Chapter VII: Part TWO: Andante Cantabile (2)

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.

“We shall have rain to-morrow,” said George, instinctively looking up at the cloudy sky invisible beyond the glare of street lamps. “It is Spring at last. The crocuses will be nearly over. I must go and look at the flowers at Hampton Court. Will you come?”

“I’d love to, but isn’t Hampton Court full of trippers?”

“Not if you go at the right time. I have walked there in the early morning as solitary as ever King Charles when the Privy Garden was really private. I should rather like to Jive in King William’s summer-house.”

“I like wilder and more primitive country, the Downs and those great round empty Exmoor hills. And I like the clear rough waves dashing against the rocks in Cornwall.”

“I don’t know Cornwall, but I love the Downs above Storrington and I’ve walked over Exmoor twice. But now I’m rather in revolt against mere country—‘Nature,’ as they used to call it. Nature-worship is a sort of Narcissus-worship, holding up Nature’s mirror to ourselves. And how abominably selfish these Nature-worshippers are I Why! they want a whole landscape to themselves and they complain bitterly when farm-labourers want modern grocery stores and W. C.’s. Whole communities apparently are to live in static ignorance and picturesque decay in order to gratify their false ideas of what is beautiful.”

“Of course, I hate the Simple-Lifers too. There was a set of them near the place in the seaside where we went for the holidays as children....”

“Oh! Have you got brothers and sisters?”

“A sister and two brothers. Why, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I believe so, but I never think about it. Relatives are awful—they contribute absolutely nothing to your interest in life, and think that gives them a perpetual right to interfere in your affairs. And they have the monstrous impudence to pretend that you ought to love them. ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ they say sententiously. So it may be, but I don’t want to dabble in thick blood. I hate proverbs, don’t you? I’ve always noticed that anything absurd or tyrannical or fatuous can always be supported by a proverb—the collective stupidity of the ages. But, I say, I’m so sorry I interrupted you. I go on talking and talking, and don’t give you a chance to say a word.”

“Oh, I like it. I think your ideas are amusing.”

“Not amusing, merely common-sense. But you mustn’t let me talk all the time. You see, I find most people rather oppress my spirits, and keep me from saying what I really think. So as a rule I’m silent, but when I find a sympathetic victim, well, you’ve already had a bitter experience of how I chatter nineteen to the dozen. There, I’m off again! Now tell me what you were going to say about the Simple-Lifers.”

“The Simple-Lifers? Oh, yes, I remember. Well, there was a set of people down there who had fled from the horrors of the mechanical age—you know, the usual art-y sort, Ruskin-cum-William Morris....”

“Hand-looms, vegetable diet, long embroidered frocks and home-spun tweed trousers from the Hebrides? I know them. ‘News from Nowhere’ people. What a gospel to lead nowhither!”

“Yes. Well, they were to lead the simple life, work with their hands part of the time, and do arts and crafts and write the rest of the time. They were also to show the world an example of perfect community life. They used to make the farm girls dance round a Maypole—the boys wouldn’t come, they stood in the lane and jeered.”

“And what happened?”

“Well, those who hadn’t private incomes got very hard up, and were always borrowing money off the two or three members who had money. The arts and crafts didn’t sell, and the toiling on the land had very meagre results. Then they got themselves somehow into two or three cliques, always running down the people in the other cliques, talking scandal about them, and saying they were ruining everything by their selfish behaviour. Then the wife of one of the rich members ran away with one of the men, and the other rich members were so scandalized that they went away too, and the whole community broke up. The village was very glad when they went. The farmers and gentry were furious because they talked Socialism and the ideal state to the labourers. And all the labourers’ wives were furious because the Simple-Life women tried to brighten up their lives and make them furnish their cottages ‘artistically....’”

They had missed two buses outside the tube station in their excited chatter. A third came along. George grabbed Elizabeth’s arm:

“Come on, here’s our bus. Let’s go on top.”

The bus-top was empty except for a couple spooning on a back-seat. George and Elizabeth a little haughtily went to the very front.

“Other peoples’ love-affairs are very tedious,” said George sententiously.

