horrid even though there are no children; and if you have children, it will be hell. If you have money, you may be quite sure that it is not you but your money which has been espoused. Every poor artist and intellectual is looking for a woman to keep him. So you loot out, too. Of course, not only are there no delicious marriages, there are not even any good ones—Rochefoucauld was such an optimist. And in any case marriage is a primitive institution bound to succumb before the joint attack of contraceptives and the economic independence of women. Remember, artists are not seeking tranquillity and legitimate posterity, but experience and an income. So look out!
Poor Mrs. Shobbe did not look out, she had never been allowed to do anything so unmaidenly. She became the means whereby Mr. Shobbe avoided the dismal but common fate of working for a living. He snubbed her, he patronized her, he neglected her, he was unfaithful to her, but hung on to her like a sloth to a tree-branch—she had three thousand a year, most of which he spent. As for Shobbe he was a plump and talented snob of German origin. His aquiline nose was the one piece of evidence, apart from his bad manners, which supported his claim to aristocratic birth. Before the Great War he was always talking about his year’s service in an aristocratic German regiment, or beginning a sentence “When I was last with the Kaiser,” or talking voluble German whenever there was an audience, or saying “of course, you English...” After the war he discovered that he was and always had been a patriotic English gentleman. Be it said to his credit, he “rolled up” himself and did not only “give” a few cousins. But then, there was Mrs. Shobbe to get away from on a legitimate excuse—how many patriotic English gentlemen in the war armies were rather avoiding their wives than seeking their country’s enemies? Shobbe was an excellent example of the artist’s amazing selfishness and vanity. After the comfort of his own person he really cared for nothing but his prose style and literary reputation. He was also an amazing and very amusing liar—a sort of literary Falstaff. As for his affairs with women—my God! Yet, after all, were they really so lurid? Probably they were grossly exaggerated because Shobbe had talent, and everybody was jealous of it....
George suddenly became aware that Mrs. Shobbe was beckoning to him from the couch. Some of the noisier guests had departed—probably to drink more freely—and a wide-opened window had carried away much of the tobacco smoke. George emerged from his reverie and went quickly over to her.
“You know Mrs. Lamberton, don’t you, Mr. Winterbourne? And this is Miss Paston, Elizabeth Paston.”
How-do-you-dos.
“And oh, Mr. Winterbourne, will you get us some iced lemonade, please? We’re all dying of thirst in this smoky room.”
George brought the drinks, and sat down in a chair facing the women. They chatted aimlessly. Soon Mrs. Shobbe went away. She saw a lonely old maid in the opposite corner of the room, and felt it “right” to talk to her. Mrs. Lamberton sighed.
“Why does one come to these intellectual agapes? An expense of spirit in a waste of time.”
“Now, Frances!” said Elizabeth, with her hard nervous little laugh, “you know you’d hate it if you weren’t asked.”
“Besides, it’s one place where you’re sure not to meet your husband,” said George.
“Oh, but then I never see him. Only last week I had to ask the servants if Mr. Lamberton were still alive or only pre-occupied with a new conquest.”
“And was he?”
“What?”
“Alive.”
“I didn’t know he ever had been.”
They laughed, though the paltry jest was near the truth.
“And yet,” George pursued, with the ruthless clumsiness of youth, “you must have liked him once. Why? Why do women like men? And on what singular principle do they choose their husbands? Instinct? Self-interest?”
Neither answered. Women do not like these questions, especially from young men whose duty it is to be dazzled by charms they cannot analyze. Of course, the questions were impertinent; but if a young man is not impertinent, what on earth is the use of him?
The women lit cigarettes. George looked at Elizabeth Paston. A slender figure in red silk; black glossy hair drawn back from a high intellectual forehead; large, very intelligent dark eyes; a rather pale, rather Egyptian-looking face with prominent cheek bones, slightly sunken cheeks and full red lips; a nervous manner. She was one of those “near” virgins so common in the countries of sexual prohibition. Her hands were slender, the line from her ear to her chin exquisitely beautiful, her breasts too flat. She smoked cigarettes too rapidly, and had a way of sitting with a look of abstraction in a pose which showed off the lovely line of her throat and jaw. Her teeth were a little irregular. The delicate ear was like a frail pink shell under the dark sea-fronds of her hair. Her calves and ankles, such important indications of female character and temperament, were hidden under the long skirts of those days; but the bared arms and wrists were slender and a little sensual as they lay along her clothed thighs. George was greatly attracted. Apparently she also liked him, and Mrs. Lamberton noticed it with that swift rather devilish intuition of women. She rose to leave.
