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Title: 25
Being a young man's candid recollections of his elders and betters
Author: Beverley Nichols
Release date: July 13, 2025 [eBook #76494]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: George H. Doran Company, 1926
Credits: Alan, Hannah Wilson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 25 ***
TWENTY-FIVE
_By Beverley Nichols_
PRELUDE
PATCHWORK
SELF
25
BEING A YOUNG MAN’S CANDID RECOLLECTIONS
OF HIS ELDERS AND BETTERS
_By_
BEVERLEY NICHOLS
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1926,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
25
—B—
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
IN WHICH SOME ENGLISH GENTLEMEN SET OUT
ON A STRANGE JOURNEY 11
CHAPTER TWO
PRESIDENTS--LEAN AND FAT 21
CHAPTER THREE
CONTAINING A FRUITLESS SEARCH FOR AMERICAN
VULGARITY 31
CHAPTER FOUR
JOHN MASEFIELD, ROBERT BRIDGES, W. B. YEATS 36
CHAPTER FIVE
IN WHICH MR. G. K. CHESTERTON REVEALS HIS
FEARS AND HIS HOPES 50
CHAPTER SIX
IN WHICH MRS. ASQUITH BEHAVES WITH CHARACTERISTIC
ENERGY 56
CHAPTER SEVEN
IN WHICH MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL LOSES HIS
TEMPER, AND MR. HORATIO BOTTOMLEY WINS
HIS DEBATE 62
CHAPTER EIGHT
BEING AN IMPRESSION OF TWO LADIES OF GENIUS 73
CHAPTER NINE
IN WHICH WE MEET A GHOST 84
CHAPTER TEN
IN WHICH I JOURNEY TO GREECE 99
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CONCERNING THE CONFIDENCES OF A QUEEN 112
CHAPTER TWELVE
STRANGE TALES OF A MONARCH AND A NOVELIST 120
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FROM THE REGAL TO THE RIDICULOUS 133
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IN WHICH SIR WILLIAM ORPEN AND MRS. ELINOR
GLYN REVEAL THEIR SOULS 146
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CONCERNING TWO ARTISTS IN A DIFFERENT
SPHERE 156
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
HANGED BY THE NECK 165
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
TWO PLAIN AND ONE COLOURED 174
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A LAMB IN WOLF’S CLOTHING 183
CHAPTER NINETEEN
TWO BIG MEN AND ONE MEDIUM 189
CHAPTER TWENTY
A MEMORY--AND SOME SONGS 201
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
HICKS--HICKS--AND NOTHING BUT HICKS 210
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
SHOWING HOW A GENIUS WORSHIPPED DEVILS IN
THE MOUNTAINS 218
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A DEFENCE OF DRAMATIC CRITICS 224
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
IN WHICH WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM MAKES
A DELICATE GRIMACE 232
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
IN WHICH MICHAEL ARLEN DISDAINS PINK
CHESTNUTS 240
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CONTAINING THE HIDEOUS TRUTH ABOUT NOEL
COWARD 248
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
IN WHICH I ALLOW MYSELF TO BE ENTIRELY
SENTIMENTAL 255
_to_
GEORGE AND BLANCHE
FOREWORD
Twenty-five seems to me the latest age at which anybody should write an
autobiography. It has an air of finality about it, as though one had
clambered to the summit of a great hill, and were waving good-bye to
some very distant country which can never be revisited.
A delicious age, you may agree, but an age too irresponsible for the
production of autobiographies. Why, I ask you? The bones of a young man
of twenty-five (according to the medical profession) are duly set, his
teeth are ranged in their correct places, and many arid pastures have
been made beautiful by the sowing of his wild oats. Why then, not write
about some of the exciting people he has seen, while they still excite
him?
That is the essence of the whole matter, to write of these things
before it is too late. This is an age of boredom, and by the time one
is thirty, I am terribly afraid that the first flush of enthusiasm may
have worn off. It is quite possible that by then I shall no longer be
thrilled by the sight of Arnold Bennett twisting his forelock at a
first night, and that the vision of Elinor Glyn eating quantities of
cold ham at the Bath Club (a sight which, to-day, never fails to amuse)
will not move me in the least.
It is also possible that my indignations will have suffered a similar
cooling, that I shall no longer feel faintly sick at the sight of the
new Regent Street, and shall be able to view the idolization by the
British people of Mr. George Robey, if not with approbation, at least
with tolerance.
It is to be hoped that this will not be the case, but you must admit,
from your own experience of young men who have grown up, that it is
quite on the cards. They are faithless to their first hates, they have
forgotten their first loves. They turn from the dreams of Oxford to the
nightmares of the city, just because the dream is difficult, and the
nightmare is so easy. In fact, they grow old.
That is why I have written this book. And from the decrepitude of
thirty I shall write another on the same lines. It will be called
‘Making the Most of Twenty-Eight.’
B. N.
CHAPTER ONE
In which some English Gentlemen set out on a Strange Journey
Had one been a Prime Minister there would be every reason for talking
of one’s first tooth and devoting a chapter or two to its effect upon
the history of our times. There would then follow, in succeeding
volumes, sketches of the youthful genius from every aspect, with
appropriate legends at the top of each page, such as ‘Backward at
School,’ ‘A Daring Frolic,’ ‘Visit to the Tomb of William Pitt.’
But since one has not been a Prime Minister, and since all first teeth
greatly resemble one another, and since most small boys are very much
alike (for if they aren’t, they are horrid)--since, in fact, there is
no excuse for being dull, we must begin by making things happen. And I
can think of no better moment for ringing up the curtain than when, at
the age of nineteen, two months before the Armistice, I was given leave
to go to America as Secretary to the British Universities Mission to
the United States.
It sounds deadly, but it was really exceedingly amusing, for this
mission, before it finished its tour (which was largely for propaganda
purposes), was to come in touch with most of the leading men in
America, from President Wilson downwards. Even in England, there were
celebrities hanging round us, all telling us with various degrees of
pomposity the sort of things which Americans expected Englishmen to do,
and the best way not to do them.
Ian Hay was the first man who gave me any information about America
that was worth having. I can see him now, standing against a window in
the Ministry of Information, a tall, slim figure, in a rather shabby
uniform, saying:
‘Whatever else you do, don’t refer to the Americans as “children.” It’s
such a damned insult.’
I demanded further suggestions.
‘Dozens, if you want them. Don’t leave your boots outside the hotel
door. Don’t get ruffled if a porter slaps you on the back and calls
you “boy.” Don’t be surprised if they refer to their country as the
peculiar property of the Almighty. For all you know they may be right.
It’s a marvellous country. And the people! Lovable isn’t the word for
them. They’ll kill you with kindness.’
All this I had heard before, but from Ian Hay it sounded different. It
is not surprising that he was a success in the States. He is very like
his own heroes, who, even when they are talking fourteen to the dozen,
give one the impression of being strong and silent. Add to this quality
a charming smile, the faintest possible flavour of a Scottish accent,
and an air of modesty which is not usually associated with the Creators
of best-sellers, and you will have the main ingredients of one of our
most typical authors.
If Ian Hay had accompanied us on our Mission he would have had
material for a comic masterpiece of English literature. There was the
representative of Oxford, who was to lose his boots in every American
hotel we were to frequent. There was dear old Sir Henry Jones, whose
Scottish-Welsh accents, combined with a heavy beard, an almost complete
lack of teeth, and a heavenly smile, were so to intrigue American
audiences; Professor J--, the brilliant Irish scientist, who was
our official pessimist, and foretold shipwreck, train-wreck, and
motor-wreck with unfailing hope; Sir Henry Miers, from Manchester,
cool, calm, and capable, who found the Oxford representative’s boots
for him and helped to interpret some of Sir Henry Jones’s more obscure
utterances; and last, but certainly not least, Sir Arthur Shipley, the
urbane Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, who never lost his boots, who
spoke perfect English, who had always exactly the right word to say
to exactly the right person, and without whom we should all probably
have been arrested within twenty-four hours of our arrival as a band of
undesirable mountebanks.
I wonder if all the English missions which tour the United States,
which march in dignified processions through the streets, which blink
up at the skyscrapers, which sneeze over the grape-juice and stagger
back from the serried headlines of the newspapers ... I wonder if they
are all made up from such human and fallible men as was ours.
Take the case of Sir Henry Jones, one of the sweetest characters and
the most generous men I have ever met. He had, in his head, a tooth.
One tooth, and no more. The first memory I have of him was in the early
morning, when we were ploughing our way through a choppy sea, with the
coast of Scotland misty to the starboard. He put his head through my
porthole, and complained bitterly that there was no fresh water in his
cabin. ‘What did he want fresh water for?’ I asked, looking sleepily at
his flowing beard. He waved his toothbrush through the window, and I
gave him my carafe. I wish we were all such optimists. And I hope this
story is not too impertinent. A very faint hope, I fear.
Again, Professor J--. It is with no lack of respect that I refer to the
more humorous side of his character. Any scientist, from San Francisco
to Petrograd, will tell you what the world of astronomy owes to his
researches into the theory of the Martian canals. Anybody but a fool
would pay homage to his intellect. None the less, for sheer pessimism I
have never met his like.
‘I took a bath this morning,’ he said to us, one day at breakfast, ‘and
I did it at the peril of my life.’
We wondered what made him think that a bath was so particularly
perilous. He explained. In taking his bath it had been necessary for
him to take off his patent waistcoat. It had also been necessary for
him to take off his clothes. In view of the fact that we were at the
moment, in a part of the ocean which was regarded with particular
affection by German submarines, both actions had been highly
inadvisable. The patent waistcoat for obvious reasons. The dangers of
the state of nature, however, he described at greater length. ‘If a
body enters the water,’ he said, ‘death takes place by chill just as
often as by actual drowning. I have made researches into the matter and
I find that a body covered with clothes does not chill so fast as a
body with nothing on. Hence the danger of baths in a situation such as
this. Supposing a torpedo had hit us while I was in my bath!’
While we were on the water, a torpedo did actually hit a liner off the
Coast of Ireland, though it was not our own vessel. As soon as the news
came through, J-- was convinced that one of his own relatives, an aged
aunt, must have been on board. The fact that she had been bedridden
for eight years, the fact that there was no conceivable reason why she
should have got up at all, far less have ventured across the Atlantic,
weighed with him not at all. He was born like that, and I think he even
took a certain grim pleasure in it, realizing the futility of human
existence.
When I add that there were in our Mission two ladies, Miss Spurgeon and
Miss Sedgwick, the introductory passage to this book is complete.
* * * * *
Have you ever noticed--you who have crossed the Atlantic--the
extraordinary effect that the Statue of Liberty has upon those who
pass for the first time beneath its shadow? It brings out all sorts of
hidden traits in even the most secretive of the passengers. Men who
have spent the entire voyage in the bar, whom nobody would accuse of
sentimentality, rush out and stand strictly to attention, chin well
out, eyes fixed on that impressive brazen lady, much as a dog would fix
its eyes on its mistress. Young and flapping ladies, who have lain on
the decks in attitudes which they apparently consider seductive, stand
with open mouths and unpowdered noses, trying to remember the date
of the American Declaration of Independence. Fathers bring out their
children and regard the statue with an air of proprietorship as though
they themselves had been largely responsible for its erection. And as
for the poets....
We had on board one rather celebrated young poet who I am sure will
never forget the Statue of Liberty--whether or no the statue will ever
forget him is another question. His name was Robert Nichols, and he
was being sent out by the English Government as the most accomplished
of all our war poets. He had created rather a sensation at home by
his volume, _Ardours and Endurances_, which contained, in the opinion
of the critics, much the best war poetry which had been produced.
During the voyage over I fear he had not been much in the mood for
writing poetry, unless it were of the style of Rupert Brooke’s dreadful
‘Channel Crossing,’ for he had been groaning with sea-sickness in his
cabin. But the statue cured him of all that. As soon as he heard that
we were about to pass under it, he emerged pale but determined and came
up to me, where I was standing by the railings.
‘I’m going to salute the statue,’ he said.
‘Well, hadn’t you better get your hat?’ I asked. ‘You can’t salute
without a hat on.’
‘I don’t care a damn about the hat,’ replied Robert, and without any
more ado, swung his hand behind his ear, where it remained quivering
like any guardsman’s. Further conversation under these circumstances
would, I realized, be sacrilege not only on the spirit of liberty but
on the spirit of poetry as well, and so I held my peace. But it was a
pity that Robert had somewhat miscalculated the distance we still had
to run, for after a few minutes he was forced, from sheer cramp, to
lower his arm again. It would have been better if he had got his hat.
I fear that Robert Nichols did not greatly enjoy himself in the States.
He could not get that ‘platform’ which had been anticipated for him,
and he always looked a little afraid, when one saw him on Fifth
Avenue, as though a skyscraper would fall on him before he had finished
his last sonnet. He might indeed have been reading a Keats poem:
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact’ry
Hold like full garners the full-ripen’d grain ...
All of this, however, is not getting us to America, to Presidents and
millionaires, and all those other engaging things.
Landing in America in this autumn of 1918, for an Englishman at least,
was exactly like a page out of an H. G. Wells novel. The aeroplanes
circling round us, the little pilot boat coming with newspapers that
told us the end of the war was in sight, the sudden glimpse of a new
radiant continent, with houses sparkling with a million lights--it was
the lights that we found most surprising. After stumbling about in
darkened streets at home, after being given hell by the police if we so
much as allowed a chink of light to escape through the window (for fear
of air raids, of course), it seemed almost indecent to see this blaze
of light coming from every window. In absolute exultation, as soon as
I reached my room (we were staying at the Columbia University Club), I
turned on all the lights, drew the curtain, and threw open the window,
thinking--‘there, look at that, and be damned to you,’ the remark being
addressed to imaginary zeppelins, thousands of miles away.
And then--the banquet that night! There was butter. Lots of it, making
the pale wisps of grease on which we had lately fed seem like some
loathsome memory of a nightmare. There was sugar, not done up in little
bags, and shrunk to the size of a pea, but fat, glistening sugar,
shining and sparkling like any diamond. There was meat, not brought
to one in exchange for a coupon, but perched on the plate, proud and
abundant. Sir Henry Jones’s one tooth was working overtime that night.
At this dinner I met my First Great American--Nicholas Murray
Butler--President of the Columbia University.
For the benefit of English readers I should here point out that the
Presidents of great American Universities occupy far more prominent
positions in the life of the nation than the Vice-Chancellors of Oxford
or Cambridge. These latter gentlemen are hardly known to the public at
all. The only Vice-Chancellor of Oxford of whom the newspaper-reading
public has ever heard is Ex-Vice-Chancellor Farnell, who set the whole
University on edge by medieval restrictions, and who has now retired
to the obscurity from which his faintly ridiculous personality should
never have been dragged. Apart from this regrettable exception, English
Vice-Chancellors have usually figured only in small paragraphs at the
bottom of the sober columns of _The Times_, when they are reported as
having given degrees to various earnest youths and maidens.
In America it is very different. Here, when the President of a great
college delivers himself of an utterance, great treble headings
announce the fact in all the principal newspapers. He is given almost
as much publicity as a successful horse. His judgments are made the
subject of leading articles, his portrait is almost as well known as
that of the baser type of politician in England. I do not know whether
this is because knowledge is more venerated in the United States than
in England. It just happens to be the case.
Well, Nicholas Murray Butler was a super-President, and, next to
President Wilson and Charlie Chaplin, he was the most ‘talked-of’ man
in the States. As I said before, he was the First Great American I met,
and it is with a feeling of regret that I have to admit that I was not
in the least impressed. He struck me as the epitome of the commonplace.
Charming, yes--a dear, kind smile, a loud and penetrating voice,
but--my God! what a mind! It was stocked with every platitude that has
bored us since Adam first yawned into the disillusioned face of Eve.
He made a speech. Such a speech. It was filled with tremendous pauses,
in which the hand would be raised, and the finger held aloft, and then,
like the booming of a gun, the platitude. For example. Silence. A row
of expectant faces, and eager eyes. A row of set mouths (except of
those who were munching salted almonds). And then ... ‘I say to you,
and I say it as my considered opinion, that War is a terrible thing. It
is a cruel thing, ladies and gentlemen, a brutal thing. But ...’ again
the silence, and the munching mouths are stilled ... ‘wars happen. They
occur. They break out. They are declared. They exist. They ...’
Oh dear, I thought. If all American speeches are like this, I am in
for a bad time. Of course, we were very soon to discover that they
weren’t, and that American oratory is among the finest in the world.