“Oh, very.”

“Rather primitive and humiliating.”

“Why humiliating?”

“Oh, because...”

“Fares, please!”

The conductor lurched skilfully against the front of the bus as it made a cow-like leap forward. George raked in his pocket for the pennies.

“Let me pay my share.”

Elizabeth produced a sixpence.

“Oh, no, please. Look, let me take you back to Hampstead, and you can pay from Tottenham Court Road.”

“All right.”

The conductor and the fare-paying had interrupted the rhythm of their communication. They were silent. The bus ran noisily along the wave-furrowed shiny tarred street, with the dark mystery of Kensington Gardens to the right and the equally mysterious boarding-houses of Bayswater to the left. Near the street-lamps the grass behind the railing was a vivid artificial green, as if some one had splashed down a bucket-ful of bright paint. Like savages in some primitive dance, the ancient trees swayed slowly, irregularly and mysteriously in the strong wind. A red apocalyptic glow from the lights of Oxford Street stained luridly and uneasily the low rolling clouds before them. The grey monster Ennui of Sunday-in-London had vanished. George took his hat off and let the wind rumple his hair. Their young cheeks were fresh with driving moist wind.

“Don’t you really like the Pre-Raphaelites?” asked Elizabeth, as the bus slowed down near Lancaster Gate.

“I used to. About three years ago I was quite cracked about Rossetti and Burne-Jones and Morris. Now I simply hate them. I can still read Browning and Swinburne—Browning for his sense of life, Swinburne for his intoxicating rhetoric. But after spending three months in Paris I got frightfully excited about modern painting. Do you know Apollinaire?”

“No, who’s he?”

“Oh, he’s a Polish Jew who has written some quite good poems and does amusing word-pictures he calls Calligrammes. He lives by writing and editing obscene books, and he’s the great defender of the new painters like Picasso and Braque and Léger and Picabia.”

“The Cubists?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve only heard of them. I never saw any of their work. I thought they were just ‘wild men’ and _fumistes?_”

“You wait ten years, and see then if you dare to say that Picasso is a _fumiste!_ But haven’t you been to Paris?”

“Yes, I was there last year, in September.”

“We must have been there together. How curious, I wish I’d seen you.”

“Oh, it was very dull. I was with father and mother, and everybody we met kept talking about the coming war with Germany. A friend of father’s in the Admiralty told him in confidence that it was absolutely certain to happen.”

“What nonsense!” said George explosively, “what absolute nonsense! Haven’t you read Norman Angell’s ‘Great Illusion’? He shows quite conclusively that war does nearly as much damage to the victor as the conquered. And he also says that the structure of modern international commerce and finance is so delicate and widespread that a war couldn’t possibly last more than a few weeks without coming to an end automatically, because all the nations would be ruined. I’ll lend you the book if you like.”

“I don’t know anything about such things, but father’s friend said the Government was very worried about the position.”

“I can’t believe it. What! A war between European nations in the twentieth century? It’s quite unthinkable. We’re far too civilized. It’s over forty years since the Franco-Prussian War....”

“But there’s been a Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan Wars....”

“Well, yes, but they’re different. I can’t believe any of the big European nations would start a war with another. Of course, there are Chauvins and Junkers and Jingoes, but who cares a hang about them? The people don’t want war.”

“Of course, I don’t know, but I heard Admiral Partington telling father that the navy is bigger, newer and more efficient than it’s ever been. And he said the German army is huge and most efficient, and the French are so frightened they’ve made the period of conscription three years. And he said, look out when the Kiel canal is opened.”

“Good Lord, you surely don’t believe what stodgy old Admirals say, do you? It’s their job to frighten people with war scares so that they can go on getting money out of the country and building their ridiculous Dreadnoughts. I met a coast-guard officer last summer, who got drunk and said he’d sealed orders as to what to do in case of war. I told him I thought that seal would not be broken until the angels in the Apocalypse arrived.”

“And what did he say to that?”

“He just shook his head, and ordered another whiskey.”

“Well, it doesn’t concern us. It’s not our business.”