“Oh, Frances, don’t go yet!” exclaimed Elizabeth. “I only came to see you, and you were so surrounded by men I have scarcely seen you.”
“Yes, don’t go.”
“I must. You don’t know the duties awaiting a careful wife and good mother.”
She slipped away, leaving them alone.
“Isn’t she a dear?” said Elizabeth.
“Something very lovely and precious. Even when she talks nonsense in that slightly affected way she seems to be saying something valuable.”
“Do you think she is beautiful?”
“Beautiful? Yes, in a way, but she isn’t one of those horrid regular beauties. You notice her at once in a room, but you’d never see her on the walls of the Academy. It isn’t her beauty so much as her personality, and that you feel more by intuition than by observation. And yet the effect is beauty.”
“Are you very much in love with her?”
“Why, aren’t you? Isn’t every one?”
“In love with her?”
George was silent. He was not sure whether the question was naif or very much the reverse. Elizabeth changed the conversation.
“What do you ‘do’?”
“Oh, I’m a painter, and I write hack articles for Shobbe and such people to earn a living.”
“But don’t you sell your pictures?”
“I try to, but you see people in England aren’t much interested in modern art, not as they are on the Continent or even in America. They want the same old thing done over again and done with more sugar. One thing about the British bourgeois—he doesn’t know anything about pictures but very stoutly stands for what he likes, and what he likes is anything except art. The newest historians say that the Anglo-Saxons come from the same race as the Vandals, and I can well believe it.”
“Surely there are some up-to-date collectors in England.”
“Why, yes, of course, probably as many as anywhere else, but too many of them collect pictures as an investment and so only take what the dealers advise them to buy; others are afraid to touch English art, which has gone soggy with pre-Raphaelitism and touched imbecility with the anecdotal picture. There are people with taste and enthusiasms, but they’re nearly all poor. It’s much the same in Paris. The new painters there are having a terrific struggle, but they’ll win. The young are with them. And then in Paris it’s rather chic to know the latest movements and to defend the rebel artists against the ordinary mass ignorance and hostility. Here they’re still terrified by the fate of Oscar, and it’s chic to be a sporting imbecile. The English think it’s virile to have no sensibilities.”
“Are you English or American?”
“English, of course. Should I care about them if I were not? In a way, of course, it doesn’t really matter. The nationalist epoch of painting is over—it’s now an international language centred in Paris and understood from Petersburg to New York. What the English think doesn’t matter.”
George was excited and talking volubly. Elizabeth encouraged him. Females know instinctively or by bitter experience that males like to tell them things. It is so very curious that we talk of vanity as if it were almost exclusively feminine, whereas both sexes are equally vain. Perhaps males are vainer. Women are sometimes plainly revolted by really inane compliments, while there is no flattery too gross for a male. There simply isn’t. And not one of us is free from it. However much you may be on your guard, however much you may think you dislike it, you will find yourself instinctively angling for female flattery—and getting it. Oh, yes, you’ll get it, just as long as that subtle female instinct warns them there is potency in your loins....