But Nicholas Murray Butler was a bad beginning. It is a matter of
absolute mystery to me how people listen to such things, or how they
read his books. For example, I picked up, the other day, a book by
him called _Is America Worth Saving?_ It was incredible. It contained
page after page of the dullest moralization, page after page devoted
to the proving that black is generally black, and that white, more
often than not, is white. And yet, when you get him by himself, Butler
is better. When we went to see him at Columbia University he kept Sir
Arthur Shipley and myself giggling faintly for twenty minutes over his
description of some of the difficulties of the educational career. I
remember in particular one reply he made which was typical of a certain
broad, dry humour. Sir Arthur had asked him, with reference to a little
party of English boys who had gone out west, if they were still at San
Francisco.
‘Not always so very still,’ replied Butler with a smile.
I had a long talk with Nicholas Murray Butler, but I gained no
enlightenment from it. He told me that the young had a great advantage
over the old because the young had longer to live, but after all the
old had an advantage over the young because they had lived longer. Or
some equally penetrating generalization. After talking to him for ten
minutes, in an atmosphere of linked Star Spangled Banners and Union
Jacks, I came to the conclusion that he probably had so original and
destructive a mind that he was forced to send out this smoke-barrage of
commonplace in order not to be arrested as a revolutionary.
CHAPTER TWO
Presidents--Lean and Fat
If you wish to sip the very essence of democracy, you must pay a visit
to the White House and talk with the President of the United States.
The more urgent your business, the more stirring the occasion, the more
completely unpretentious will be your reception.
We arrived in Washington in late October, already somewhat battered by
an existence in which every meal was a banquet, and on the day after
our arrival found ourselves drawing up at the gates of the White House,
duly attired, cleaned and brushed, in order to make the most favourable
impression on President Wilson.
The simplicity of the first home of America is, in some ways, more
alarming than the pomp of an ordinary Court. There were no beautiful
footmen, no drifting diplomats to waft us higher and higher until we
were at length admitted into the presence. Indeed, it was more like
going to see a dentist than a President.
We were shown into a pleasant white room, with the usual dentist’s
array of newspapers and periodicals, slightly soiled by many democratic
thumbs. At this point it might be mentioned that the pet mascot of the
Mission also entered the White House with us, concealed in an overcoat.
This was Cuthbert, a stuffed rabbit, which had been presented by a
frivolous friend to the Mission on our departure from England. Cuthbert
had been a sure help in trouble and had grown more than human. When the
sea was rough, he would be propped up on the edge, looking over, in
case he might be overcome. When it was calm he would be allowed to bask
in the sunshine. And when we were passing under the Statue of Liberty
he was stood to attention until the statue was passed. He couldn’t
salute, because toy rabbits aren’t made that way.
Cuthbert was adored by every member of the Mission, except the
representative of Oxford, who thought that such things were naughty. He
was taken to the tops of skyscrapers to survey New York by night. He
was taken on the Hudson to survey New York by day. And I was damned if
I was going to allow Cuthbert to depart from America without entering
the White House. And so, he was carefully stuffed into the capacious
pocket of Sir Arthur’s overcoat (unknown, one must in fairness admit,
to Sir Arthur). He was not taken, however, to see the President. There
are limits.
Mr. Lawson, the Secretary for the Interior, was with us when we
entered, but the real thrill of the morning was to come when a
manservant poked his head through the door and said, ‘Are you men
waiting to see the President?’ We all bridled slightly at this historic
question. ‘How divinely American!’ we thought. Were we ‘men’ waiting
to see the President? Men. _Men_, if you please. The world’s greatest
authority on bugs. A man. The world’s greatest authority on the canals
of Mars. A man. The world’s greatest authority on Greek something or
other. A man. Men--all men. Except, of course, the women. We said, yes,
we were waiting to see him.
‘Then you’d best come along with me,’ said the manservant.
We came along with him. We came along through a passage, from which
outside you could see the short drive, the white buildings of
Washington, the bustling life of the city passing by, and we stepped
through some folding doors, on to a great space of highly polished
floor, in the centre of which, like a waxwork, was standing the world’s
most important figure--President Wilson.
The first thing that struck me was that he looked very clean.
Immaculate. Not that I had expected to find him dirty. But there
was something about the stiff white cuffs, the gleaming collar, the
sparkling pince-nez, the beautifully pressed trousers, that suggested
he had dressed in a disinfected room with the assistance of a highly
efficient valet, who had put on his clothes with pincers. Again the
dentist feeling. He _was_ like a dentist. Or a distinguished surgeon.
In silence we were introduced, and slid over the polished floor until
we were grouped round him in a sort of semicircle. I had a ridiculous
feeling that we were all going to sing ‘Here we come gathering
nuts-in-May.’ Everything was suddenly so dignified. No question now of
being mere ‘men.’ We were all diplomats, in the centre of the universe.
And then Wilson began to speak, quietly and calmly, weighing his
words, telling us exactly what was passing in his mind. I remember
being struck by two things--foolish, no doubt. The first was a feeling
of strangeness that he should speak with an American accent. One had
imagined him as belonging to the world, forgetting that after all, he
only belonged to America. The second was that he was just an ordinary
man, in a hideously difficult position, applying the ordinary standards
of decent conduct to the world situation.
He talked about affairs in France, compared them with that of last
year, and drew conclusions. And then he said something extraordinarily
interesting:
‘My principal difficulty,’ he remarked, ‘is that we are dealing with
people whom we can’t trust. I wonder if you can understand how baffling
that is, when one is honestly trying to find a way out? If Germany were
like any other country, if we could count on certain promises, certain
assurances being fulfilled, then we should know where we are. But we
can’t count (he almost shouted the last words) on that. I write a note.
I receive an answer. I write another note. I receive another answer.
I _go on writing notes_. And I am left in exactly the same situation
as before, because I have learnt, from bitter experience, that the
promises contained in that answer will be broken as soon as the first
convenient opportunity presents itself.’
All the time he spoke he stood looking straight in front of him,
with his hands behind his back. He looked terribly tired. I gathered
afterwards that he had scarcely time to sleep, that often he would be
up all night trying to unravel the hopeless tangle of lies and evasions
which was almost daily served up for him.
He continued in this strain for some time, until there suddenly came
into his voice a note of passion, ‘America is not going to leave the
Hohenzollerns in power. It would mean leaving a running sore in the
heart of Europe.’ He made a little grimace of disgust.
I won’t attempt to give any long précis of his remarks. Generalizations
are never interesting, and even if they were, you can discover all of
them in the newspapers of the period. Sir Arthur had a talk with him
on the way out about his life at Princeton, and with his usual genius,
managed to smooth the wrinkles out of his face and to make him laugh.
The last words I heard him say were in reference to the Princeton
professors. ‘They kicked me upstairs,’ he said. A very long way
upstairs, most people would think.
That was one of the most interesting mornings of my life. I only wish
that Cuthbert could have been concealed behind the curtain.
* * * * *
Where Wilson impressed one with a feeling of respect (if not
reverence), Taft filled one with a bouncing spirit of good will--a sort
of ‘Pippa Passes’ spirit--that as long as Taft was in being, all must
be right with the United States.
I met him at a dinner given about this time in Washington, and was at
once captivated by him, because he seemed to make a point of being
particularly charming to the people who didn’t matter. There was a
tremendous reception after dinner, and half the time Taft was standing,
a round Colossus, talking to persons of no importance, and ignoring the
crowd of millionaires and diplomats who clustered round him.
Somehow or other, I found myself talking to him. He said:
‘Well, young man, and aren’t you getting rather sick of trotting round
with a lot of old professors?’
I indignantly disclaimed any such suggestion (which happened to be
quite untrue).
However, Taft only winked, and said Englishmen were always so tactful,
weren’t they, winked again, heaved his shoulders, and shook. Then,
apropos of nothing he said:
‘I heard a wonderful story yesterday about a Scotchman.’
One has always just heard wonderful stories about Scotchmen, but not
always from Ex-Presidents of the United States, so I listened politely.
‘A Scotchman,’ said Taft, speaking in a loud whisper, and keeping one
eye on the crowd of millionaires behind him, ‘went out one cold day on
the links, did the whole eighteen holes, tramped back, and at the end
of it all gave his caddy threepence.’
Here he heaved again. I wondered if that was the end of the story, when
Taft continued:
‘The caddy looked at the man and said, “D’ye ken I can tell yer fortune
by these three pennies?”’
(Heavens! I thought. He can speak Scotch. No wonder they made him
President of the United States.)
‘The man shook his head,’ said Taft, ‘and the caddy looked at the first
penny.
‘“The fir-r-rst penny,” he said, “tells me that you’re a Scotsman. Eh?”
‘“Yes.”
‘“The second tells me that you’re a bachelor.”
‘“Yes.”
‘“And the thir-rd penny tells me that yer father-r was a bachelor too.”’
And with that Taft turned on his heel, roaring with laughter, leaving
at least one young Englishman a staunch Anglo-American for the rest of
his life.
* * * * *
It was also in Washington that I first met Elihu Root. Everybody, ever
since my arrival had said, ‘Ah! but you must meet Elihu Root,’ rather
in the same sort of way as Sydney people say, ‘Ah! but you must see
our harbour,’ or Cambridge people, ‘Ah! but you must see our Backs.’
He seemed to have a quite unique reputation--the reputation of being a
thoroughly honest politician. I used to ask, ‘Why in that case is he
not made President?’ And the reply invariably was, ‘He is too good, too
honest, too impeccable.’ All of which seemed very strange.
However, when one met him, the mystery was explained. Elihu Root struck
me as ‘a very parfit gentle knight.’ His conversation was like a man
thinking aloud. He shut his eyes and frowned and then spoke, and you
knew that the man was telling you what he really thought. It was at one
of the inevitable banquets that he first appeared, and after it was
over I boldly went up to him and asked him some sort of question about
Anglo-American friendship.
‘That rests with you, young man,’ he said, and shut his eyes. ‘Youth
to youth, young heart to young heart’--and he sighed a little
sentimentally.
I asked him the usual stock question which one asks on these
occasions--if there was no means of dissipating some of the ridiculous
clouds of mistrust and delusion which still hung over the Atlantic,
blotting out the true features of each nation from one another; if
there was no means of bringing the Press, at least, to realize the
importance of the Anglo-American ideal.
‘Ah--the Press. Did you ever study the question of sovereignty at
college?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Have you ever tried to put your finger on a certain monarch, a certain
body of men, a certain institute and say, “Here is sovereignty--here
is the ultimate authority”? And have you, when you have decided that
sovereignty lies here, or there, suddenly realized that the true power
still eludes you? Have you realized that those men are elected by the
people and that in consequence sovereignty lies in the people? And
have you, going even further, realized that the force that makes the
people vote, i.e., the force that moulds the people’s wills, is really
the true sovereign? Think about it. And then you will realize the true
importance of the remark you made to me just now.’
All this was delivered with eyes shut and with head tilted back. A
very straight and honest man, Mr. Root, typical of all that is best in
American life.
* * * * *
From Washington we travelled to Boston, staying with President Lowell
of Harvard. Harvard made us all feel a little depressed. It was so very
rich, so very efficient, so very prosperous, so entirely different
from the bankrupt universities of England. I looked with green eyes on
undergraduates’ rooms fitted with telephones and bathrooms, and served
with a central heating apparatus that made the frozen apartments of
Balliol seem a little torturous.
And then, after Boston, Chicago. Our arrival in Chicago was
sensational. Mr. Hearst, the newspaper proprietor, had declared the
war to be over, although it was still raging gaily, and had another
forty-eight hours to run. As a result of Mr. Hearst’s enterprise,
all the country people within a hundred miles of Chicago had come to
‘celebrate,’ and they travelled with us, dressed in their best, and
taking liberal swigs of whisky. When we actually arrived, we found a
mad city. Paper littered the streets, bells clanged everywhere. And
when we came to the club (decency forbids me to mention which one it
was) every waiter in the place was drunk, and we had to tread our way
upstairs over recumbent figures, while our bags remained in the hall.
‘Terrible,’ said the representative of Oxford. ‘I am beginning to
understand why the Americans have so urgent a need for Prohibition.’
I am afraid I did not agree with him. It all seemed to me very jolly.
For one thing, all the telephone books in the club had been taken to
the roof where they had, throughout the day, been slowly torn into
little pieces by intoxicated fingers, in order that the streets might
have a festive and confetti-like appearance. As a result, though we
could be rung up, we could not ring up, and that, for the secretary
of an educational mission was, I assure you, a blessing not at all in
disguise.
* * * * *
However, that was one of the only two occasions when I ever saw anybody
intoxicated in America. The other was some weeks later when we were
down in Texas. We had been travelling all night, and we emerged, one
cold morning before breakfast, at the town of--(I had better leave it
blank), to visit the local university. Half the professional staff were
lined up on the platform to meet us, and they certainly had the warmest
ideas of hospitality, for from the overcoat pockets of at least half
a dozen of the more venerable members of the staff protruded the neck
of a bottle of rye whisky. Now rye whisky is, at all times, a potent
drink, but taken before breakfast, on a cold morning, it is not only
potent, it is deadly. Nor was this all. For when we had driven to the
university, we were greeted by a festive board at which the chief item
of diet appeared to be egg-nog, well flavoured with rum. However, we
all enjoyed ourselves very much, though I fear that this part of the
tour cannot have been very fruitful from the educational point of
view, however much it may have strengthened the Anglo-American ties of
friendship.
CHAPTER THREE
Containing a Fruitless Search for American Vulgarity
I noticed more and more in America that vulgarity (which one finds, of
course, all over the world, even in the South Sea Islands), seemed to
be in inverse ratio to wealth. The people who were really tiresome,
who talked about their automobiles and their incomes, and their
emeralds, and their trips to Europe, were nearly always the people
with comparatively small incomes. They might be rich, but they weren’t
‘rolling,’ like the Goulds or the Vanderbilts.
For example, a perfectly appalling little woman to whose box at the
opera I was once unwillingly lured, suddenly, during an _entr’acte_,
produced from her stocking a cheque for a hundred thousand dollars,
and waved it in my face, saying, ‘Say, what d’you think of that for a
birthday present?’ A most unsavoury proceeding, and as I afterwards
discovered, a complete fake. The woman’s husband had not a hundred
thousand dollars in the world, and went bankrupt only a few weeks later.
How entirely different are the super-millionaires! They have enough
money to roof their houses in gold and diamonds, but they behave
with the simplicity of an English parson. It seems foolish to have
to say it, and one’s only excuse is that there is still in England a
ridiculous prejudice against rich Americans.
It would be a good thing if people who have such a prejudice could meet
a man like, for example, Jack Pierpont Morgan. No nicer creature ever
trod the earth, in spite of his mansions in New York, Grosvenor Square,
Scotland, Cannes, and a few other places. He was one of the last
people I saw in New York, and one of the best.
One cannot think of Jack Morgan, of course, without thinking of his
library, although it is somewhat depressing for an Englishman to think
of it, since so vast a multitude of English treasures have found their
way there. When he showed me over it I was absolutely staggered by the
collection of our manuscripts which he has amassed. There is hardly a
novelist or poet of any repute whose faded pages are not treasured in
this house. And not only their manuscripts, but their portraits, their
personal belongings, in fact anything of interest that is even vaguely
connected with them.
I was browsing round among these treasures when I suddenly saw, under
a glass case, a thrilling object. It was a little lock of hair, bound
together with a piece of ribbon, and underneath was a label which read:
‘A lock of the hair of Keats. Given to Shelley by Keats’ friend--’ And
then there was a description of the time and place at which the lock
had been given.
This object so excited me that I could not drag myself away from it.
Jack Morgan came up.
‘What are you looking at?’ he said. ‘Keats’ hair? Like to hold it for a
minute?’
He produced a key from his pocket, undid the case and put the precious
thing into my hand. I felt an almost schoolboy emotion at the thought
that this hair had grown from the head in which the Ode to a Grecian
Urn had been conceived.
Suddenly Morgan said, ‘Give it to me for a moment.’ Reluctantly I
handed it over. And then, marvel of marvels, he extracted a single hair
from the lock--(a long, curly one) put it on a piece of paper, dropped
a spot of sealing wax on one end of it and then wrote, as a sort of
testimony:
‘Keats’ hair. From a lock in my possession. J. P. Morgan.’
This hair he gave to me, and, as all writers of autobiographies so
constantly assert, ‘it is one of my most treasured possessions.’ After
he had done that, he took off the key from its ring, handed it to his
secretary and said:
‘That’s the last hair from that lock that I give away. If we take any
more we shan’t have a lock, we’ll have a bald patch. Don’t you let me
have that key--not if a dozen young Englishmen come along and beg for
it on their bended knees.’