“No, thank God, it doesn’t and can’t concern us.”

* * * * *

They were in Oxford Street, rolling past the shuttered shop-fronts. A good many people were on the pavements, but the street was comparatively empty of vehicles, empty and sonorous. As they ran down past Selfridge’s, the curved line of lights in the centre of the street looked like an uncoiled necklace of luminous, glittering beads. At Oxford Circus they gazed down old Regent Street with its long lines of _café-au-lait_ Regency houses, broken only at the Quadrant by the new Piccadilly Hotel.

“Isn’t that like us?” said George. “We have an attempt at town-planning, and dull as Nash is, at any rate his design is simple and dignified, and then we go and ruin the Quadrant with a horrid would-be-modern hotel.”

“But I thought you believed in modernity in art.”

“So I do, but I don’t believe in mucking up the art of the past if it can be avoided. Besides, I don’t call these pastiches of Renaissance palaces modern architecture. The only people who have got a live modern architecture are the Americans, and they don’t know it.”

“Those awful sky-scrapers!”

“They’re awful in one way, but they’re original. I saw some photographs of New York from the harbour recently, and I thought it the most beautiful city in the world, a sort of gigantic and stupendous Venice. I’d like to go there, wouldn’t you?”

“No, I’d like to go to Paris and live in the real student’s quarter, and to Italy and Spain.”

* * * * *

The bus stopped at the end of Tottenham Court Road. They got down, and crossed the street to wait for the Hampstead bus.

“Look here,” said Elizabeth, “why do you bother to come all the way out to Hampstead? I’m perfectly used to going about alone. I shall be all right.”

“Of course, you would be. But I’d like to come most awfully. I hope I shall see a good deal of you, and we haven’t arranged where and when to meet again.”

“But there won’t be a bus back.”

“Oh, I shall walk. I like walking. And it’ll be an antidote to the fug and idiotic talk at Shobbe’s. Here’s the bus. Come on.”

They clambered on to the top of the bus, and again got the front seat. Elizabeth took off her right-hand glove to pay the fare, and after the conductor had gone George gently and rather timidly put his hand on hers. She did not withdraw it. Having established this delicious and dangerous contact, they sat silent for a while. The firm cool male hand gently espoused her slim glove-warmed fingers. In them both was the exaltation of the Cyprian, potential desire recognized only as a heightening of vitality. The first step along the primrose path—how delightful! But whither does it lead? To what everlasting bonfires of servitude or ashy wastes of indifference? Neither of them thought of the future. Why should they? The young at least have the sense to live only in the present moment.

Preceded by the silver dove-drawn chariot of the Paphian, the heavy bus lumbered northward. Sweet is the smile of Cypris, but ironic and a little terrifying, enigmatic as the fixed smile of the Veian Apollo.

Like all imaginative and sensitive men George was not what is called an enterprising lover. He had too much male modesty, the inherent _pudor_ which is so much stronger and more genuine than the induced modesty of women, that coquettish flight of the nymph who casts a rosy apple at her pursuer to encourage him to continue. Odd, but perhaps in the nature of things, that those men who have most contempt for women are generally most successful with them. There must be a vast amount of latent masochism in women, ranging from the primitive delight in being knocked down to the subtle enjoyment of complex jealousies. How ghastly—if you think about it—their passion for soldiers! To breed babes by him who has slain men—puh! there’s too much spilt blood in the world, one sickens at it. Give me some civet....

Once more they fell into talk, eager, excited, more intimate talk. They were calling each other “George” and “Elizabeth” before they reached the stately homes of Camden Town. By the time they passed Mornington Crescent they had admitted that they liked each other “frightfully” and would see a good deal of each other. In their excitement they talked rather incoherently, jumping from one topic to another in their eagerness to say something of all that seemed to clamour for expression, recklessly wasting their emotional energy. Their laughter had the ring of pure happiness. George slipped his arm through Elizabeth’s and held her fingers more amorously. Their natures expanded in a sudden delicious efflorescence; great coloured plumes of flowers seemed to sway and nod above their heads. They were enclosed in a nimbler air, the clear oxygen of desire, so light, so compact, so resistant to the grey monster Ennui of Sunday-in-London.