“Mother of the race of Æneas, voluptuous delight of gods and men, sacred Aphrodite”—how does it go? But the poet is right. She, the sacred one, the imperious reproductive instinct, with all Her wiles and charms, is indeed the ruler over all living things, in the waters, in the air, on land. Over us her sway is complete, for it is not seasonal but permanent. (Who was the lady who said that if the animals don’t make love all the time the reason is that they are bêtes?) Priests, with all weapons from circumcision to prudery, have warred with Her; legislators have laid down rules for Her; well-meaning persons have tried to domesticate Her. Useless! “At thy coming, goddess,” the celibate hides his shaved crown and sneaks to a brothel, the clerk in holy orders enters into holy matrimony, the lawyer visits the little shop-girl he “helps,” domestic peace is shaken alive with adulteries. For man is an ambulatory digestive tube which wants to keep alive, and Death waits for him. Descartes was a fool in these matters, like so many philosophers. “I think, therefore I am.” Idiot! I am because others loved; I love that others may be. Hunger and Death are the realities, and between those great chasms flits a little Life. The enemy of Death is not Thought, not Apollo with gold shafts of light, useless against the Foe of gods and men, as you see him in the prologue to “Alkestis.” It is She, the Cyprian, who triumphs, woman-like with her wiles. Generations She yields Him, the Devourer, as His prey, and unwearyingly raises up new races of men and women. It is She who swells the loins of men with an intolerable burden of seed; She who makes ready the thirsty womb; She who creates implacable desire and infinite yearning and compels the life-giving act; *** *** ****** *** **** ***** ********* **** *** **** **** ********* ******; She who plumps the flat white belly and then, treacherous and cruel to Her instrument once Her purpose is achieved, with intolerable anguish tears forth from shaking mother-flesh the feeble fruit of Man. All the thoughts and emotions and desires of adult men and women circle about Her, and Her enemies are but Death’s friends. You may elude Her with asceticism, you may thwart Her purpose (who shall write a new myth of the rubber-tree, Death’s subtle gift?), but if you love Life you must love Her, and if you puritanically say She is not, you are both a fool and Death’s servant. If you hate Life, if you think the suffering outweighs the pleasure, if you think it the supreme crime to transmit life, then you must indeed dread Her as the author of the supreme evil—Life.
Elizabeth and George talked and found each other delightful. They thought it was their interest in art and ideas. Delightful error! All the arts of mankind are the Cyprian’s hand-maids, and even the chaster and tweeded spectre Sport has unwittingly been made Her pander—for with no grudging hand does the Goddess scatter Her gifts, smiling upon the amorous play of children and not disdaining even those who desire their own sex. She is beneficent and knows there are only too many ready to propagate and is not anxious to create too many victims for Hunger, and therefore patronizes even the heretics of Sparta and Lesbos....
We should turn churches into temples to Venus, and set up a statue to Havelock Ellis, the moral Hercules who has partially succeeded in cleansing the Augean stable of the white man’s mind....
Under the benign influence of the Cyprian they talked, they went on talking. They had drifted on to the topics of Christ and Christianity, that interminable pons asinorum of youthful discussions.
“But I think Christ is wonderful,” Elizabeth was saying with an air of having discovered something, “because he completely ignored social values and considered people only for what they really were in themselves. It is so strange to think of his being made the pretext for the world’s most elaborate system of priest-craft when the whole of his life and teaching are a protest against it.”
“The bohemian Christ? But have you noticed what a Proteus he is? Everybody interprets the historical Jesus to please himself. He is a whole mythology in himself. If you really try to discover the historical Jesus, you find you keep stripping away veil after veil, and then just as you think you are coming to the real figure, you find there’s nothing there. But, I grant you, Christ is a very sympathetic figure. What I cannot endure is Christianity and the harm it has done Europe. I detest its system of values, its persecution, its hatred of life (it worships a tortured and expiring god), its cult of self-sacrifice and sexual aberrations, like sadism, masochism and chastity....”
Elizabeth laughed, a little shocked.
“Oh, oh! Now you are exaggerating!”
“Not at all. I think I could prove what I say, at the expense of some time and boring you. Consider the lives of Saints like Catherine of Siena, Sebastian and all the infinite martyrs, look at their representation in art; and then ask yourself what instincts are really satisfied by the cult of these personalities and images.”
“That sounds like good Protestant prejudice.”
“There are lots of things I detest in Protestantism—its smugness and aridity for instance—but I like its honesty. And we owe it a great deal. It was because of the political inconveniences resulting from a multitude of sects, that Holland and England reintroduced religious tolerance, which had disappeared with the triumph of the Christians. Of course, the tolerance is not complete, because the Christians are still persecutors at heart and have a thousand ways of vexing and maligning those who disagree with them or are merely indifferent. Hence the extraordinary defensive puritanism of many English rationalists. But something has been achieved. After all, during many centuries I should have been arrested, tortured and probably murdered for what I have just said to you, and you would have thought me a carbonized monster. Now any alleged truth or moral proposition or belief which has to be enforced by torture or defended by sophistry stands self-condemned.”
Was ever woman in this manner wooed? But George had mounted one of his hobby-horses and was careering away through a dust of words. Elizabeth, with practical instinct, stopped him.
“Where do you live?”