Morgan is like a father among his children when he moves among these
marvels. He pretends to know nothing very much about them, but he
knows a great deal. He knew, for example, what I had never quite
understood--the exact sequence in which Poe had written ‘The Bells.’
Poe’s manuscripts seemed to convey a special charm for him, as indeed
they might, since Poe was incomparably the greatest creative genius
that America has produced. His manuscripts were the very reverse
of what one would have expected. There were no wild scrawls, no
blotches, no hasty writing. On the contrary, they were all beautifully
transcribed on clean paper, in a hand that would have won a prize in
the copybook of a schoolboy.
I fell quite in love with American newspapers--bad taste, I
suppose--but quite comprehensible if you have strength enough to
survive the first shock of them. Everybody has written everything that
there is to be written about American journalism, and I won’t add to
it. But one episode does deserve to be recorded as a classic example of
New World enterprise.
The two ladies of our Mission, after a few weeks of racket and bustle
and sleeping-cars, arrived at Detroit in such a state of exhaustion
that they retired straight to their rooms, refusing to see anybody,
whether they were professors, or journalists, or presidents, no matter,
in fact, how distinguished they might be. There arrived on the scene a
young man with a speckled face who demanded an immediate interview with
these ladies.
‘Impossible,’ I said.
‘I’ve got to get it.’
‘Can’t help that.’
‘I _shall_ get it.’
‘You won’t.’
Pause. The speckled gentleman spat on the floor, sniffed, and then
said, ‘Well, we shall see.’
What he meant I did not even guess. But the next day there appeared
an immense interview, together with pictures of the two ladies in
question, under a head-line that informed all and sundry that ‘Dishpans
Lose Their Lure For Female Sex in England Say Prominent British Women
Educators.’
To an American reader, this must sound quite dull. Its only value,
as a story, is that, to an Englishman, it sounds almost impossible.
The ladies, rising refreshed, and eating a hearty breakfast, looked
up from over their grape-fruit to see this astounding account of the
interview which they had never given, and choked with fury.
‘How dare they?’ said one.
‘How monstrous!’ said the other. ‘Barbarism, savagery!’ they cried.
‘Not at all.’ It was imperative to soothe the ladies a little. ‘Don’t
you see that it’s really extraordinarily funny? A speckled young man
demands an interview and doesn’t get one. He therefore invents it. You
ought to feel flattered that your views are so much sought after.’
They did not feel flattered, however.
‘Besides,’ I added, ‘it is probably perfectly true that Dishpans have
Lost their Lure. Haven’t they?’
‘Dishpans have no more to do with the case than the flowers that bloom
in the spring,’ said the ladies.
* * * * *
And there, I am going to leave America. I am well aware that these few
pages represent only a very small and quite superficial fragment of a
great many exciting happenings. The truth, however, is that I was too
young to pick out what Americans call the ‘high spots.’ The rest of
this book will, I trust, be different.
CHAPTER FOUR
John Masefield, Robert Bridges, W. B. Yeats
In January, 1919, I went to Oxford. That seems about the shortest way
of relating a fact that is of singularly little interest to anybody
but myself. What _is_ of interest is that Oxford, at that time, was a
regular nest of famous singing birds gathered together in the aftermath
of the War, choosing Oxford as a sheltered resting-place, as though
their wings were a little weary and their feathers rather draggled.
W. B. Yeats had come to rest from the storms of Ireland in a quiet,
green-shuttered house in Broad Street; John Masefield was writing his
marvellous sonnets in a cottage on Boar’s Hill; Robert Bridges, the
Poet Laureate, was near by, occasionally producing a few lines of
verse which had more satire in them than poetry, to say nothing of
such young men as Aldous Huxley, Robert Nichols, and Robert Graves. I
must also pay tribute to Leslie Hore-Belisha, who is now perhaps the
most brilliant of our younger M.P’s. He did not write poetry, but his
quite unmatched eloquence at the Union will always linger as one of my
keenest intellectual (I almost said emotional) pleasures.
Of all these men, by far the greatest, to me, at least, was John
Masefield. He was the strangest blend of passion, and ethereality. He
was, moreover, the most generous of men. As soon as I went to Oxford
I decided, in company with a little band of equally impertinent young
men, that what Oxford needed was a new literary magazine which should
reflect the new spirit of the university after the War. Delicious
innocence! One really was under the impression that one was doing
something, not only terribly important, but quite new.
After endless cigarettes and a quantity of mulled claret we decided on
two things--the title and the price. It was to be called _The Oxford
Outlook_, and people were to pay half a crown for it. It is still
called _The Oxford Outlook_ to this day, which must be something of a
record for ’varsity papers. The price, however, is only a shilling.
Now came the question of contributors. Although we were properly
idealistic we were also shrewd enough to realize that unless we got
some big names, apart from those of the undergraduates, our publication
would stand little chance of creating any very great stir in the
world outside, which was what we secretly desired. Somebody therefore
suggested Masefield. And that night I sat down and wrote to Masefield,
telling him what we were doing, and asking him if he could possibly
send us a few lines for our first number.
By the next post came a most charming letter from Masefield, wishing
us all good luck, and enclosing two of the best sonnets he has ever
written--poems which any editor of any country in the world would have
been proud to publish. Here is the first of them, which has since been
included in the collected edition of his works:
ON GROWING OLD
Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying,
My dog and I are old, too old for roving;
Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying
Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving.
I take the book and gather to the fire,
Turning old yellow leaves. Minute by minute
The clock ticks to my heart; a withered wire
Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet.
I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander
Your mountains, nor your downlands, nor your valleys
Ever again, nor share the battle yonder
Where your young knight the broken squadron rallies,
Only stay quiet, while my mind remembers
The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.
And that he sent to somebody whose name he had never even heard,
knowing full well that we could not afford to pay for them.
A few weeks later I met Masefield himself. He had promised to read
some of his poetry to a little literary society which we had gathered
together, and we all assembled in my rooms to await his arrival. It was
a bitterly cold night, with driving snow, and he lived some eight miles
out of Oxford, in a region where there were neither taxis nor buses,
so that he would have been perfectly justified in ’phoning us to say
that he could not come. However, he turned up only a few minutes late,
having bicycled all the way, in order not to disappoint us.
One never forgets Masefield’s face. It is not the face of a young
man, for it is lined and grave. And yet it is not the face of an old
man, for youth is still in the bright eyes. Its dominant quality is
humility. There were moments when he seemed almost to abase himself
before his fellow-creatures. And this humility was echoed in
everything he did or said, in the quiet, timid tone of his voice, in
the way in which he always shrank from asserting himself.
This quality of his can best be illustrated by his behaviour that
night. When the time came for him to read his poems, he would not stand
up in any position of pre-eminence but sheltered himself behind the
sofa, in the shade of an old lamp, and from there he delivered passages
from ‘The Everlasting Mercy,’ ‘Dauber,’ ‘The Tragedy of Nan,’ and
‘Pompey the Great.’ He talked, too, melodiously, and with the ghost of
a question-mark after each of his sentences as though he were saying
‘Is this right? Who am I to lay down the law?’ And when it was all
over, and we began to discuss what he had said, all talking at the top
of our voices, very superficially, no doubt, but certainly with a great
deal of enthusiasm, it was with a sudden shock that I realized that
Masefield had retired into his shell, and was sitting on the floor,
almost in the dark, reading a volume of poems by a young and quite
unknown writer.
I saw a good deal of him after that. He lived in a little red house
looking over the hills and valleys about eight miles out, and on fine
days one could see from his window the grey spires and panes of Oxford
glittering in the distance.
‘Oxford is always different,’ he said to me once. ‘Always I see her in
a new mood of beauty from these hills.’ We were looking down on the
city from the distance and I too knew how he felt. Oxford from the
hills is a dream eternally renewed. Under the rain, when only a few
spires and towers rise above the driving sheets of grey, on an April
morning, when the whole city is sparkling and dappled with yellow
shadows, by moonlight when it is a fantastic vision of the Arabian
Nights.
Like many other literary geniuses, Masefield is clever with his hands.
He will, with equal complacency, make a model of a ship or mend a
garden gate. But since he was himself a sailor--since he has himself
known the sea in every mood of loveliness or of terror, it is only
natural that, when he does model, he should turn, by instinct, to
ships. He showed me, at his house, a most exquisite model in wood of an
old sailing vessel of the eighteenth century. There was nothing of the
dilettante about that work. Every spar, every rope, every mast, every
tiny detail was there, modelled to scale. It would have satisfied the
most ardent technician, and yet it had a grace and a poetry that only
Masefield could have given it.
‘You must keep this in a glass case,’ I said to him. ‘It’s far too
precious, too dainty, to knock about like the other things.’
He shook his head. ‘She’s not going to stay here,’ he said. ‘I made her
for a friend who has been very kind to me.’
That was like Masefield, I thought, to spend weeks and weeks of labour
to please ‘a friend who had been kind to him.’
* * * * *
Anybody more different from Masefield than the Poet Laureate, Robert
Bridges, it would be difficult to imagine. One was always longing to
put him on a pedestal, to thrust a sceptre into his hand, and a crown
on his head, and then to wait for the lightning. A most leonine and
noble gentleman. Even when he wandered round the streets of Oxford clad
in shabby knickerbockers, with a large, dirty satchel full of books
on his bent back, it was impossible to forget either his great height
or the immense head, modelled after Meredith, with a snowy beard and
silvery locks, flowing with just that touch of abandon which made one
wonder if, after all, Nature had not been a little improved upon.
Just as Masefield’s favourite word was Beauty, so, according to
popular tradition, Bridges’ favourite word was Damn. We all know his
celebrated retort to Horatio Bottomley, who had suggested in the House
of Commons that in view of the exceedingly limited output of the Poet
Laureate, it might be advisable to grant him, instead of his salary,
the ancient Poet Laureate’s privilege of an annual cask of wine, in
order that his tongue might be a little loosened. Bridges, in reply to
all these criticisms, merely wrote and said, ‘I don’t care a damn.’
It was typical of him, but most of us thought that the criticism was
justified, for, at the time, there _was_ a war on, he _was_ Poet
Laureate, and he _wasn’t_ writing a word.
The only time I ever heard Bridges deliver himself of this word was at
a tea-party at his house on Boar’s Hill. He damned the Press, he damned
the university, he damned, also, more than one of the modern poets whom
we were so ill-advised as to mention. When I mentioned Masefield he was
most generous to him, which made me realize how little truth there was
in the story which some wit had sent round the university at the time,
concerning Bridges’ criticism of Masefield. However, though fictitious,
it is amusing enough to recall.
‘“Masefield’s Sonnets”?’ he is alleged to have said. ‘Ah! yes. Very
nice. Pure Shakespeare. Masefield’s “Reynard the Fox”? Very nice too.
Pure Chaucer. Masefield’s “Everlasting Mercy”? Mm. Yes. Pure Masefield.’
The other literary celebrity who at this time had chosen Oxford for a
home was the Irish poet, W. B. Yeats. Yeats always seemed to me to move
in a mist.
He was like ‘men as trees walking.’ He certainly did not do it on
purpose, as Bridges may have done. He would wander along the street
with his head in the air and his hands behind his back, always wearing
an overcoat, even in the warmest weather, with a long loose bow, and a
mouth perpetually open. To walk behind him was in itself an adventure,
for when he crossed the street he never took the faintest notice of any
traffic that might be bearing down upon him, but dawdled over oblivious
of the stream of cars, bicycles, horses and motor-lorries that were
rushing past.
A lovable man, Yeats, but, I should imagine, that some people would
have found him a trying fellow to live with. When I left my college
rooms I went to a divine old house with a rickety staircase, and low
ceilings, which looked out on to one of the fairest views in Oxford,
the Sheldonian library. To this house after a little time, drifted
Yeats, complete with his wife and his baby. It was a time when the
servant problem was at its height, and occasionally, if the house was
more than usually under-staffed, all the undergraduates and other
occupants of rooms, including Yeats himself, used to gather to eat a
communal luncheon.
On the first of these luncheons, Yeats arrived very late, and after
absently toying for a few moments with a little cold asparagus, turned
to me and said:
‘Were you at the Union last night?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, what did you think of it?’
It was difficult to say what one thought of it. The debate had centred
round the ever-green subject of Ireland. There had been a great deal
of bad temper, and not very many arguments. Before I could reply Yeats
said:
‘I thought it was terrible. The appalling ignorance of English Youth
about anything remotely connected with Ireland. I was astonished. Why,
they don’t know the first thing about us.’
He darted a limp stick of asparagus into the open mouth, looked away
for a moment and then said:
‘Why can’t they understand that the Irish people are Irish, and not
English? Why can’t they realize that over there they’ve got a race of
peasants who believe in fairies, and such-like, and are quite right
to do so? Why, I’ve seen myself the saucers of milk which the Irish
peasants have put outside their doors for the pixies to drink.’
He talked absently for a little longer, and then said, in a dreamy
voice:
‘_If the English could only learn to believe in fairies, there wouldn’t
ever have been any Irish problem._’
However, Yeats was not made entirely from dreams. He had a good
business streak in him as well. He knew to a ‘T’ the best market for
his poems, although like all poets he also knew from bitter experience
that verse as a means of livelihood was impossible.
‘America pays best for poetry,’ he said to me once; ‘but even America
pays badly. They will give you twice as much for a poem in America as
in England. But for an article they will give you three times as much.
I wonder why?’
* * * * *
Among the most entertaining people in Oxford at this time (and, I
may add, among the most entertaining people in Europe), were the
brothers Sitwell. I suppose the Sitwell trio--Osbert, Sacheverell, and
sister Edith, have been talked about as much as any literary family
in England. Apart from their merits, they have had a great advantage
over most writers to whom publicity is not distasteful--they possess
a label. A label is tremendously important if you want to impress
yourself on the British public. It seems that there are a certain
number of niches in the contemporary temple of Fame, and that unless
you fit into one of these niches you will never be recognized. There
is a niche labelled ‘Paradox Mongers,’ another niche labelled ‘Psychic
Storytellers’ and a whole series of geographical niches labelled
‘Dartmoor Scribes,’ ‘Irish Prophets,’ ‘Sussex Poets,’ ‘East End
Recorders,’ ‘Yorkshire Romancers,’ etc. If by any chance, a describer
of Sussex gorse strayed into the Dartmoor heather, he or she would be
disowned. If Mr. Michael Arlen were to get into the wrong omnibus and
be observed alighting guiltily at Selfridges, his reputation would be
tarnished beyond hope. And if a man who had gained a reputation as a
writer of ghost-stories began to make paradoxes, the result, as they
say in the Bible, would be confusion.
The particular niche which the Sitwells occupy is that of ‘Chelsea de
Luxe.’ It is a very definite and not unprofitable niche. At the time
of which I am writing nobody was inclined to take them seriously. In
fact, we used to think that if the Sitwells’ papa had been anything
else but a baronet with fierce ginger hair, if they themselves had
dropped their h’s instead of dropping their rhymes, their united
efforts would not have created much of a stir, and that _Wheels_ (the
only true schoolboys’ magazine published outside a school) would have
been passed over in comparative silence. Since then, however, Osbert
has written some of the finest short stories in the English (or the
French) language, and Sacheverell has produced a work of real genius in
_Southern Baroque Art_.
Sacheverell was ‘up’ at Oxford at the same time as myself, and
introduced a very pleasant flavor of Bohemianism--(there really is
no other word)--into those dingy quarters. He hung his rooms with
drawings by Picasso and Matisse, which were the subject of lewd comment
among the more athletic members of the college. There was one drawing
by--I believe, Picasso--called Salome, which represented a skinny and
exceedingly revolting old lady prancing in a loathsome attitude before
certain generously-paunched old men who looked like the sort of people
you meet at a Turkish Bath when your luck is out. One day a certain
charming don--(an ardent Roman Catholic)--strolled into Sacheverell’s
rooms, saw the picture, paled slightly and then asked him what it was
all about.
Sacheverell said something about ‘line.’
And then the don let go. ‘Line,’ he said, was the excuse for every
rotten piece of work produced by modern artists. If a leg was out
of drawing, or a face obviously impossible, if the whole design was
grotesque and ridiculous, the excuse was always ‘line.’ And he stamped
out of the room leaving untouched the very excellent lunch which
Sacheverell had prepared for him.
But Sacheverell stood his ground in all his conflicts with the
authorities. At the end of every term a terrible ordeal takes place
known as ‘collections,’ or more colloquially, ‘collecers,’ which
consists of an examination on the work done during term. When
Sacheverell came up for his viva voce, he was greeted with black faces
and remarks of that strange and curdled quality which, in academicians,
passes for sarcasm. ‘As it is obviously superfluous to comment on your
knowledge--which is non-existent--we are only left with your style, Mr.