“Isn’t it strange!” George exclaimed, with that fatuity peculiar to lovers, “I only met you this evening and yet I feel as if I had known you all my life!”

“So do I!”

He gratefully squeezed her fingers in silence, caught in a sudden panic of bashfulness, unable to pursue further.

“Do let’s meet often. We can go to the galleries and Queen’s Hall and Hampton and Oxshott. I can get you tickets for the new picture shows. Do you know the Allied Artists?”

“Yes, I belong.”

“Do you? Why ever didn’t you tell me you are a painter, too?”

“Oh, I’m such a bad painter, besides you didn’t ask me.”

“Touché! How self-absorbed one is. I apologize.”

“You must come and have tea at my studio and look at my—what I call my pictures. But you mustn’t be too critical. When can you come?”

“Any time. To-morrow if you like.”

Elizabeth laughed.

“Oh! Oh! You are impatient. Can you come on Friday?”

“So long? It seems ages away!”

“Well, Thursday then.”

“All right, what time?”

“About four.”

Elizabeth was probably not acquainted with Stendhal’s ingenious theory of crystallization, but she acted instinctively in accordance with it. Three days and four nights made exactly the right period. To-morrow was too soon, the crystals would be in process of formation. A week would be rather too long, they would be tending to disintegrate.... Infinite subtlety of females! One must admit they need it.

* * * * *

George accompanied Elizabeth to the boarding-house where she lived and took the address of her studio. She held out her hand, after putting the latch-key in the yale lock.

“Till Thursday then, good-night.”

“Good-night.”

He held her hand a moment, and then awkwardly and timidly kissed it. In her turn she felt a sudden panic, opened the door swiftly, and disappeared inside, with a last hasty: “Good-night, good-night!”

George stood for several moments irresolutely on the step. He was desolated, thinking he had offended her.

Inside Elizabeth was murmuring silently to herself: “He kissed my hand, he kissed my hand! I’ve a lover, a lover.”

The sudden panic and flight were a masterpiece of erotic strategy—they left that feeling of uncertainty, of mingled hope and fear, so valuable to the production of a powerful crystallization.

* * * * *

George walked back to Greek Street, enclosing in himself a small chaos of emotions and thoughts. He went by way of Fitzjohn’s Avenue and St. John’s Wood. The infinite debate in a lover’s mind—did she or didn’t she, would she or wouldn’t she?—moved in those curious arabesques where a mind continually wanders away from a main stem of thought, and perpetually comes back to it. Upjohn’s ridiculous conceit, Shobbe’s party, never go to that sort of thing again, Bobbe’s acrid offensiveness, how delicate that line from her ear to her throat, I should like to paint her, now, in that article to-morrow I must try to show clearly and definitely what the new painters are attempting, I wonder if she was really offended when I kissed her hand, but I must think about that article, let me see, begin with an explanation of non-representational, yes, that’s it, I must get a new tie for Thursday, this one’s worn out.... And thus, with merciless iteration.

* * * * *

Under a gas-lamp near Marlborough Road Station he stopped and tried to write his first poem, and was surprised to find how difficult it was and what nonsense he wrote. A policeman came out of a side-street, and looked a little suspiciously at him. George moved on. A little later he began to sing “Bid me to live,” interrupted himself halfway through to make a note for a study in analysis of form. He walked rapidly and absorbedly, unconscious of his physical fatigue. Just before he crossed Oxford Street, he stopped and clapped his hands together. My God, I was a fool to kiss her hand the first time I met her, she’ll think I do that to every girl and won’t want to speak to me again. Oh, well, it’s done. I wish I could kiss her mouth. I must remember to tell her on Thursday about that show at the Leicester Gallery....

He lay awake long that night, unable to sleep for very love of living. So much to see, so much to experience, so much to achieve, so much to be and do! How wonderful to do things with Elizabeth! It would be fun to go to New York, of course, but perhaps one ought to see the old world first? She said something about Paris and Spain. We might go together. Cursed money difficulty. Never mind, if one wants to do a thing hard enough, one always manages to do it. I suppose I’m in love with her? It would be divine to kiss her and touch her breasts and... Of course, one mustn’t have a baby, that would be too ghastly. I must find out. I wish we could go to Paris, the trees will be leafing in the Luxembourg....