“In Greek Street. I’ve got a large room there, big enough to paint in. Where do you live?”
“In Hampstead. It’s rather horrid and the place is full of old maids. But anything is better than being at home. I don’t mind my father, but my mother makes me so nervous when I’m at home that I feel I shall just die if I have to be any longer with her.”
“I’m so glad you hate your parents, at least one of them. It’s so important to recognize these antipathies, which are after all perfectly natural. Most animals hate their mature young. I remember I used to watch the young robins exterminating their fathers and think how right it was. But it ought to be the mothers. Men somehow leave each other alone.”
“Oh, it’s partly due to the awful domestic-den family life. They can’t really help it, poor dears. The den was forced on them, and they had to live in it.”
“Not really. They must have wanted it. It’s all part of people’s amazing cowardice, their panic terror of life. It’s a device of governments, an official cheat.” George was off again. “All states are founded on the obligation of a man to provide for the child he begets and the woman who produces it. The State wants children, wants more and more ‘citizens’ for various reasons. The State exploits the love of a man for a woman and his tenderness towards her children—even she may not know whether they’re his or not. And so she’s taught to say: ‘Be careful, step warily, don’t offend any one, remember your first duty is to provide for me and the children, you mustn’t let us starve, oh, do be careful,’ with the result that the poor man very soon becomes a member of the infinite army of respectable commuters....”
“Oh! Oh!” Elizabeth laughed again, “why are you so full of moral indignation?”
“I’m not. Most of my brilliant acquaintances, like Upjohn, have so much to say about themselves that I never seem to get a chance of discussing anything else. And my non-brilliant acquaintances are simply shocked and reproving. They think I’m utterly damned because I read Baudelaire, for instance. Have you noticed the British middle-class superstition that anything they can label ‘Gallic’ must necessarily be libidinous and depraved? I get tired of telling them that the beauty of Baudelaire’s verse is infinitely more spiritual and ‘uplifting’—to use their damned cant—than all the confounded nonconformist-baptist-cum-Salvation Army....”
But the end of George’s denunciation was never uttered, for at that moment they were interrupted by the gentle Mrs. Shobbe.
“Excuse me for interrupting you, Mr. Winterbourne. Elizabeth dear, do you know how late it is? I’m afraid you’ll miss the last bus, and you know I promised your dear mother I would look after you....”
Both George and Elizabeth saw with surprise and some embarrassment that the studio was nearly empty. Almost every one else had gone and they hadn’t noticed it, absorbed in their delightful exploration of each other. Of course, in these cases it isn’t what is said that matters, but all that remains unsaid. The talk is mere “parade,” a rustling out of the peacock’s tail, a kind of antennæ delicately fumbling. Lovers are like mirrors—each gazes rapturously at himself reflected in the other. How delicious the first flashes of recognition!
Elizabeth jumped nervously to her feet, almost upsetting a small table.
“Oh, my! I’d no idea it was so late. I must go. Good-bye, Mr.—Mr.—”
“Winterbourne,” said George. “But if you’re going to Hampstead, let me take you back as far as Tottenham Court Road and put you on the Hampstead bus. It’s not out of my way at all.”
“Yes, do, Elizabeth. I feel so nervous at your being alone in London at night like this. Whatever should we do if anything happened to you?”
“Why, what’s likely to happen?” said George contemptuously, ever ready to defend the cause of female emancipation, “she’s got sense enough not to let herself be run over, and if any one tries to rape her she can yell for a policeman.”
“Such a violent and rude young man,” Mrs. Shobbe lamented as they went for Elizabeth’s things. “But they’re all like that now. They seem to have no respect for anything, not even the purity of womanhood. I don’t know if I ought to let him take you home, Elizabeth.”
“Oh, that’s all right; besides, I rather like him. He’s quite amusing. I shall ask him to come and have tea with me at my studio.”
“Elizabeth!”
But Elizabeth was already at the door where George was waiting. All the guests had departed, except Mr. Upjohn and Mr. Waldo Tubbe. A last whiff of their conversation reached George’s ears:
“You see, what I mean is, you take Suprematism, what I mean is, you see, there you’ve got something....”
And like the toll of Big Ben over the sleeping city came Mr. Tubbe’s last, deep-breathed, significant, deportmental:
“Oe-oh.”