Sitwell,’ said one of the examiners. ‘You appear to write very much in
the manner of Ouida.’
‘That,’ remarked Sacheverell calmly, ‘is my aim.’
I am not surprised that Sacheverell describes himself in _Who’s Who_ as
‘Educated Eton College, Balliol College, Oxford. Mainly self-educated.’
Osbert, Sacheverell’s brother, is the wittiest of God’s
creatures--(forgive me, Osbert, for that expression)--whom I have
ever met. He has infused even more wit than Sacheverell into _Who’s
Who_--that badly constructed work of fiction. As far as I know, the
editor of _Who’s Who_ is not aware of the pranks which Osbert has
played in the 1925 edition. May I enlighten him?
Take first that wonderful phrase ‘Fought in Flanders and farmed
with father.’ One day I am going to write a beautiful fugue in F to
accompany that phrase, but at the moment it is only necessary to call
attention to the source from which it sprang. For that, you must cast
your eye to the preceding paragraph, which is devoted to Osbert’s papa.
There you will read: ‘Being unfit for service, farmed over 2,000 acres,
producing great quantities of wheat and potatoes.’
Take again ‘Founded Rememba Bomba League in 1924.’ It sounds so exactly
like the sort of thing which most of those who appear in _Who’s Who_
would do. There is no such organization as the ‘Rem....’ No, I won’t
be quite as obvious as that. But I might explain that the telegraphic
address ‘Pauperloo,’ which appears at the bottom of the paragraph,
being interpreted, means ‘Pauper Lunatic Asylum.’
‘Deeply interested in any manifestation of sport.’ One has a feeling
that Osbert’s page has got muddled with that of Lord Lonsdale, or Dame
(Clara) Butt. Until finally, one is informed that his recreations are:
‘Regretting the Bourbons, repartee, and Tu Quoque.’
Repartee, most certainly. I have laughed as much with Osbert as with
anybody in the world. I shall never forget his reply to a certain
publisher, who had been endeavouring, unsuccessfully, to shield the
body of W. J. Turner from the darts of scorn which Osbert was aiming
at it. ‘Personally,’ said the publisher (and when people begin with
that word one always knows they have nothing to say), ‘personally, I
find W. J. Turner rather a lovable person.’
Osbert put his head on one side and smiled. ‘I know what it is,’ he
said, with an air of discovery, ‘you used to keep tadpoles.’
He once told me, with that perfect modesty which his enemies find so
disarming, that he gave his superior authorities more trouble during
the War than any other officer they had ever known. I suppose it _must_
have been a little trying to the colonel who came up to him and asked
if he were fond of horses to be told ‘No. But I adore giraffes.’ And it
must have been positively exasperating to the outraged military police
to find him, an officer in the Grenadiers, carrying on an intimate
conversation with a very private soldier in a very public place. Even
worse, when at the subsequent cross-examination, the private soldier
turned out to be Epstein (whose taste in birds differs so strangely
from that of the British public).
He began a naughty movement during the War to urge that all those who
had served in France and had no desire to serve again should first
be voluntarily denationalized and then compulsorily deported. It
never came to anything. But in spite of its failure, he survived, and
still walks from time to time down the grey pavements of Piccadilly,
negligently tripping up an occasional poetaster or Royal Academician
who has the temerity to cross his path.
One more story. It is set on the said grey pavements, and Osbert was
walking over them with another man who was staying with him. There
came into sight a mutual acquaintance, whom we will call Lady C. Now
Lady C. knew perfectly well that Osbert’s friend was staying with him,
but she calmly ignored Osbert and said to the friend, ‘Do come and dine
with me on Friday.’ The invitation was accepted. They passed on.
The day of the dinner arrived, and with it, a postcard from Lady C. on
Osbert’s breakfast table saying, ‘I should be so glad if you would come
and dine to-night as well as Mr. --’
This was too much. Osbert went grimly to the telephone.
‘Hullo? Is that Lady C.? I’m sorry, but I shan’t be able to dine
to-night. But listen.... Will you lunch with me last Thursday?’
Yes--England needs its Sitwells.
CHAPTER FIVE
In which Mr. G. K. Chesterton reveals his Fears and his Hopes
Among the questions which will present themselves to the future
literary historian, none will be more difficult to answer than ‘Was Mr.
G. K. Chesterton afraid of his wife?’ There are several passages in
his books which indicate that the answer will be in the affirmative,
and among them one might quote that charming essay from _Tremendous
Trifles_ which is called ‘On Lying in Bed.’ He confesses to an
overwhelming desire, while lying in bed, to paint the ceiling with a
long brush. ‘But even,’ he adds, ‘my proposal to paint on it with the
bristly end of a broom has been discouraged--_never mind by whom_; by a
person debarred from all political rights.’
The first time I ever asked myself this question was in Cornmarket
Street at Oxford, on a windy night in May. G. K. Chesterton was
alighting, with a certain amount of difficulty, from a taxi-cab, and as
soon as he had safely emerged, he stood in the gutter, his mackintosh
flapping loudly in the wind, while he assisted a charming and
diminutive figure in a cloak. The diminutive figure was his wife. But
even in these strange circumstances, with the wind tying her cloak into
knots, and the rain-spots slashing against her veil like cold bullets,
she seemed completely mistress of the situation of the moment, which
was ‘When should the car come back to fetch them?’
Chesterton turned to me--(for he had come to debate with us at the
Union)--‘When _shall_ we want it, do you think?’ he said, a little
pathetically.
Before I could reply the diminutive figure said, in a sweet, firm voice:
‘When will the thing be over?’ (a great deal of feminine contempt in
that sentence).
‘At eleven. But there’s a sort of reception afterwards.’
She immediately turned to the driver. ‘Be here at eleven.’
‘But ...’ began Chesterton.
‘And,’ said Mrs. Chesterton, ‘is this the way in? It’s raining, and my
husband has a cold.’
So we meekly followed her to the debating hall.
One has so often been told that Chesterton is an enormous,
elephantine creature, that the actual sight of him is really a little
disappointing. He _is_ a big man, of course, but not as big as all
that. If it were not for his cloak, and his longish hair, and the bow
which he sometimes wears, one would not say that he was an exceptional
figure in any way. It seemed to me that he took a secret joy in
making himself as large as possible, like some little boy who stuffs
his overcoat with cushions. G.K.C. has such a passionate love of the
grotesque that if it were suddenly ordained that he should be four
times his present size he would give a whoop of joy.
Yes. The more one thinks of it--the more it seems that he _did_
purposely accentuate his largeness. His mackintosh was the mackintosh
of a man several sizes larger than he. The wide-brimmed Homburg hat
seemed specially designed to exaggerate his face. Even his glasses
could, without difficulty, have been cut in half. And I noticed that
he took a sort of impish delight, as soon as he was introduced to the
committee, of placing himself next to the Junior Librarian, a very
diminutive young man, whom he addressed as from a pinnacle, holding
himself well erect, swelling his shoulders, and even puffing his
cheeks, to improve upon the already imposing body with which nature had
provided him.
We all trooped into the debating hall, which was absolutely packed,
for Chesterton’s paradoxes are always a draw with youth. The subject
for debate was ‘That this house considers that the granting of any
further facilities for divorce will be against the true interests of
the nation,’ or words to that effect. I was speaking against this
motion (being one of those who have never seen how the interests of the
nation are served by perpetuating the union between a sane husband and
a lunatic wife, or a law-abiding wife and a murderer husband), and as
soon as my speech was over I went to the ‘Ayes’ side of the house where
Chesterton was sitting and sat beside him.
‘You shouldn’t have referred to me as eloquent,’ he said. ‘Wait till
you hear me speak. I’m not a bit eloquent. I can’t speak off the bat. I
must always have notes.’
I looked down and saw that he had a sheet of paper in his hand, on
which he had been scribbling in pencil. But the ‘notes’ were not words,
they were little pictures. A grotesque dragon had been hastily drawn
in one corner, and a tiny sketch of a very fat man in another. There
were also several comic faces, among which I recognized that of the
secretary, who was sitting with his profile to us. It was typical of
him to call these sketches his ‘notes,’ and it was even more typical
when he got up to make a very brilliant speech, that he left his notes
behind him.
I forget what he said except that it struck one as irrelevant. To hear
Chesterton speak is in itself an explanation of his writing. He pours
out his words, suddenly says something which pleases him by its touch
of fantasy, pauses, and then with a face that grows more and more
smiling and eyes that grow more and more bright, proceeds to develop
the idea, to chase it, to leap ponderously after it, so hurl paradoxes
in its wake, to circumvent it with every ingenious conceit. For
example, he said, almost in an aside, that doubtless divorce would soon
be part of the regular curriculum at Oxford, and when he had said it,
was so entranced by the prospect opening up before him, that he almost
lost his head, and ended by drawing for us a picture of the future
in which M.A. instead of meaning Master of Arts should mean ‘married
again’ and should be accompanied by the B.A., three months later, which
would mean ‘bachelor again.’
Perhaps his most vivid conversation came after the debate was all over.
When we were standing in the hall, waiting for the car, he delivered
himself of a second speech which so interested me that afterwards I
went straight home to write it down.
‘Somebody said in the debate,’ he remarked, ‘that I am the slave of
symbols, that I believed in magic, that in a ceremony or an institution
or a faith I merely examined what was on the surface and took it all
quite literally, like a peasant in the Middle Ages.
‘But it isn’t I who am the slave of symbols. It is you. I venerate the
idea which lies behind the symbol, you only venerate the empty shell.
Take this case of monarchy. Somebody remarked to-night that we had
taken away half the duties and prerogatives of the King, and that the
monarchy still remained. They went on to say that we could take away
half the duties and prerogatives of marriage, and that marriage would
still remain. Perhaps it will, but what will be the use of it?
‘Because I bow down to the sceptre, and because I take the words
“honour and obey” quite literally, you say that I am the slave of the
symbol. But I bow down to the sceptre because I believe in the power
that lies behind it. I keep to the smallest details of the marriage
service because I believe in marriage. If you believe neither in the
sceptre nor in the service, and yet bow down to them, then you are the
slave of the symbol.’
He looked away. Somebody presented him with his mackintosh. He
struggled into it, got it half on, and then, with one arm still waving
in the air he exclaimed:
‘A time will come--very soon--when you will find that you want this
ideal of marriage. You will want it as something hard and solid to
cling to in a fast dissolving society. You will want it even more
than you seem to want divorce to-day. Divorce ...’ and here, with a
sort of groan, he thrust his second arm through his mackintosh--‘the
superstition of divorce.’
The small figure of Mrs. Chesterton appeared in the doorway. She, as
usual, was quite unperturbed. The fiery words, the tangled eloquence of
the evening seemed to have passed over her unnoticed.
‘The car is here,’ she said, ‘and we are already five minutes late.’
G.K.C. shook hands hurriedly, and vanished through the door. The last I
saw of him was the flap of his mackintosh in the wind.
CHAPTER SIX
In which Mrs. Asquith behaves with characteristic Energy
Oxford at this time was a ferment of political activity. It was full of
young ex-soldiers, who considered, with pardonable presumption, that
having endured Hell for five years, they were justified in suggesting
the lines along which the New England (the Lloyd-Georgian England) was
to be remodelled. And so we formed ourselves into clubs, concocted
newspapers, wore ties varying from the noblest shade of blue to the
bloodiest tint of red, and extracted a great deal of pleasure out of it.
On the outskirts of Oxford lived Mr. and Mrs. Asquith, watching with
interested eyes this ferment of budding talent. I do not know if Mr.
Asquith ever actually said ‘Catch ’em young,’ but, to use his own
type of phraseology, he was not unaware of the advantages which might
conceivably be expected from a judicious sowing of the Liberal Seed
among mentalities still unprejudiced and alert. It was only to be
expected therefore that when I, in company with two staunch friends of
the same College, formed the Oxford University Liberal Club, he should
accept the position of President with alacrity.
As soon as the club was formed, we arranged a monster meeting in the
Oxford Town Hall, and decided that it would be rather fun to have a
thoroughly pompous dinner beforehand. We therefore invited various
celebrities, who all, to our astonishment, accepted; and when the
plans were well in hand, I departed to tell the Master’s wife of our
intentions.
Now, it has been suggested to me that the Master’s wife did not
absolutely ‘appreciate’ Mrs. Asquith. At any rate, although it was
understood that Mrs. Asquith was to dine at Balliol, there was trouble.
So much trouble, in fact, that it seemed as though the dinner could not
take place at all.
This was a dreadful situation. We had already asked Mrs. Asquith to
dine. She had already accepted. It was quite impossible to put her off.
What was the matter?
It was afterwards suggested to me, by an ingenious scholar of Balliol,
that the college authorities feared that Mrs. Asquith would have a
disruptive influence on callow youth. A foolish reason, of course. If
we wanted, we could have asked Mrs. Asquith to dine with us in our
rooms on every day of the week, Sundays included. She would not have
accepted, but that is another story.
However, I never did discover the real reason, and, as a matter of
fact, there was no need to do so, for the Master’s wife, in the
interests of Liberalism, very kindly asked Mrs. Asquith to dinner
herself. And so, that was how we dined,--the men in one building, the
women in another, as closely segregated as though we had been members
of some strict religious order which forbade the intermingling of the
sexes.
Asquith was in great form at dinner. I had never seen him before, and
if first impressions are of any value, be it recorded that he struck
me as having a head far too large for his body. His face was of a
pleasant, rosy hue, rather like that of a genial baby, his body was
short and rather inclined to stoutness. Two things only about him
suggested the sheather of swords--his hair and his voice. The former
was long and white and so silky that one longed to stroke it. His voice
was deep and rich with a quality that also suggested silk.
The first thing he said to me after we had been introduced was:
‘Did you get my box?’
This cryptic remark needs a little explanation. As soon as Asquith had
consented to speak for us he sent word by his secretary saying that
it was most important that we should prepare for him a box, some ten
inches high and twelve inches broad. This object must be covered in
green baize, and placed on the table at which he was going to speak. It
was destined, as we afterwards learnt, to carry his notes.
Such a request was, at first, a little surprising. One had always
thought of Asquith as a man with an endless flow of language, who did
not have to rely upon written memoranda in his speeches. However, the
more one learns about apparently impromptu oratory the more does it
appear in its true light, as carefully prepared. Winston Churchill has
told us that the speech that gained him his greatest reputation as an
impromptu was written out six times with his own hand. Bright used to
have an entire synopsis hidden between the palm and fingers of his left
hand, and I am sure the more ‘mountainous’ districts in Lloyd George’s
perorations are carefully hacked and hewn beforehand. So at least
Asquith was in good company.
During dinner I asked him if it was true that he had once laughingly
summarized the most valuable attribute of Balliol men as a ‘tranquil
consciousness of superiority.’
‘A tranquil consciousness of _effortless_ superiority,’ he corrected.
‘Don’t forget the “effortless.” That’s the whole point of it. But,’ he
added, ‘I don’t want to corrupt the youth of Balliol by such agreeable
theories as that.’
He had an extraordinary thirst for knowledge about post-war Oxford--a
thirst that was almost pathetic, so clearly did it indicate a love of
the very stuff, one might almost say, the very smell, of scholasticism.
Was there much unrest among the undergraduates? Did they find it hard
to settle down after the War? How many people were abandoning the
classics? And what was their chief reason for doing so? Was it lack of
time or lack of thought, or mere laziness? One could not help thinking
what an admirable Master of Balliol Asquith would have made if he had
ever chosen to abandon politics for university life--(his natural
element).
Dinner passed quickly under this fusillade of questions, and I was
longing to see how Mrs. Asquith had fared in her comparatively solitary
dinner. It cannot have been a very inspiriting one, for when we all
trooped over to the lodge, and joined them in the big room upstairs,
the atmosphere was gloomy, not to say strained. Mrs. Asquith was
sitting on a table, swinging her legs, which were encased in grey
Russian top-boots, and she greeted our arrival with a whoop of delight,
and started to talk very quickly, as though she had been pent up for
years. How wonderful of the undergraduates to give her a bouquet of red
roses! Had they guessed that she was going to wear a red hat? And did
they mind her not dressing? No? How charming of one to say that she
looked nice in anything, etc., etc.
The Master’s wife, on the other hand, said nothing at all, but remained
by the fireplace in what appeared to be deep melancholy. I went up to
her and said, ‘We really ought to be going along to the Town Hall now.
The meeting starts in five minutes.’
At this she brightened considerably, and said:
‘Is Mrs. Asquith going?’
I explained that it was snowing outside, and that the other guests had
to be disposed of first. Mr. and Mrs. Asquith would bring up the rear,
as they were the most important people.