* * * * *

In the night-silence water dripped with insistent melody in some hidden tank. From outside came the shrill distant notes of train whistles, rather silvery and exquisite, bringing the yearning for travel, “the horns of elf-land faintly blowing.” Where had he read that? Oh, of course, Stevenson. Funny how the Coningtons thought Stevenson a good author....

“Good-night, Elizabeth, good-night, sweet, sweet Elizabeth, good-night, good-night.”

[ IV ]

Before our eyes we have the regrettable examples of George Augustus and Isabel, Ma and Pa Tartly, dear Mamma and dear Papa—eponyms of sexual infelicity.

Are we more intelligent than our ancestors? What a question for the British Press or for those three musketeers of publicity cheap and silly, of tattered debates on torn topics—Shaw, Chesterton and Belloc. Shaw, yes, the puritan Beaumarchais—_un coup de chapeau_—but the others! To the goddess Ennui sung by Pope, the groans of the Britons. Who will deliver us from the R. C. bores?

* * * * *

The problem may be stated thus:

Let X equal the _ménage_ of dear Mamma-dear Papa, or a typical couple of the seventies and eighties;

And let Y equal the _ménage_ George Augustus and Isabel, or a typical couple of the nineties and noughts;

And further, let Z equal Elizabeth and George, or a typical bright young pair of the Georgian or European War epoch;

Then, it remains to be proved whether Z is equal to, or greater than or less than X and / or Y.

A pretty theorem, not to be solved mathematically—too many unknown quantities involved.

I am naturally prejudiced in favour of Z, because I belong to their generation, but what do _les jeunes_, the sole competent authority, think? For, after all,—let us be perfectly frank—dear Papa expired peacefully in his bed; George Augustus was unhappily but accidentally slain in the performance of his religious duties; whereas George, if you accept my interpretation of the facts, virtually committed suicide at the age of twenty-six.

But then dear Papa and George Augustus did not have to fight the European War....

The problem, you see, is almost insoluble, no doubt because it is wrongly stated. Let us examine it in different terms.

* * * * *

Without going back to Horace’s egg, may we not assume that he and she have lived well who have lived with felicity?

This not only involves the problem of the _summum bonum_ or sovereign good, so much debated by the ancient philosophers, but the awful difficulty of knowing who is to decide whether another person has lived with felicity. Is there such a thing as a happy life? And, if there is would it be the most desirable life? Would you like to be Claudian’s old man of Verona? Or Mr. John D. Rockefeller? Or Mr. Michael Arlan? Or any other type of unabridged felicity?

There are, of course, lots of things and people who will eagerly or dogmatically tell you exactly what you have to do to be happy. There is, for instance, the collective wisdom of the ages, as embodied in our religions, philosophies, laws, and social customs. What a mess! What a junk-shop of dusty relics! And in any case, “the collective wisdom of the ages” is merely one of the innumerable devices of government by which the Anglo-Saxon peoples are humbugged into thinking themselves free, enlightened and happy.

* * * * *

But let us abandon these abstruse and arid speculations.... The point is, did George and Elizabeth (consider them for the moment, please, rather as types than individuals) come better prepared to the erotic life than their predecessors, were they more intelligent about it, did they make a bigger mess of things? Does the free play of the passions and intelligence make for more erotic happiness than the taboo system? Liberty versus Restraint. Wise Promiscuity versus Monogamy. (This is becoming a Norman Haire tract.)

Here, of course, I shall come into collision (if this has not happened long ago) with the virtuous British journalist. This gentleman will inform us that there are far too many books about the erotic life, that to dwell upon sex is morbid and disgusting, that monogamous marriage as established by religion and law must remain sacred, et cetera, et cetera, and that it provides a perfect solution, et cetera, et cetera. Moreover, in the few cases where it goes wrong, the situation must be met by frequent applications of cold water to the genitals, by propelling balls of different sizes in different manners with various instruments in mimic combat, by slaying small animals and birds, by playing bridge for modest sums, avoiding French wines and dancing, scattering saltpetre on one’s bread and butter, regularly attending church, and subscribing to the virtuous organ of the virtuous journalist....