[ III ]
This banal party and banal conversation with Elizabeth were of capital importance in George’s life. The party, with its revelations of character and general tedium, confirmed George in his growing dislike for the intellectual banditti. Self-interest, though universal, is less tolerable in those who are supposed to be above it—there is, of course, no reason why a good artist should not be successful, but when one considers the intrigues now necessary for success there is a natural prejudice in favour of those who do not elbow in the throng. Vanity is none the less odious even when there is some reason for it, though why any one should feel vain of publishing books and exhibiting pictures is a mystery, when you reflect that two thousand novels a year are published in England alone and that tens of thousands of canvases are showed annually in Paris. Gossip and scandal are none the less scandal and gossip even when witty and the victims are more or less conspicuous in the small world which receives, or haughtily disdains to receive, press-cuttings. George felt it rather unimportant to know which talented lady was “with” which famous gentleman. His interest was comparatively so languid that he forgot most of the scandal he was told ten minutes after he heard it, and rarely bothered to repeat what little he remembered. Somehow people are frightfully offended if you say, “Does it matter?” when they tell you with sparkling eyes that somebody you know has run away with the mistress of Snooks, the painter, or that Pocock, the eminent impresario, has just celebrated the birth of his twenty-fifth illegitimate child. Does it matter, indeed! Why this fascinated delight in the private lives of the great? They’re just as sordid as everybody else’s.
The artist, anyway, is not nearly so important as he thinks himself. It’s all poppycock and swagger for Baudelaire to say that a man can live three days without food but not a day without poetry. It may have been true of Baudelaire; it certainly isn’t true of the world in general. In any nation only a comparatively small minority are interested in the arts, and most of those merely want to be amused. If all the artists and writers of a nation were suddenly obliterated by some plague of Egypt, some legitimately vengeful angel, most people would be totally unaware that they had suffered any loss, unless the newspapers made a fuss about it. But let the journeymen bakers go on strike for a fortnight.... If I were a millionaire it would amuse me to go about giving high-minded artists five hundred pounds a year to shut up. The suggestion is not copyright.
Our young friend was, of course, filled with numerous high-falutin’ delusions about the supreme importance of art and the dazzling supremacy of artists over the rest of mankind. But he had two fairly sound ideas. One was that the artist should do his job, like any one else, as well as he could, without making too much fuss about it; the other was that knowledge of the arts and practice of any art are chiefly important for sharpening the intelligence and perceptions, extending one’s experience and intensifying life. These objects are not furthered by scandal, preposterous vanity and arrivism. He was therefore perfectly right in feeling a certain amount of contempt for Mr. Shobbe’s guests. The life of Rousseau the Douanier is infinitely more respectable than that of a fashionable portrait-painter, touting socially for orders.
Elizabeth and George continued their conversation on the bus from Holland Park to Tottenham Court Road. Like most bright young things they abounded in their own sense. As George said, it was perfectly obvious that they were an immense improvement on their predecessors, that they knew exactly how to avoid the lamentable errors and absurdities of former generations, and that they were going to have most interesting and delightful lives. Anybody who has not felt these pleasing delusions at the age of twenty must, I fear, be ranged in George’s category of abject morons. Youth is so much more valuable than experience; it is also far more intelligent. Few things are more astounding and touching than the kindly tolerance of the young for their imbecile elders. For, have no doubts about it, even the greatest minds degenerate annually, and the finest moral character is repulsive at forty. Think of the fire and flash and inspiring genius of young General Bonaparte and the stupid degeneracy of the Emperor who had to retreat ignominiously from Moscow. A nation which relies on the alleged wisdom of sexagenarians is irrevocably degenerate. Attila was only thirty when he sacked sexagenarian Rome—at least, he ought to have been.
Elizabeth and George were very young and hence, on a priori grounds, extremely intelligent. Probably the highest intensity of life ever reached by man or woman is in the early stages of their first real love affair, particularly if it is not thwarted by insane social and religious prejudices inherited from the timid and envious aged, and not contaminated by marriage.
They emerged from the stuffy smoke-heavy room into the broad avenue, and walked towards Notting Hill tube station. A warm southwesterly wind was blowing, moisture-laden, the kindly courier of Spring. Gone was the raw acrid damp of Winter, and they imagined they could taste in the air the faint salt flavour of southern seas and the earthy English acres.