‘Oh, I see,’ she said, ‘Mrs. Asquith’s the climax, is she?’
I was very thankful when we were all safely landed at the Town Hall,
and the meeting had begun.
I needn’t say anything about the meeting itself, except that everybody
made admirable speeches, which called forth a great deal of applause,
and set the fires of Liberalism blazing fervently. A few extra lines
may, however, be inserted to make this sketch of Mrs. Asquith a little
less shadowy.
I am perfectly certain that this lady has been very much maligned by
the British public. A section of that public regards her as vulgar
because she is enthusiastic, prejudiced because she is loyal, conceited
because she is frank, and generally a very tiresome creature. They
have not the wit to realize that she is, in reality, a woman almost
unbearably sensitive, who is aggressive only in self-defence, and that
she is so emotional that she does things in public which some people
regard as outrageous only because they do not understand her.
I shall never forget, for example, seeing her at the end of the
meeting, put her hand on her husband’s shoulder while they were playing
God Save the King, and, as soon as the King was saved, throwing the
flowers from her bouquet into the stolid faces of the crowd below. How
I sympathized with her at that moment. I should have liked to jump to
the roof with elation. The only difference was that Mrs. Asquith had
the courage to do what she wanted, and I hadn’t.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In which Mr. Winston Churchill loses his Temper, and Mr. Horatio
Bottomley wins his Debate
You may, or you may not, have heard of the Oxford Union Society. It has
a habit of producing future Prime Ministers. Among its past presidents
it numbers such illustrious names as Gladstone, Salisbury, Asquith,
Birkenhead, etc., etc., to say nothing of such minor fry as occasional
Archbishops, diplomats and ambassadors.
Among its past presidents it also numbers myself. A matter again of no
importance, except for the people with whom it brought me into touch.
Now, every president of the Oxford Union Society can invite, during his
term of office, not more than two distinguished statesmen to address
the Society. As soon as I had been elected I looked round for two
men who might bring a little live blood into our somewhat academic
discussions, and there seemed no better couple, for this purpose,
than Winston Churchill, the Secretary for War, and Horatio Bottomley,
M.P., who is at present languishing in gaol. Both expressed themselves
as delighted to accept, and dates were fixed for their respective
appearances.
A terrible problem faced me as Winston’s arrival drew near. I had to
give a dinner, not only to him, but to his guests (four of them), and
about a dozen others. When one dines in this fashion, one has to dine
well, with Moët 1914 and all the usual things which go to make good
oratory. Being quite devoid of funds, and having long before exhausted
my allowance in riotous living, there seemed no alternative but to
make a descent on an already overburdened parent. Then suddenly, a
charming friend, who is now brightening a not very brilliant House of
Commons, suggested that we should all dine with him ... a suggestion
which was carried _nem. con._
Winston was the first great English statesman who ever dined with me
(probably the last also). Remembering that it was he who had, on his
own responsibility, given orders to the British Fleet at the outset
of the War which were probably instrumental in saving the Empire, I
sat gazing at him in a sort of awe. ‘This,’ I thought, ‘is the face
that launched a thousand ships.’ And yet there was something a little
incongruous about Winston Churchill in this tiny room. He was so
vigorous, he breathed so hard, and spoke so quickly that one feared
he might at any moment seize all his knives and forks and glasses and
arrange them in the form of a field of battle to illustrate his martial
theories.
This he actually did. I happened to mention that, in order to help our
memory of the campaigns of Napoleon, I and several others who were
working together, had composed a series of rhymes round the tributaries
of the Po, which we found of the greatest value.
That set Winston off. He seized a knife, a fork, and a salt cellar
and made with them a little plan round which he marched the imaginary
armies of Napoleon. I have never heard anybody talk of war with such
gusto. With each martial adjective, a light seemed to be turned on
inside his head, his eyes gleamed, his lips parted, and he talked so
vividly that the slight impediment in his speech, which he has always
so pluckily fought, was forgotten. And when he had finished he gave me
an exhaustive list of military treatises on Napoleon, which, needless
to say, I did not attempt to read.
Winston was a wonderful talker that night--not only of war, but of
other arts, notably of literature and painting. He asked how long it
had taken me to write my novel _Prelude_.
‘I haven’t the least idea,’ I said, ‘because it was done in bits and
patches over a period of about five months.’
‘Didn’t you work at it regularly?’
‘No. I don’t see how you can do work in that manner if it is to have
any sort of claim to be emotional.’
‘Nonsense.’
I sat up, and Winston began to put forward some very interesting
theories on the writing of books.
‘You should go to your room every day at nine o’clock,’ he said, ‘and
say to yourself, “I am going to sit here for four hours and write.”’
‘But suppose you _can’t_ write? Suppose you’ve got a headache, or
indigestion....’
‘You’ve got to get over that. If you sit waiting for inspiration, you
will sit there till you are an old man. Writing is a job like any other
job, like marching an army for instance. If you sit down and wait till
the weather is fine, you won’t get very far with your troops. It’s
the same with writing. Discipline yourself. Kick yourself. Irritate
yourself. But write. It’s the only way.’
Advancing years have taught me that there is a good deal more than half
of the truth in what Winston said. The ideal combination would seem
to be a little of both spirits--the spirit that enabled Mozart to sit
down, like an accountant, and write his divine melodies at his desk,
and the spirit that urged Beethoven out into the woods and forests when
the storm was at its height.
To return to Winston. He made a very good speech--(it was about
Russia)--quite as good as those of the undergraduates who were opposing
him--won his motion, and then trotted off to bed, with the cheers of a
thousand young throats ringing in his ears.
The next day I called on him after breakfast and suggested that it
might amuse him to walk round some of the colleges. ‘All right,’ he
said, and we set out forthwith, while I tried to recall the names of
the various buildings which one passed every day, but never recognized.
However, Winston strode along gloomily, smoking a cigar, tapping
his stick on the pavement, and taking not the faintest notice of my
chatter, which showed his good sense. Still, I wanted to know the
reason for his ill-humour, and was about to ask him if he had got out
of bed on the wrong side, when he said:
‘There was a shorthand reporter there last night, of course?’
I shook my head. ‘No. We don’t run to that.’
He glared at me in astonishment. ‘But there was a man from the _Morning
Post_?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but he only takes extracts. Did you want a report?’
‘I should damned well think I did,’ replied the Secretary for War.
‘I said a lot of very--er--delicate things last night and it’s most
important for me to know what I _did_ say.’
I remembered, with exquisite clarity, his remarks about footpads,
assassins and other gentlemen with whom His Majesty’s Government, of
which he was a prominent member, were at that period negotiating. And
I also appreciated the fact that he was honest enough to stand up for
his personal convictions at the risk of being severely censured by his
colleagues. However, there seemed nothing to be done.
‘Perhaps,’ I remarked, with singularly misplaced brightness, ‘it may
be a good thing in view of the delicacy of the discussion, that there
_was_ a certain vagueness about what you actually said?’
For reply, he merely clasped his hands behind his back, made a clucking
noise with his teeth and said:
‘Is that Lincoln or Exeter?’
That night, in the House of Commons, several indignant gentlemen rose
to their feet to draw the attention of the House to the indiscretions
of the Secretary for War at Oxford. Many uncomplimentary things were
said before the matter was allowed to drop. For one night, at least, I
experienced something of the thrill of government.
* * * * *
It is a long step from Winston Churchill to Horatio Bottomley, but
not quite as long as might at first be imagined. Both men have a good
deal in common--(this is meant as a tribute to Horatio rather than a
reflection on Winston)--and if Horatio had been to Harrow instead of
to a little school in the East End of London, it is not impossible
that he would have risen to Cabinet rank, have stirred the nation with
patriotic speeches, and have gone down to history as one of the great
men of our times.
At any rate, he seemed to me a fascinating figure, and one who should
enliven any debate in which he spoke.
I therefore wrote to him, suggesting that he might care to visit us. By
return of post I received a reply, typed on the sort of notepaper that
is described by stationers as ‘superfine,’ and couched in the third
person. It stated that ‘Mr. Bottomley considered himself honoured by
the invitation, which he had great pleasure in accepting. Mr. Bottomley
would also like to know the subject of the debate. If he had any say
in the matter he would prefer to speak in favour of the Independent
Political Party. Failing that, he would like to attack the League of
Nations, which he considered a useless and a pernicious institution.’
The Independent Party won the day.
On the night of Bottomley’s arrival, I was suddenly sent into a panic
by the news that a gang of undergraduates, who considered that the
dignity of the Union was being outraged by including Bottomley among
its ‘distinguished visitors,’ had arranged to kidnap him. The plan was
to meet him at the station before anybody else could get near, to hurry
him into a motor-car, and to drive straight up to Boar’s Hill, where he
would be given a good dinner, and allowed to depart in peace after the
debate was over. I immediately went down to the station, seized several
burly porters and informed them of the situation. Whether or no these
measures had the effect of nipping the plot in the bud, history will
never know. He arrived safely.
A grotesque figure, one would have said at first sight. Short and
uncommonly broad, he looked almost gigantic in his thick fur coat.
Lack-lustre eyes, heavily pouched, glared from a square and sallow
face. He seemed to have a certain resentment against the world at
large. It was not till he began to talk that the colour mottled his
cheeks and the heavy hues on his face were lightened.
Was there any excitement at his coming? Yes? He smiled like a child.
A lot of big men came down to speak, didn’t they? Asquith, Winston,
Lloyd George? Yes? ‘And now, Horatio.’ He rubbed his coarse hands and
chuckled.
At the entrance to the hotel he stood sunning himself in such publicity
as was afforded by the gaping hall porter and his underlings. He
stumped across to the office, his fur coat swinging open, drew from
his pocket a heavy gold pen, and signed his name with a flourish. The
signature was illegible, but the gesture was Napoleonic.
He dined with me that night, and kept the small gathering of
undergraduates I had invited in a constant splutter of unholy laughter.
‘Do I pay my income tax?’ he said. ‘Not I.’ And he told us, with a
dazzling display of figures, exactly how he managed to avoid that
obligation. To my dying day I shall regret that I forget his method. He
discussed religion, with his tongue well out in his cheek. He drew for
us a little portrait gallery of contemporary politicians, as crude but
as vivid as the work of an inspired pavement artist. Birkenhead seemed
to be the sole politician for whom he entertained any genuine regard.
‘When Birkenhead was seriously ill a few months ago,’ he said, ‘I was
the only man he allowed into his room. I would go and sit with him for
hours, sometimes talking, sometimes just silent. Funny, isn’t it?’
We adjourned to the debating hall, were greeted with uproarious
applause, took our places. As the debate proceeded, I looked from time
to time at Bottomley. He seemed, suddenly, to have grown nervous.
His face was flushed and hot, and from time to time he mopped his
forehead with a large silk handkerchief. The light and airy chatter,
the brilliant irrelevancies, of the Oxford Union seemed to be filling
him with a certain mistrust. He had never known an audience like this.
Every phrase, every gesture, he watched with narrowed eyes, leaning
forward intently. And then he rose to speak. He took the wind out of
our sails from the very beginning.
I had been afraid that before this, ‘the most critical audience in
the world,’ he would try to assume an air of culture that was foreign
to him, that he would endeavour to put on airs. He did exactly the
reverse. After his opening sentence there was a moment when everything
hung in the balance. He made some rather inapt historical reference,
paused, and was for a moment at a loss. And then, quite calmly and
deliberately, he looked round and said:
‘Gentlemen: I have not had your advantages. What poor education I have
received has been gained in the University of Life.’
Dead silence. I sat back, marvelling at the consummate stagecraft
of the man. After that brief remark, any men who laughed at his
pronunciation or his mannerism would be cads, and they knew it. And he
knew that they knew it.
From that moment, he sailed on triumphantly. His eloquence was uncanny.
For sheer force of oratory I have never heard anyone like him. Compared
with him, Asquith was a dry stick. (I am talking of the manner, not of
the matter.) And his aptness of retort was modelled on the best Union
styles. For instance, he happened to use, during one of his passages,
the phrase ‘the right to work.’ A Welsh miner who was in the gallery,
and who was, as usual, on strike, cried out ironically, ‘’ear, ’ear.’
Bottomley did not look at him. He merely added, in exactly the same
voice as he had used before, ‘a right which I am sure we will gladly
grant to the honourable member.’ Delicious.
Nor was his repartee merely flippant. One of the preceding speakers
had made a great hit by referring to him, somewhat contemptuously, as
‘a voice crying in the wilderness.’ Bottomley took up the gage and
hurled it with unerring skill back into the face of his opponent. ‘All
my life,’ he cried, ‘I have been a voice crying in the wilderness. All
my life I have battled alone, fought alone, struggled for causes that
other men have deserted as hopeless. A voice crying in the wilderness!
Yes, gentlemen, and I am proud of it!’ Thunders of applause.
He won his motion by several hundred votes, and when he left the hall,
they cheered him to the echo.
But he did not seem particularly elated by his success. When he
returned to a party I gave for him at my room afterwards, the voting
had totalled about 1,100--a few less than a record attendance. ‘I’d
hoped I should draw the biggest house you ever had,’ he said with a
sigh. ‘Are you sure there was no mistake in the counting?’
I assured him that the tellers were thoroughly trustworthy.
He nodded. ‘Well, it can’t be helped. Still--it’s a pity.’
Further regrets were stopped by the discovery that nobody could open
any of the champagne. ‘Give me a bottle,’ said Bottomley. ‘I’ll show
you a trick.’
He seized a bottle in his podgy hand, went to the door, half opened
it, shut it again, gave the bottle a pull, and lo!--the cork was
removed. As he drank our healths he looked across and said ‘Damned fine
champagne.’
He was either a liar or a very bad judge of champagne, for it was the
worst wine I have ever tasted.
* * * * *
We had arranged to breakfast together the next morning, and at nine
o’clock I arrived at the hotel. It was a drizzling, dreary sort of
morning, with a cold wind, and an indeterminate mist over the roofs.
Bottomley came downstairs looking very tired. The lustre had faded from
the heavy eyes, the bulky frame had lost all elasticity.
‘And what would you like for breakfast?’ I asked him.
He protruded the tip of his tongue, paused, and then gave me a wink.
All Whitechapel was in that wink.
‘A couple of kippers,’ he said, ‘and a nice brandy and soda.’
I gave the order, as gravely as possible, to the waiter, and watched
him gulp his brandy, leaving the kippers untouched. He cheered up after
that, and by the time his cab had arrived he was quite gay. ‘I’ve
enjoyed myself,’ he said to me when I bade him good-bye. ‘Enjoyed
myself like hell.’
It will need a clever man to write _finis_ to an analysis of the
character of Horatio Bottomley--part genius, part scoundrel, and yet,
wholly human.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Being an Impression of Two Ladies of Genius
So far the feminine element has not obtruded greatly into these pages,
not for lack of females, but for lack of distinguished ones. It is
a matter of little significance to the reader that in May I met a
charming girl called Jean, and in June lost my heart to a languorous
beauty named Helen. But at about this time (the summer of 1920) I did
meet and get to know two very remarkable women.
The first was Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She was staying at a house whither
I journeyed in late July to escape the heat of a London summer. My
first sight of her was as I emerged from the car; very dirty and
dishevelled after a long journey, in which somebody had spilt a bottle
of champagne all over my trousers. I entered the hall, and observed
a strange, dark woman in orange looking at me, wondered who she was,
wondered still more when she advanced and said in a deep booming voice:
‘Oh, young man. Run upstairs quickly before you go in to see them. The
room is full of earls and cocktails.’
This remarkable announcement (which was true in so far as there was an
earl somewhere in the distance, and the clinking of ice in glasses) was
followed by a mutual introduction.
A fiery, billowing, passionate, discontented creature of genius--that
is my impression of Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She absolutely dominated the
party during my whole visit. I fell passionately in love with her, with
the shy, ridiculous love of twenty-one for--?
Try to see her as I see her now. The tall, cool dining-room, the Romney
smiling from the wall, the long dining-table, and, near the end, Mrs.
Patrick Campbell, hunched up, scowling, smoking a cigar, and as she
puffed the smoke into the face of the lady opposite (whom she detested)
telling the following story:
‘Do you know’ (oh! the mellow boom of that magical voice!) ‘the story
of the old hen that was crossing the road and that was run over by
a Rolls-Royce? There was a flutter of feathers, a shrill cackle and
then--’ (turning to her neighbour) ‘what do you think the hen said as
she died? _My God, what a rooster!_’
I don’t think anybody was ever quite so rude to people as Mrs. Patrick
Campbell. She would stand in front of the glass, tugging fitfully at
her dress, and then, with her head on one side, she would say, in
dreamy but resounding tones:
‘Isn’t it awful? I try to look like a lady and all I look like is
Miss --.’ The fact that Miss -- was standing just behind her, made no
difference at all.