To which may be said; for example,

That without sexual intercourse, frequent and pleasant, adult life is maimed and tedious;

That social hypocrisy prescribes that we shall avoid open discussion and practice of the sexual life, and that we all (virtuous journalists included) think a great deal about it;

That the sporting-ascetic practices recommended are only effective in those predisposed to abnormal frigidity, and

That they, taken in conjunction with the segregation of the sexes, economic difficulties and insane prejudices, form one of the chief predisposing causes of the pictures of Dorian Grey and wells of loneliness which cause the virtuous journalist so much horror and indignation.

We therefore unanimously dismiss the virtuous British journalist with a firm but vigorous kick in the seat of his intelligence, and return to our speculations.

* * * * *

Mother of the race of Æneas, voluptuous delight of gods and men, sacred Aphrodite, who from the recesses of thy divine abode lookest in pity upon the sorrowing generations of men and women, and sheddest upon us rose-petals of subtle and recurrent pleasure and the delicious gift of Sleep, do Thou, Goddess, be ever with us, and neglect not the felicity of Thy worshippers. Do Thou, alone beautiful, daughter of the Gods, drench us with loveliness.

* * * * *

From which to the lives of Pa and Ma Hartley _et al._, is indeed a staggeringly long step....

* * * * *

I hold a brief for the war generation. J’aurais pu mourir; rien ne m’eût été plus facile. J’ai encore à écrire ce que nous avons fait.... (Bonaparte à Fontainebleau—admirez l’érudition de l’auteur.)

* * * * *

Yet why should we mourn, O Zeus, and why should we laugh? Why weep, why mock? What is a generation of men that we should mourn for it? As leaves, as leaves, says the poet, spring, burgeon and fall the generations of Man—No! but as rats in the rolling ship of the Earth as she plunges through the roar of the stars to the inevitable doom. And like rats we pullulate, and like rats we scramble for greasy prey, and like rats we fight and murder our kin.... And—O gigantic mirth!—the voice of the Thomiste is heard!

* * * * *

Peace be to you, O lovers, peace unto Juliet’s grave!

* * * * *

At the time of which I am writing—the three or four years preceding 1914—young men and women were just as much interested in sexual matters as they are now, or were at any other time. They were in revolt against the family or domestic den ethic, that “ordained for the procreation of children” attitude whereby the State turns its adult members into a true proletariat, mere producers of _proles_. And they were almost as much in revolt against Tennysonian and Pre-Raphaelite “idealism,” which made love a sort of hand-holding in the Hesperides. But, let it be remembered, Freudianism (as distinct from Freud, that great man whom every one talks about and nobody reads) had scarcely begun to penetrate. All things were not interpreted in terms of sexual symbolism; and if one had the misfortune to slip on a banana peel in the street, he was not immediately told that this implied repressed desire to undergo the initiatory mutilating rite of the Mohammedans. They thought they were rediscovering the importance of the physical in love; they hoped they were not neglecting the essential tenderness, and the mythopœic faculty of lovers which is the source of much beauty.

* * * * *

Late in April, George and Elizabeth went to Hampton Court. They met at Waterloo about nine, went by train to Teddington, and walked through Bushey Park. Each had brought a frugal lunch, half because of poverty, half from some Pythagorean delusion about austerity in diet.

They walked on the grass through the long elm naves.

“How blue the sky is,” said Elizabeth, throwing back her head, and breathing the soft air.

“Yes, and look how the elms make long Gothic arches!”

“Yes, and do look at the young leaves, so shrill, so virginal a green.”

“Yes, and yet you can still see the beautiful tree skeleton—youth and age.”

“Yes, and the chestnut blossom will be out soon.”

“Yes, and the young grass is— Oh Elizabeth, look, look! The deer! There’s two young ones.”