At this house there was a swimming bath--rather on the Roman model,
with pillars of pale blue marble mosaic, and little nooks and corners
where one could drink cocktails before summoning up the energy to
dive in. It was a very hot summer and the bath was in great demand,
especially after tennis. On one of these occasions we all assembled,
in dressing-gowns of varying gorgeousness, and plunged into the water.
Enter Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She herself was in a tea-gown, having no
intention of bathing. Lying on a couch, she surveyed the splashing
throng. Suddenly, as a pretty girl in a _décolletée_ bathing dress
scrambled up on the diving board the great voice rang out:
‘I’m sure you wouldn’t appear like that before the man you loved!’
I don’t know what happened. I only know that the two never spoke to one
another again.
And yet, when one got her by herself, she was the most fascinating of
creatures. She was, at the time, moving into a little house near by,
and whenever the opportunity occurred, we would go over to assist her
in her task. It is probable that the ‘assistance’ considerably delayed
her entry into possession, for though we had all of us very decided
ideas upon house decoration, we had not the remotest idea of how to
carry them out. I remember standing in a small and dishevelled room for
nearly an hour, while we all argued exactly where a set of the works
of Bernard Shaw (which the author had given her) should be placed.
Finally, with a gesture that would have done credit to an empress,
Mrs. Patrick Campbell swept the whole lot on to the floor, drew from
her pocket the manuscript of a one-act melodrama by Clemence Dane,
and tramped round the room reciting it, her golden voice echoing over
the empty house. She must have quite demoralized the young man who
was putting in a new bath, and she certainly created havoc among the
various vases and oddments with which the floor was strewn.
After that, we decided that we would leave the house to itself for an
hour or two, and go into the village to buy garden implements. I wish
you could have seen Mrs. Patrick Campbell stalking into that provincial
ironmonger’s shop. She stood in the entrance, drawing her furs around
her, swept out her hand and pointed to some extraordinary instrument
covered with knobs and spikes (probably designed for the uprooting of
turnips).
‘What,’ she boomed, ‘is that?’
The man, like a startled rabbit, tried to give her some indication of
its use.
‘Give it to me,’ she cried.
The next thing was a rake. She asked for a r-r-rake, rolling her r’s
and her eyes as though she were asking for some esoteric poison. When
she held the rake at arm’s length she reminded one irresistibly of a
Britannia of the decadence. Choppers, trowels, insecticide, squirting
things--enough to staff a place four times the size of her own--were
all ordered and bundled into the car, so that when eventually we set
out for home we must have looked like a party of _sans-culottes_
departing to arm their local legion.
The actual use of these instruments was never fully discovered. The
rake was of course a simple matter, and was employed with great aplomb
in removing the remaining gravel from the centre of the drive to the
sides, where it served as a very effectual choker of the drains. The
clippers also wrought confusion with the grass borders, and became
caked with earth and grit. But the spiked thing remained a complete
mystery.
I never understood how Mrs. Patrick Campbell wrote her autobiography.
When I saw her it was apparently due at the publishers towards the
end of the next month, although not a word of it had been written. She
would suddenly get up in the middle of a conversation, and rush away to
her room saying, ‘Now, I am going to write.’ But half an hour later she
would invariably be back again, booming at us from the sofa.
This habit of leaving things to the last moment undoubtedly explains,
to a large extent, the fact that her later career has not been marked
with the same triumph as she enjoyed during her earlier years, in spite
of the fact that she is still the superb genius, shining with a dark
radiance that hardly any of her younger rivals possesses.
Does she allow that genius to run to waste? I wonder. She does not
appear to have the capacity for taking pains. Philip Moeller, the
author of _George Sand_, told me that she was anything but word-perfect
in the title-rôle. ‘At the final dress rehearsal,’ he said, ‘she was
sweeping about the stage with the text in her hand, reading it, word by
word. She carried it off somehow, by gagging--magnificent gagging, if
you like--but still, you can’t expect to play a part on those lines.’
A pity, a decided pity. For so fine and sensitive an artist must have
suffered tortures when she first saw inferior artists taking her place.
And when she had to appear at the music-halls it must have been like
putting a queen in a pillory. I once heard a marvellous story of her in
this connection.
It is alleged to have occurred at some London music-hall where--sadly
to relate--she had to share the honours with some performing sea-lions.
Think of it! Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who had swept London off its
feet in _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, having to appear in the unworthy
company of beasts of that nature, which probably eat their young and
sleep all the winter. These animals were apparently incapable of
appreciating true art, for during the whole of her act (which preceded
their own), they made the most appalling noises off stage, booming and
bellowing for food. They were, of course, kept hungry in order that
they might go through their tricks with proper alacrity.
Mrs. Patrick Campbell, according to the story, put up with the
sea-lions for two performances, but after that, she had had enough.
On the following evening she therefore paid an early visit to the
theatre, a strange bundle under her arm. In this bundle was a packet
of succulent fish with which she proceeded to feed the sea-lions one
by one, addressing them, as she did so, in terms of great affection.
After a couple of fish the bellowing ceased, and gave way to contented
licking of lips....
Mrs. Patrick Campbell went through her act in a deathly silence that
night. But when the sea-lions came on, the general impression of the
audience was that it was a very poor show.
* * * * *
I cannot better introduce the other lady who at this time so impressed
me than by quoting a very penetrating sentence that was written about
one of her books by Mr. Middleton Murray. It referred to _Vera_ (by the
authoress of _Elizabeth and Her German Garden_), and he called it ‘A
Wuthering Heights written by a Jane Austen.’
For Lady Russell--if one may be so unkind as to strip from her the mask
of anonymity which she is always so careful to preserve--is just like
that. It is as though she dwelt in an early Victorian drawing-room,
listening to some passionate dialogue of life that was being carried
on outside the window. The voices rise and fall, the rain splashes
against the bright panes, the wind moans and whistles round the stoutly
built walls. Then, there is a lull, and in the silence may be heard the
scratching of her little quill pen, transcribing the violent things
she has heard in a tiny, spidery handwriting, catching the thunder in
a polished phrase. And when she has finished writing, there, on the
paper, is a story as full of tension, fierce and frightening as any
that dwells in the broken, passionate sentences of Emily Brontë.
When one meets her, inevitably she suggests Dresden China, with her
tiny voice, tiny hands, tiny face, tiny manners. And then suddenly,
with a shock, you realize that the Dresden China is hollow, and is
filled with gunpowder. Not that Lady Russell will tell you. You simply
sense it, and stand back a little, wondering.
After I had returned to London, I was trying to endure one of those
dull Septembers which seem to concentrate in themselves all the heat
and stuffiness of a summer that has outstayed its welcome, when
somebody rang up and said, ‘Come to lunch. I want you to meet a very
charming lady.’
I went to lunch, and there were certainly several very charming ladies,
but one knew them all before. Until, twenty minutes late, the door
opened, and a little figure with blue eyes floated across the floor
saying, ‘Du forgive me, will yiu? I feel I must be late.’ And then
everything was changed.
There really ought to be some sort of musical notation for giving the
exact timbre of people’s voices. Lady Russell’s is a delicious voice,
like a dove that has become slightly demoralized by perching too long
on a French hat. Her ‘U’ sounds are startlingly French, and yiu,
pronounced _à la française_, is the only way you can write it. She does
not really talk, she croons aloud. And here again, one comes up against
the Austen-Brontë combination. No other woman could possibly deliver
herself of such remarks in so utterly dulcet a tone.
It was at the time when her (?) book _In the Mountains_ was being so
well reviewed, and there was just enough doubt as to whether she really
had written it to lend piquancy to the discussion.
‘In the Mountains?’ she said. ‘It sounds like a Bliu Guide.’
‘You wrote it--you _know_ you wrote it.’
‘_Yiu_ may know I wrote it. I haven’t even read it.’ But if _yiu_ like
it, it must be improper. So I shan’t read it.’
She swore till the very last that she did not write it.
‘I couldn’t have written it, could I, because I only published a book
last year, and I write terribly slowly. Scratch out all the time. I
want to write a play.’
‘Why don’t you?’
She sighed. ‘It’s so difficult to know what’s going to happen to a
play. Yiu always know with a novel that it will be published, but with
a play yiu never know, du yiu? I once had a play produced and I was so
thrilled that I used to go every night and sit all by myself in the
pit, thinking “What a clever girl am I.” But I think the little man at
the door began to think I must be in love with him and so I stopped.
And so did the play.’
Suddenly--(this was after lunch)--‘Let’s write a play _now_.’
‘What sort of a play?’
‘A play with heaps and heaps of tiny scenes, all lasting only about
five minutes. With Bach fugues in between. Beautifully lit. Tiny
tragedies. Tiny comedies. Like the things that happen in one’s life.
Some of the plays might be silent. And then--oh, _du_ lets’--and then
after each funny little emotion, one would always have the fugue to
recall one back to life.’
It sounds a fascinating idea, and I wish she would do it. Perhaps she
will. So that if ever a unique entertainment by an anonymous writer is
produced in London, of the type sketched above, you will know who is
responsible for it.
Lady Russell has her own way of administering criticism to bad
writers--the sort of way which makes one swear never to do it again.
In one of my novels, which she had read, there comes a passage of a
very lurid and foolish nature, where a villainous vicar strikes an
adventuress across the face. One develops fairly quickly, and I knew,
almost as soon as the book was published, that this passage was rotten
stuff. I met Lady Russell shortly after she read it and she said, ‘I
_du_ like your book. And I _loved_ the bad old man who hit the girl on
the mouth.’ Silence. Utter silence. And then a laugh. I went straight
home and threw that silly novel into the fire.
But that is not nearly so damning as she can be. I shall never forget
my thrill of delight when I heard of her quite classic rebuke to one of
the world’s most tiresome women. The scene had better remain veiled in
mystery, but one can say that she had several amusing people staying
with her. There suddenly arrived in the neighbourhood Lady --, who, as
everybody who knows her will tell you, will go miles in any weather
to be near a celebrity. She was full of her latest discovery, a very
decorative young soldier, who had won far more than his share of medals
in the war. Lady -- talked about him till everybody felt inclined to
scream: how she had lunched with him in Paris, how he had done this,
that and the other. ‘And do you know,’ she added, in a vibrating voice,
‘he was wounded in sixteen places!’
Lady Russell looked at her with a plaintive smile. ‘I didn’t know men
_had_ so many places,’ she said.
It would be interesting to know what she really thought of life, or
failing that, what she really thought of her own work, but very few
people have ever managed to get behind the mask of anonymity, and they
all come back with different stories of what they have seen. One thing
I do know, and that is that _Vera_ _had_ to be written. The terrible
brute of a man, the feeling of suspense which hangs over the pages like
a menace--they were as inevitable as a human birth.
‘Did you like writing that book?’ I asked her once.
‘I hated it,’ she said, in a whisper. And then, looking down at the
floor, ‘Isn’t he a brute? An absolute brute? Have you ever known
anybody so horrible?’ She shuddered as though she were talking of a
very real person.
Whatever one may say of her, the fact remains that she occupies a
place in modern literature that is unique, because to the public she
is only a pen, and not a person. When they think of anybody like
Sheila Kaye-Smith, they call to mind bobbed hair, black eyebrows, and
a cottage on the Sussex downs. When they think (as they apparently
sometimes do) of Hall Caine, they call up visions of a beard, private
suites at the Savoy, and countless mysterious legends of his doings
in the Isle of Man. When they hear of Stephen McKenna it is always
with the knowledge that he has either just been to or returned from
the West Indies and is either going or has gone to some party or other
in London. But they never think at all of Lady Russell, because they
simply do not know she exists. They are caught up in the fascination of
her work, they wonder for a moment what manner of man or woman produced
it. And all they have to guide them is a blank title-page.
CHAPTER NINE
In which We Meet a Ghost
At this point in the narrative it seems fitting to introduce a
spiritual element which, up to the moment, has not been very noticeable.
You may have seen, two Christmases ago, a sensational article in the
_Weekly Dispatch_, by one Lord St. Audries, telling of a ghostly
midnight adventure which he had experienced with two friends in a
Devonshire house. The article made something of a sensation at the
time. The _Daily Mail_ devoted a leading article to the subject,
and many American papers quoted it in full. The full story of that
adventure, however, has never been told. And since the two other
conspirators mentioned in the article were my brother and myself, it
seems that the time has now come when the true story of that very
remarkable evening may be told in full.
It was the first week in June when Peter--as it is shorter to call
him--came down, and it was in the third week in June that the thing
happened. In case you might imagine that the atmosphere of my home
was favourable to ghosts, it is necessary to state that we had lived,
during those two intervening weeks, the most distressingly healthy of
lives. Most of my morning had been spent in wrestling with the foreign
policy of Queen Elizabeth or the political theories of Mr. Aristotle,
a task that was not made any the more pleasant by the thud, thud of
tennis balls which came from the lawns below. But in the afternoon we
would always set out together, sometimes to motor up to Dartmoor and
picnic in heather, but more often down to the sea, where we bathed,
and spent the long hot afternoons lazing about on the beach.
One Sunday--the last Sunday of Peter’s visit--we all went to evensong.
It was a glorious evening when, at about seven o’clock, we came out
of church, and we decided to walk home, taking the short cut by the
road over the hill. This road, I may say, runs straight from the
church, past various houses, until it reaches the gates which guard the
approach to our own home.
A full moon hung over the hills--a little pale in the fresh light of
dusk--and after we had been walking a few minutes, Peter stopped,
looked over a wall and said:
‘What a fearful house.’
We looked with him. It was a house which I will call Weir. It had been
untenanted for nearly thirty years and was falling to rack and ruin.
The roof had long ago disappeared, the paint was peeling from the
faded green shutters, and as we looked a bat flew out of one of the
second-story windows, showing that the glass had also vanished.
‘Why has it been allowed to get like that?’ asked Peter.
‘Haunted,’ said my brother. ‘At least, that’s the legend.’ And then he
told him how nobody could ever live in it, how strange sounds, screams
and the pattering of hurried feet were heard by passers-by, how it was
narrated that in years gone by there had been a terrible murder there,
in fact, all the usual things which are told in Christmas numbers of
popular magazines.
Peter interrupted him.
‘I’m for going in,’ he said.
‘What on earth for? You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?’
‘No. Nor disbelieve in them. But, it would be rather fun.’
And that was how it began, and how we found ourselves, three hours
later, walking back over the road by which we had come.
The road was quite deserted, for the town went to bed at early hours,
and as we swung along, wearing our flannels, for it was a hot night,
I took a certain interest in the state of mind of my two companions.
My brother was, frankly, a little on edge. He had a candle in one
pocket, and a crucifix in the other, to meet the respective powers of
darkness with which we might be confronted. Peter was just--how shall
I say?--alert. He had had experiences which might be described as
psychical in the past, and he was more or less prepared for anything
that might happen. And I was just enjoying the whole thing, quite
confident that we should see nothing at all, but none the less amused
by the possibility that, perhaps, if we were lucky....
We clambered over the wall, for the gate was locked, walked down some
steps, through some bushes, and round to the front of the house. It
stood about thirty yards back from the road, and the main grounds
stretched out in front. As it was built on sloping ground, the tangled
grass and shrubberies in front were on a level with the basement,
through which we had to enter. The first floor was on a level with the
road behind us.
It was an absolutely still night, so still that the poplar trees
behind us were etched against the moon in a motionless trelliswork of
silver leaves.
‘Come on,’ said Peter. We decided to enter the house through one of
the windows in front of us. The glass was broken, and there was no
difficulty in raising the sash. We opened the window and as soon as
we had done so, it fell down again with a bang. The sash had long ago
rotted.
‘Give me your stick,’ said my brother. ‘I’ll prop this thing up. We
might have to come out in a hurry, and we don’t want to crash into a
lot of broken glass.’
I gave him the stick, and he wedged the window firmly into position. It
is lucky that he did so.
We clambered in one by one, groping our way in the semi-darkness.
As soon as the candle was lit, a room of indescribable melancholy
flickered into view. The plaster had fallen in great lumps from the
ceiling, so that we walked with a crunching noise that echoed all over
the house. Wooden boxes and planks strewed the floor. The wall-paper
had almost all peeled from the walls, though some of it still clung in
strips, like pieces of decaying skin.
‘Where?’ said Peter.
‘Upstairs, I think--don’t you?’
‘Right.’
We spoke in whispers, as though afraid of disturbing something that
might be lying asleep above, and one by one made our way up a narrow
twisting staircase that led into the main hall.
In this hall we paused, undetermined where to go next. Right before us
was the front door, and on the left, the two principal rooms of the
house. Both of their doors were open, and through them one caught sight
of a floor on to which the moonlight poured abundantly. To the right
was a corridor leading to some rooms that were shrouded in darkness.
Just by us was the continuation of the staircase, which in the old
days had led up to the rooms above, but which now led (after turning a
corner beyond which we could not see) straight up to the sky.
We began to make a tour of the house, and chose, firstly, one of the
big rooms on the left. There was hardly any need for a candle here,
since the moonlight was so brilliant, but we took it for the sake of
dark corners. We found absolutely nothing. Only a big, silent room,
looking out on to the garden, with a single cupboard, which was empty.
A most prosaic room it must have been in daylight, and even now, there
was nothing particularly alarming about it.
‘So far, so good,’ said my brother.
‘Let’s try the other room now,’ I said.
I went outside, and stood in the hall, waiting for them to follow.
I was not feeling ‘creepy,’ although I should not in the least mind
admitting it. As a matter of fact, I was rather disappointed that
nothing had happened. I stood there waiting, looking into the darkness
of the corridor on the right.
And then suddenly, the first alarm. It was not in the least the most
important thing that happened that night, but since it happened to me,
I take a particular interest in it.
As I stood there, I was thinking in the odd, inconsequent way in which
one does think, of an essay which I had been writing that morning, when
suddenly I thought--‘I am thinking very slowly. My brain does not seem
to be working properly.’ And then, with a thrill of dismay I realized
that exactly the same physical process was taking place in my head as
takes place on those dreary occasions when I have been forced to have
an anæsthetic. The left side of the brain starts to be covered with
a black film (almost like the shutter of a camera), which gradually
closes over, from left to right. While this is going on I can think
perfectly clearly with the right side. Thought and consciousness do not
cease until the film has closed completely over. Then, everything is
blackness.
This was now happening to me, but with two differences. The film was
spreading over my brain far more quickly, and the agent which was
responsible for it was not anæsthetic but a force which I can only
describe as a form of suction, coming very distinctly from a room down
the corridor on the right.
‘Hullo! What’s up?’
I saw them standing before me. With every effort of concentration, I
managed to say, in an absurdly stilted voice: ‘The candle. Quick, the
candle. Outside.’ I found the candle placed in my hand. My feet carried
me downstairs, I half fell to the window, and then--the film closed
over.
A minute later I found myself sitting up on the grass, feeling
absolutely normal again, though strangely tired. What had happened? It
was exceedingly difficult to say. Nothing--and yet, everything. All I
knew was, that here in the garden I was safe. But inside....
‘I wish to goodness you wouldn’t go in again,’ I said.
However, they were now more determined than ever to make a thorough
investigation, and after waiting to see that I was all right, they
clambered once more through the window.
Not one corner, not one crevice of that house did they leave
unexamined. It was a very simple house to explore, because apart from
the fact that the only possible entrance was by this particular window,
the rooms themselves were square and stoutly built, and there were
but few cupboards, and absolutely no mysterious closets or any other
contrivances which might be thought to harbour ‘ghosts,’ or even,
failing a ghost, a harmless tramp.
They spent about twenty-five minutes over their examination, and came
out reporting that they had been everywhere--including the little room
from which I had felt the ‘influence,’ and had found absolutely nothing.
‘And now,’ said Peter, ‘I’m going in _alone_.’
‘Alone? Good Lord, man, haven’t you had enough of this business?’
He shook his head. ‘No. I believe Paul’s an “anti-influence.” Sort of
lightning conductor. He keeps them off. Perhaps it’s the crucifix,’ he
laughed. ‘Anyway, you remember that nothing happened to you until you
went out in the hall away from him. And nothing happened to me, perhaps
because we were together all the time.’
We tried to persuade him not to go. But he insisted, and we let him go
in on the condition that he should take the candle, and that we should
whistle to him every few minutes, while he would whistle back, to show
that he was still there.
Once more, for the third time, he went into that house, while we sat
down on the grass and listened to the sound of his footsteps as he
clambered up the stairs. We heard him walk across the hall and sit
down, as I judged, on the bottom of the steps, waiting. Then there came
a faint whistle, and we whistled back.
Silence. We whistled again, and the answering echo sounded clearly.
Another whistle, another answer. And so the minutes passed away.
Then--terror!
It was about twenty minutes after Peter had climbed through the window,
and nothing had happened. The last whistle we had heard, which was
about two minutes before, had been particularly shrill and cheerful.
It seemed quite evident that we had drawn a blank, and I turned to my
brother to suggest that we should call Peter out, and go home.
But, over our heads there came something which was not a sound, for
there was no sound; not a wind, for the trees were still; nothing
visible, for we saw nothing. A second later, a cry from the house, in
Peter’s voice, the like of which I hope I shall never hear again. It
was a long-drawn ah-h-h! The sort of cry that a man would give who had
been stabbed in the back.
We sprang to our feet, and rushed to the window. As we did so, a single
cloud which had long been drifting slowly to the moon, started to
obscure the light. Clambering through, we found ourselves in utter
darkness. The planks and boxes which, by candlelight had been so easy
to surmount, appeared gigantic. To add to the distraction there came
from upstairs the wildest thuds and crashes, as though several men were
struggling together.
‘For God’s sake, matches.’
‘Haven’t got any.’
‘We must get some.’
We scrambled to the patch of light made by the window, rushed through
the bushes, the noise of the struggle inside increasing all the
time, vaulted the wall into the garden of the house next door, whose
occupants were fortunately well known to us, pushed wide the front door
which was fortunately open, seized a lantern which, by a miracle lay
just inside the hall, tore back again, over the wall. As we vaulted the
wall we heard a noise which was like a whole platoon of men stumbling
down the stairs.
And then, ‘Oh, my God! ’ in Peter’s voice.
We met him as he emerged, staggering round the corner, his face dead
white, his hair, his hands and his clothes covered with plaster and
dirt. We took him into the next house, dosed him with brandy, and
listened to the following story:
‘When I got into the house,’ said Peter, taking a plentiful gulp of
brandy, ‘I couldn’t at first decide where to take up a position. I
eventually chose the bottom of the staircase, for two reasons. It was
central--that is to say, it commanded a view of nearly every door on
the ground floor, and it also allowed me to face the corridor on to
which opened the little room from which you’ (turning to me) ‘felt the
influence coming.
‘I wasn’t particularly hopeful of seeing anything. However, something
seemed to tell me that if there _were_ to be any manifestations, that
is to say, quite crudely, if there was a ghost, the centre of its
activity would be in that little room. My attention seemed constantly
switched in that direction, and after a few minutes I sat quite still,
my eyes fixed on the door of the little room, which I could just make
out as a patch of greyish light in the darkness of the corridor.
‘The minutes sped by, bringing nothing with them. I heard your whistles
outside. I whistled back. And though the echo of my whistle sounded a
little uncanny in the lonely house, I still didn’t feel in the least
“ghostly.” I felt extraordinarily matter of fact. I remember even
wondering if the wood on which I was sitting was damp.
‘I suppose that about twenty minutes must have gone by like this, and I
was seriously thinking of giving it up as a bad job. Your last whistle
had just sounded, and, growing impatient, I began to rise to my feet,
intending to have a final look at the little room, and then to go home.
‘Then, the thing happened. Out of that room, down the darkness of the
corridor, something rushed. I don’t know what it was, except that it
was black, and seemed to be shaped like a man. But two things I did
notice. The first that I could see no face--only blackness. The second
was that it made no noise. It rushed towards me over that bare floor
without a sound.
‘I must have taken in those two facts subconsciously, for I had only
two or three seconds in which to think. After that I was knocked flat
on my back by some overwhelming force. I had a sickening, overwhelming
sensation of evil, as though I were struggling with something beastly,
out of hell.
‘After that I remember struggling--it seemed to me for my
life--staggering with an incredible effort to my feet--and fighting my
way downstairs. If one’s sensations in moments of half-consciousness
are of any value, then I must have been fighting not with one thing,
but with two or three. How I managed to get down the stairs, God knows.
There was nothing but darkness and a hundred filthy influences sapping
my strength. The next thing I remember is meeting you outside.’
Before I go on to the sequel to this story, just let me remind you
of two things. Peter was, once again, a perfectly normal and healthy
creature, going through the war like any other young man, fond of
country life, the reverse of neurotic. Secondly, whatever it was that
knocked him down, it was not a human being. That room from which the
‘thing’ emerged was empty. It had no cupboards, no secret doors. There
was no possible way of entering it.
The sequel is as follows. We were naturally very anxious, after this
exceedingly unpleasant experience, to find out a little more about
Weir, and its antecedents, and with this object we paid a visit
to a certain very charming lady who lived close by and who had an
international reputation in things psychic. She knew all about it. She
heard our story quite calmly, and without the least surprise.
‘But do you mean to say,’ she said, when we had finished, ‘that you
didn’t _know_?’
‘Didn’t know what?’ I asked impatiently.
And then it transpired that some forty years ago, Weir had been the
scene of a particularly brutal double murder, in which a semi-insane
doctor had done to death first his wife, and then a maid-servant. The
actual scene of the murder was in the bathroom. _And the bathroom was
the little room at the end of the corridor from which I had felt the
influence coming and from which the thing had rushed at Peter._
I could tell you a lot more about Weir if I had time--how when it was
renovated, and re-inhabited a short time ago, no door in the place
would keep shut, and how even the stodgiest tenants were forced to
admit that something very devilish was on foot. How no dog can be got
past the house after a certain hour. How--but one might go on like that
for ever, and so I shall leave the facts as they stand.
* * * * *
Before leaving this question of ghosts, however, I cannot refrain from
telling another story of the same kind, which also had Peter as its
main victim. You may disbelieve it or not as you choose, but at least,
even if you decide to treat it as pure fiction, it makes very good
reading. And it is, as a matter of fact, the unadulterated truth.
The scene was laid about six years ago at St. Audries, a rambling,
pleasant old place in Somersetshire. Peter had come home from London
the night before, and apart from his sister, there was nobody there
except the servants. On the second night, he was rather tired, and so
at about ten o’clock he went to his room, which lay at the end of a
long wing, a good distance away from the main body of the house. By
half-past ten he was sound asleep.
Some hours later, in the middle of the night, he suddenly found himself
awake, with that strange feeling that one has been disturbed by some
noise outside. He rubbed his eyes, and sat up. Yes--distinctly there
was a noise in the corridor. Wondering who on earth it could be at this
time of night, he called out. There was no answer. Called again. Still
no answer. Mystified, he rose from bed, put on a dressing-gown, and
opened the door.
Outside, there was an old woman with a candle, standing a few yards
away from him, regarding him with calm, wide eyes. He had never seen
her before, and he spoke to her. She did not reply.
He then took a step towards her, and as he did so, she suddenly turned
and began to walk away. Exceedingly curious, he began to follow, but
she broke into a run. He too started running, and he chased her down
corridors, along passages, up little staircases, faster and faster.
Suddenly at the other end of the house, when he was only a few yards
behind, she turned into a corridor that led to a room from which there
was no escape. There was the sound of a door slamming, and a second
later he flung it open. Bright moonlight flooded the room. It was
empty, silent, deserted.
Peter stood there, wondering. The only exit from the room was by the
door through which she had just entered. Unless of course one jumped
out of the window, from which there was a sheer drop of forty feet on
to a hard lawn. But the window was locked and barred. Nobody had opened
it for years.
Shrugging his shoulders, he walked back to his room, a little
disturbed, and greatly puzzled. Before he turned out the light to go to
sleep again he glanced at his watch. It was two minutes to one.
The next morning, the whole adventure seemed so fantastic that he
decided to say nothing about it. He therefore went down to breakfast,
talked quite normally and cheerfully, and kept his peace.
As he rose to go out, his sister suddenly said to him:
‘Oh, Peter. The clock on the mantelpiece has stopped, and it’s a
terrible nuisance to wind. What is the right time?’
Peter looked at the clock. It registered two minutes to one. He took
out his own watch. That also marked two minutes to one.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll go outside and tell you.’
But in the hall the same thing had happened. The grandfather clock,
which was usually kept fast, had also ceased ticking--at two minutes to
one. The clocks in all the other rooms had stopped--at two minutes to
one. Even a clock over the staircase, which could only be reached by a
ladder, and of which he alone held the key, had stopped at two minutes
to one.
That is all. There is no explanation, no ‘sequel’ of any kind. It just
happened. It has never happened again.
Since these events I have looked the other way whenever I have seen any
spiritualists coming down the street.
CHAPTER TEN
In which I Journey to Greece
It was not easy, in the unrest and turmoil of the year 1921, for
any young man to settle down to a definite occupation. There was a
great outpouring from Oxford in that year, mainly consisting of those
who had been to the war, had returned to the University to finish
their studies, and had taken the shortened course. Men of that type,
prematurely matured, seemed indeed to many of us, quite middle-aged,
though most of them were not twenty-eight. And naturally having already
lived many lives and died many deaths, the prospect of beginning all
over again and being treated like children was not altogether pleasing.
Everybody who has done much public speaking at the University is
always told that he ought to go to the Bar. It seems destined for him,
as something almost inevitable--why, I could never quite understand,
because mere eloquence is not nearly so great an asset at the Bar as
the capacity to spurn delights, to live laborious days, and to make up
your mind that for several years at least you must be content to be a
very dull dog indeed.
I, too, was caught in this spirit of unrest. I went to London in
search of a job, had no idea how to set about it, wrote odd articles,
spent all my money, and returned home. Something had to be done, so I
sat down and occupied the next four months in writing _Patchwork_, a
novel of the new Oxford. It was published in the autumn, had a certain
_succès d’estime_, and brought me in about enough money to pay my
tailor’s bill.
And then one day, there came a letter which set my heart beating
quickly and filled me with a sense of adventure which made life seem
more than worth living again. It was from my publishers, and it told me
the following story:
A new revolution, it seemed, was on the point of breaking out in
Greece. That unfortunate country was in the direst distress, being
ruled by a monarch (the late King Constantine) who was not recognized
by the Allies, who had already been exiled once, and who, unless
drastic measures were taken, would be exiled again. The national
exchequer was empty, the national spirit almost broken, and the
national manhood practically exhausted by the war against Turkey, which
had already lasted, on and off, for seven years.
The only way in which Greece could be saved was by the recognition of
King Constantine by the Allies. Such an event was, at the moment, out
of the question, since ‘Tino’ was regarded in France and England and
America as an Arch-Traitor, a sort of miniature Kaiser, who by his
treachery and his double dealing had imperilled our cause throughout
the whole of the Near East.
But that legend of Tino, it was now alleged, was false. It had been
carefully built up, during the war, by interested agents, on a fabric
of complete falsehoods. The astounding nature of these falsehoods
was contained in a collection of documents which was being carefully
guarded. In those documents was material for a book which would cause a
sensation throughout Europe as soon as it was published.
Would I go to Athens and write that book? I should be given immediate
access to the documents, I should be under the special protection of
the Greek Government, I should have, as a matter of course, the entrée
to every circle of Greek Society which I might desire to investigate,
from the Court downwards. And all my expenses would be paid.
Would I go to Athens? Would I go to heaven? Just imagine if _you_ had
just come down from Oxford, were still at heart an undergraduate,
and were suddenly given the opportunity of embarking on an adventure
which gave every promise of situations as fantastic as ever occurred
to the peppery imagination of William le Queux! For, naturally, one
guessed that, in an undertaking of this sort, there would be a certain
element of danger. The Balkan countries have never been exactly a
health resort for political adventurers, and what should I be but a
political adventurer, delving into secrets of which, at the moment, I
knew nothing, in a distant and romantic capital which was alive with
intrigue?
Would I go to Athens? Without a moment’s delay I sat down and wrote a
telegram, saying that if necessary I would start to-morrow.
* * * * *
Let us get straight on to Greece, for it is easier to do that in
a book than in the so-called _train-de-luxe_ which totters across
Europe, falling over bridges, blundering through ravines, and waiting
for a whole day at deadly looking hamlets in strange countries. It
is all right until you reach Fiume. Till then you have a comfortable
dining-car with regular meals, and a sleeping compartment in which it
is possible to sleep and not to freeze. But after that, God help you.
They take off the dining-car, and you have to depend for sustenance on
what you have got with you. And if you have got nothing, it means that
you have to clamber out of bed in the middle of the night and go into
some filthy little railway café, to bargain for black olives and dusty
chocolate and sour bread. At least, that was how things were in the
winter of 1921.