“Where? Where are they? I can’t see them. I _want_ to see them!”

“There they are! Look, look, running across to the right.”

“Oh, yes! How funny the little ones are I But how graceful. How old are they?”

“Only a few days I should think. Why are they so beautiful and young babies so hideous?”

“I don’t know. They’re always supposed to look like their fathers, aren’t they?”

“Touché—but I should think that would make the mothers hate them, and they love the little beasts.”

“Not always. A friend of mine had a baby last year, and she didn’t want it when it was coming, but kept thinking she would love it when it came. And when she saw it, she simply loathed it, and they had to take it away. But she _made_ herself look after it. She says it’s ruined her life and she doesn’t find it a bit interesting, but now she’s fond of it and couldn’t bear it to die.”

“Perhaps she didn’t love her husband.”

“Oh, yes, she does. She simply dotes on him.”

“Well, maybe it wasn’t his child.”

“Oh! Oh!” Elizabeth slightly shocked. “It _was_ his child. But one reason why she didn’t like it was because it separated them.”

“How long had they been married when the child was born?”

“Oh, I don’t know—less than a year.”

“Idiotic,” said George, banging the end of his walking stick on the ground, “Ab-so-lute-ly idiotic! Why the devil did they go and have a child bang off like that? Of course, she’s unhappy and they’re ‘separated.’ Serves ’em right.”

“But could they help it? I mean—well, you know—it just happens, doesn’t it?”

“Good Lord, Elizabeth, what a prehistoric notion! Of course it doesn’t ‘just happen.’ There are several ways...”

“It seems a bit revolting?”

“Not a bit! You may feel so because you’ve had mushy ideas about maidenly modesty and such twaddle instilled into you. That’s all part of the taboo. Now I think the really civilized thing is _not_ to let such things happen to us like animals, but to control them. It’s all most frightfully important, perhaps the most important problem for our generation to solve.”

“But you surely don’t think everybody should give up having children?”

“Why, of course not! I do say so sometimes when I feel discouraged and disgusted with the poor scarecrows of humanity we are now. Fewer and better babies. Isn’t it insane that we exercise over animals the control they haven’t got themselves, and yet resolutely refuse even to discuss it about human beings? How can you have a fine race if you breed insensately like white mice?”

“Well, but, George dear, you can’t interfere with other peoples’ lives like that!”

“I didn’t say one should. But I believe that if people have the necessary knowledge and we get rid of the taboo they will for their own sakes come to breed more eugenically. Of course, it’s an intimate and private matter—no need for Sir Thomas Moore’s insane regulations and naked exhibitions before modest matrons and discreet old gentlemen. It’s not for the old to interfere with the lusts of youth! Damn the old. But here’s another point. Like most intelligent women and a few men you’re indignant at the way women have been treated in the past and at the wicked mediæval laws of this country. You want women to be free to live more interesting lives. So do I. Any man who isn’t an abject moron would rather see women becoming more intelligent and magnanimous instead of having them kept ignorant and timid and repressed and meekly acquiescent, and therefore sly and catty and wanting to get their own back. But you won’t achieve that with Suffrage. Of course, let women have votes if they want them. But who the devil wants a vote? I’d gladly give you mine if I had one. But the point is this—when women, all women, know how to control their bodies, they’ll have an enormous power. They’ll be able to choose when and how they’ll have a child and what man they want as its father. Overpopulation causes wars as much as commercial greed and diplomatic deceit and imbecile patriotism. Talk about the miners’ strike! What I want to see is a universal strike of women. They could bring all the governments of the world to their knees in a year. Like the Lysistrata, you know, but not a failure this time.”

“Oh, George, you are amusing with your fancies I You make me laugh!”

“Laugh away! But I’m serious. Of course, it isn’t possible to have such a concerted action all over the world. For one thing it wouldn’t be politic to announce it, because the unscrupulous governments will always go to any extent of force and fraud to sustain their infamous régimes....”

* * * * *

They had crossed the road outside Bushey Park and entered the palace gates. Between the wall which backs the Long Border, the Tudor side of the palace and another long high wall, is the Wilderness, or old English garden, composed on the grandiose scale advocated by Bacon. It is both a garden and a “wilderness,” in the sense that it is planted with innumerable bulbs (which are thinned and removed from time to time), but otherwise allowed to run wild. George and Elizabeth stopped with that sudden ecstasy of delight felt by the sensitive young—a few of them—at the sight of loveliness. Great secular trees, better protected than those in the outer Park, held up vast fans of glittering green and gold foliage which trembled in the light wind and formed moving patterns on the tender blue sky. The lilacs had just unfolded their pale hearts showing the slim stalk of closed buds which would break open later in a foam of white and blue blossoms. Underfoot was the stouter green of wild plants, spread out like an evening sky of verdure for the thick clustered constellations of flowers. There shone the soft slim yellow trumpet of the wild daffodil; the daffodil which has a pointed ruff of white petals to display its gold head; and the more opulent double daffodil which, compared with the other two, is like an ostentatious merchant between Florizel and Perdita. There were the many-headed jonquils, creamy and thick-scented; the starry narcissus, so alert on its long slender stiff stem, so sharp-eyed, so unlike a languid youth gazing into a pool; the hyacinth-blue frail squilla almost lost in the lush herbs; and the hyacinth, blue and white and red, with its firm thick-set stem and innumerable bells curling back their open points. Among them stood tulips—the red, like thin blown bubbles of dark wine; the yellow more cup-like, more sensually open to the soft furry entry of the eager bees; the large parti-coloured gold and red, noble and sombre like the royal banner of Spain.

English spring flowers! What an answer to our ridiculous “cosmic woe,” how salutary, what a soft reproach to bitterness and avarice and despair, what balm to hurt minds! The lovely bulb-flowers, loveliest of the year, so unpretentious, so cordial, so unconscious, so free from the striving after originality of the gardener’s tamed pets! The spring flowers of the English woods, so surprising under those bleak skies, and the flowers the English love so much and tend so skilfully in the cleanly wantonness of their gardens, as surprisingly beautiful as the poets of that bleak race! When the inevitable “fuit Ilium” resounds mournfully over London among the appalling crash of huge bombs and the foul reek of deadly gases while the planes roar overhead, will the conqueror think regretfully and tenderly of the flowers and the poets...?

* * * * *

When George, on one of our walks, told me the gist of this conversation with Elizabeth, I was at once more amused and more interested than I allowed him to see. There are certain aspects of peoples’ bodies, certain things they say and do, which not only determine one’s attitude towards them but seem to explain them. And more, in some cases they seem to reveal an epoch. Every one has experience of attraction or repulsion caused by another’s body. For instance, there was once a poet, whose work I admired; but the first time I met him he tried to hold a girl’s hand. I didn’t mind _that_, au contraire. What I minded was the awful spectacle of his large ugly raw-red hand, with knotty fingers and gnawed mourning nails, trying to enclose the washed and chubby hand of my little friend.... I could never read his poems again without thinking of that Mr. Hyde-like hand, the Barrymore film hand of Mr. Hyde....

Now I had a reason for dwelling at some length on these preliminary conversations of George and Elizabeth with George much in the foreground. They seem to explain a great deal, at least to me. They reveal him and at the same time “throw more light” (as the learned say) on the state of mind of a generation of young men who mostly perished in their twenties. As a rule, George was very silent. Like most people who think at all he had very little of the small change of conversation and disliked aimless babbling. But when he was with somebody he liked, he talked. My God, how much he talked! He was passionately interested in ideas, passionately interested in his own reactions to the appearances of things, comparatively little interested in the lives of other people except in a general and abstract way. He noticed in a flash the girl at a party who looked like a Botticelli (people still admired Botticelli in those days and girls lived up to it) but he would never see, for example, the look on the face of the rather plain woman whom one guessed to be in love with the handsome host uxoriously devoted to his new wife. Consequently his talk was all ideas and impressions. He had an almost indecent love of ideas. If you threw George a new idea he caught it with a skilled and grateful snap, like a seal at the Zoo catching a fish jerked at it by the keeper.