A word about Belgrade, the capital of Yugo-Slavia, because it is,
of all the cities I have ever seen, the most sinister and the most
melancholy. It would appeal to Poe. We arrived at about dawn, and I
woke up to look out on a dreary, broken-down station, snow-bound, and
to hear the monotonous echo of some soldiers singing round a little
fire which they had built on the platform to keep them warm. I dressed
and went outside with some Greeks, who spoke bad French. We were all
terribly hungry and were determined to eat some breakfast or die in the
attempt.
What a sight when we stepped outside the station. You must imagine
a background of leaden skies, and long, almost empty streets along
which an occasional bullock cart silently plodded. In the foreground,
however, all was colour and noise and animation, for it was market day,
and the peasants from the outlying districts had all come in to sell
their cattle. Never can there have been such a picturesque crew of
rascals--rather like a chorus in the Chauve-Souris. The men with black
beards, and stockings brightly worked in blue and crimson wools, the
women with green aprons and yellow jackets, and odd-looking belts that
seemed to be made of dyed leather. And they were all stamping about in
the snow, shouting out in that dark, stinging language which sounds
like Russian spoken by a devil. At least three fights were in progress,
and the way they treated their animals made me feel that, unless I went
straight into Belgrade, there would be a fourth.
We pushed our way through this unsavoury collection, and walked down
the silent, desolate street in a sort of dream. There were no motors
(I did not see a single motor in the whole of Belgrade) and very few
horse-carriages. Almost every man we met was a soldier. And such
soldiers! Dreary, pale, half-starved-looking creatures, slouching along
like tramps, with uniforms that hung about them in rags and boots that
had long been unfit for any human beings. Then, suddenly, we saw three
officers, swaggering down towards us. A greater contrast it would be
impossible to imagine. They were not only smart, they were superb. They
glittered and shone and sparkled, they strutted, and puffed, and posed.
They were the complete musical-comedy officer of the Balkans, their
uniforms a dream of delight. And as they passed, a group of ragged
soldiers sprang to attention, and remained stiff as corpses for fully a
minute after the said officers had gone by. Discipline, what crimes are
committed in thy name!
And then the breakfast! It was quite as depressing as a Dostoievsky
novel. We had it at the best hotel in the place, and it consisted of
bitter coffee, white butter made with goats’ milk, and bread so sour
that it was almost impossible to eat. There were no eggs, no meat, no
sugar. One was back in war-time England again, _with_ a difference.
Only one word more about Belgrade, and that must be to record the
impression of amazement I had that this terrible hole of a place was
the capital of one of the largest countries in Europe, of the country
which, according to the economists, is going to be one of the most
prosperous in the whole world. Make no doubt about it, Yugo-Slavia is
a coming country. But if you could see its capital, the town which, by
the august dispensation of the Peace-Makers, has been set in authority
over many fair and cultured cities of the Austria that was, you would
say it was a back slum of London, set on a hill, subjected to an
earthquake, and then cursed by the Creator.
They don’t build houses to last in Belgrade, because they know that in
ten years or so there will be another war, and the whole thing will be
blown to pieces again. That is the sort of spirit one met the whole
time. Nothing permanent. No trust. No faith. No hope. I looked into a
photographer’s shop and saw a photograph of the Parliament in session.
So pompous, so threadbare, so utterly, damnably sad.
All this may have been the effect of a bad breakfast and a cold
morning. But I think that you will admit that it is borne out by the
facts.
Let us hurry to Greece. The next scene in the journey was when, at
dawn, the train, with a last despairing effort, arrived at the frontier
town of Ghev-Gelli, and stopped, panting. And this was Greece! This
land of crystal sunlight, with the brown mountains against skies of
burning blue. Greece! I felt like Linnæus, who went down on his knees
at the first sight of English gorse; or like Cortez, when his eagle eye
first gazed upon the Pacific, through the medium of Keats’ Sonnet. Or
like a great many other popular people who may all be found in _The
Children’s Encyclopædia_.
I dressed quickly, and went into a little restaurant that lay just
behind the station. A brown-eyed maiden bustled forward and showed me
to one of the four small tables. There was a spotless cloth on the
table, and a big earthen bowl of violets. And for breakfast there was
a huge glass of fresh milk, a chunk of coarse bread, and the sweetest
honey that even Greek bees can ever have distilled. One felt that on
such a diet, and under such sunshine, anybody could write masterpieces.
I had just swallowed my last spoonful of honey, and lit a cigarette,
when there was a sound of tramping feet outside, a shouted word of
command, a moment’s silence, and then a babble of conversation.
Soldiers! Greek soldiers! These must be inspected at once. I went to
the door and saw, lined up, a small platoon of soldiers, clad in khaki,
standing at ease. They were burnt almost black with the sunlight,
were of rather under average height and were talking in a fierce and
indigestible language. But what most attracted the eye was the superb
young officer who was engaged in conversation with the conductor of the
wagon-lit. He was the first (and almost the last) Greek I ever saw who
gave one the impression of a statue come to life. And how smart he was!
How his sword glistened in the sunlight, how his leather shone and his
buttons sparkled!
Suddenly he turned, pointed in my direction, and started walking
towards me. I hurriedly adjusted my tie, and wished that I had shaved.
It didn’t seem to make much difference, but it made one feel somehow
undressed. However, there was little time for regret. The officer was
already by my side.
‘Monsieur Nichols?’
‘Oui.’
He saluted, turned, and shouted to the soldiers. They ceased talking.
Shouting again. They sprang to attention. Shouted again. They sloped
arms.
This was terrifying. I also endeavoured to put a few inches on my
height, and frowned severely, which is reputed to have an effect of
making one look older.
‘I come from the Military Commander of Macedonia,’ he informed me. ‘You
are to be under his special protection.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, in as deep and resonant a voice as possible. ‘It
is very gracious of him.’
‘I have also,’ he remarked, ‘to present you these documents.’ He handed
me some papers decorated with heavy seals. I took them, glanced at
them, and placed them inside my pocket.
‘You will have no difficulty,’ added this excellent young man, ‘in such
things as customs. Athens has been informed of your arrival. Everything
will be done to ensure your comfort.’
‘I am more than honoured,’ I said. I felt an awful fraud, and was
thankful that the Military Commander himself was not present. If only
one could have grown a beard, or have developed pouches under the eyes,
or a cynical smile or _something_ which would have concealed the fact
that one was really only an undergraduate, and not the distinguished
author that they were expecting. How marvellously Hall Caine would have
suited an occasion like this. He would probably have emerged in a
black coat, looking like a minor prophet, and have made some profound
remark on the liberty of Greece. All I could do was to ask the young
man to stand his soldiers at ease, which seemed an excellent suggestion
and was promptly carried out.
We talked for a little longer, and then, in order to end a situation
which was rapidly becoming unbearable, I informed him that I had
business in the train which must be attended to. He sprang to
attention, we shook hands, the soldiers clicked, sloped arms, right
turned and stamped rhythmically out of the station. The last thing I
saw was the glint of their rifles in the sun.
After waiting nearly the whole day at Ghev-Gelli, the train puffed out
into the open country towards Athens at about five o’clock. I looked
out on to the mountains and flower-filled valleys, dreaming in the late
afternoon sunlight. The adventure had really begun.
* * * * *
And now, Athens.
We arrived at about seven o’clock in the evening, and all the things
which my admirable and decorative soldier had foretold, came to pass.
Various imposing people met me, my luggage slipped through the customs
unopened, and I found myself outside the station while the other
wretched people were still wrestling with officials.
Now, I am all for dramatizing the various episodes in one’s life in
order to get the utmost emotion from them. This seemed to be an episode
well worthy of such treatment. And so, for this night, I planned to
drive through the streets to my hotel in an open cab, have a jolly good
dinner, and then go up to the Acropolis by moonlight alone.
I achieved all these delectable things. By various subterfuges I
managed to get rid of the people round about, and found myself in the
desired open cab driving slowly towards the main streets.
The streets of Athens at night! Take, as a model, Paris, and set it
in surroundings of incredible beauty, hills that soar proudly above,
a sea that stretches below, lit with the lights of a thousand ships.
Fill it with dark, swarthy people, with eyes like stars, who do not
so much walk as sway. Plant along its streets rows of pepper trees,
whose feathery branches dance beneath the lamp-light. Sprinkle among
the crowd young giants in the most picturesque uniform of Europe--a
white kilt that makes them look, in the distance, like ballet girls.
Build your houses of white marble, scatter their gardens with flowers,
breathe over it all a spirit of gaiety and love, light it with a moon
so clear and clean that it might be carved from the marble of the
Acropolis--and then, perhaps, you will have a faint idea of Athens.
Unless, from sheer incapacity, I have inadvertently been describing a
Lyceum pantomime.
And then, most important of all, one could dine like a king in this
paradise, and still can, for less than half a crown. The drachma was
not nearly as low then as it is now, but this was what my dinner cost:
_Wine 15 cents_: A bottle of white wine--tasting of
the tiny yellow grapes that are
good enough to grow on the
slopes of Mount Parnassus.
_Omelette Superb. Greek hens are worthy of
12 cents_: special praise.
_Pilafe de Volaille A pilafe that brings to the dinner,
15 cents_: as the cigarette advertisements
say, something of the ‘romance
of the East.’ Made _à la_ Constantinople,
its rice flavoured
with essences which none but a
Turk could contrive.
_Yaorti 10 cents_: It hailed originally from Bulgaria.
It is a perversely succulent dish
of sour cream and fresh cream
mixed, iced, and sprinkled with
sugar.
_Savoury Apollo Born of an unholy but delectable
12 cents_: union between the lobster and
the crab, and baptized with a
sauce of the cook’s own invention.
_Turkish Coffee Again the Eastern element. Constantinople
5 cents_: is close, you see--too
close for the comfort of Greece.
But, at least, it has taught them
how to make coffee.
Grand Total, including wine, 69 cents.
And that is in the best hotel in Athens. If you go to any of the other
restaurants, you will dine equally well for a good deal less.
But I want to take you with me up to the Acropolis, before we part
company on this most thrilling of all nights. For the Acropolis is the
personification of all Greece, it is the Crown of Athens, the eternal
symbol raised aloft which proclaims that Greece has no kith nor kin
with the crowded barbarians to the North, or the massed savages to
the East. Oh! I know perfectly well that the Turk is a fine fellow--a
finer fellow than the average Greek, and that probably modern Greece
has little in common with the Greece that first lit the lamp of
civilization in Europe. But Turkey has no Acropolis. And as long as
those matchless columns hover, like a benediction over Athens, Greece
will be _different_ from her neighbours.
It was the night of the full moon. As we rattled up the narrow streets,
the roads grew bumpier and bumpier, the lights more and more dim. A
wonderful place, one thought at each street corner, for a murder. It
would be dreadful to be murdered before seeing the Acropolis. After
seeing it, nothing would matter. That at least was how I thought, as
the cab swung round the final bend in the hill, drawing up beneath the
clustered buildings, dreaming on their narrow cleft of rock.
How can I describe it, this milk-white miracle of beauty? Its beauty
does not come from its antiquity alone, for here, among the columns
of dim silver, stained with shadows of violet, one is away from Time.
The temples soar to the stars, like white flowers eternally born anew.
The same moon that lit the face of Alcibiades falls on each fragment
of glittering marble, gilding the stone arms of its warriors and the
silent faces of its maidens, and only yesterday it seems that the voice
of Socrates must have echoed here, carried by this breeze through the
cool, cleft spaces.
At night-time even modern Athens seems to fit into the dream without
disturbing it. One stands by some broken, lovely fragment, looking
over the hills on to the sparkling city beneath. It is a box of jewels
spilt as an offering to the gods. The streets are strung into darkness
like glimmering necklaces, and from far below comes the muffled whir
and murmur of modern life. And then one shuts one’s eyes again, and
there is silence--the silence of eternal things....
I offer no apology for this sentimental outburst. I have no sympathy
with the man who does not grow sentimental among the columns of the
Acropolis. I have read about him in Freud, and he is a very dirty dog.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Concerning the Confidences of a Queen
On the next day I was summoned to the Queen. I must here admit, with
due shame and contrition, that I had never been to see a Queen before.
I really don’t know why. Still, the fact remains that I knew nothing
whatever about Queens, especially Balkan ones. I had read about them
in certain lurid accounts of themselves, from which I gathered that
they must all be very temperamental, and I had seen photographs in the
illustrated papers, from which I concluded that all photographers were
Republicans. Beyond that, my mind was a blank.
Still, two things one knew instinctively about Queens. They liked to
be called Ma’am, and they had to be approached in a morning coat. The
ma’am business struck me as faintly ridiculous. I practised it while
dressing, and pranced round the sunlight-flooded room saying, ‘Yes
ma’am, no ma’am, three bags full.’ However, when one has on one’s
morning coat the ma’am becomes something rather awe-inspiring.
I had to be at the palace at eleven, and at fifteen minutes before that
hour I entered a rickety ‘amaxa,’ drawn by two horses, and trundled
over the bumpy streets towards my destination. A blue, blue sky above
and all the houses glistening white. A faint breeze that drifted in
from the sea. In the distance the Acropolis could be seen gleaming,
like a white rose on a hill. Athens was bustling and wide awake. Little
flower stalls made bright splashes of colour under the pepper trees.
Outside on the boulevards people were drinking coffee and smoking
cigarettes. Now and then a lordly car would sweep by, and one would
catch a glimpse of a rich merchant and his lady, the latter with pale
face and crimson lips, and the glitter of diamonds that come from the
Rue de la Paix. A little bit of Paris, a little bit of the East, a
little bit of the classic past--that is Athens.
We swept through some wide gates after a certain controversy with two
fierce sentries in white kilts. Charming people those sentries. I
have always wanted to have one for a servant. They would create such
a sensation in London. They have a scarlet turban, with a long tassel
that hangs over the left shoulder, a tight-fitting, blue jacket with
rows of buttons like a page, a white sort of ballet skirt, shorter and
more frilled than a kilt, long white stockings, and red shoes with huge
black woollen rosettes on the toes. They told me that the costume was
very comfortable, except for the shoes, which were always coming off.
I don’t suppose we should ever have got past the gates had it not been
for the kindly offices of the Royal Chamberlain, who was waiting for
me, and took me straight to a reception room, then to another reception
room, then to a third such, and finally left me to wait. I had not long
to wait, for after about five minutes an aide-de-camp appeared and told
me that Her Majesty was ready to see me.
I followed him, noting the universal blue in which the palace was
decorated. Blue curtains veiled the glare of the sunlight outside,
casting a sort of haze into the quiet corridors. There were blue vases,
and blue sweet-scented flowers, and an immense staircase covered with
a blue carpet that was like a summer sky.
I negotiated the staircase successfully, walked down a few more miles
of corridor, and was eventually ushered into a long room, very like an
English drawing-room, in which Queen Sophie was standing.
I shall never forget my first sight of her, for she had the saddest
face of any woman I have ever seen. Standing there, dressed entirely
in black, a bowl of lilies by her side, her face rose from the shadows
like one who has known every suffering. Beautiful? I am not sure about
that. A beautiful expression, certainly. A beautiful bearing, too.
But my first impression remains, also my last. The very air which she
breathed seemed heavy with sadness.
(I don’t wish to convey the impression that she was a sort of mute, a
funereal figure. There were many days on which I saw her afterwards, in
which she was one of the gayest and most sparkling of creatures. But
the underlying note of tragedy would always recur.)
Her first words were anything but tragic.
‘I’m so glad,’ she said, ‘that you don’t try to kiss my hand. Some
Englishmen seem to think that they must do it, and they always look so
embarrassed.’
‘Ought I to have done it--ma’am?’ I said, wondering if I had let fall
the first brick.
She spoke perfect English--or, rather, the sort of English that you and
I speak, which is probably very far from perfect, but at least could
not be accused of any foreign flavour.
‘And now,’ she said, ‘before I tell you about Greece, for Heaven’s sake
tell me something about England. I haven’t been there since the war,
and’--here she shrugged her shoulders--‘I don’t suppose I shall ever be
able to go there again.’
I told her as much as I could. She was absolutely ravenous for
information. Did they still plant the tulips in Hyde Park? Was the
grass as green as ever in Kensington Gardens? (Oh, the green grass
of England!) Were people giving many parties now? And what were the
parties like, gay or sad? Had people got over the war at all? Were
there any very pretty girls running about? Had I any idea whom the
Prince of Wales was going to marry?
I gradually realized, as I endeavoured to supply some form of answer to
this bewildering torrent of interrogatives, that here was a woman who
was sick at heart for the country in which she had played as a child.
For, after all, Kaiser’s sister or no Kaiser’s sister, Queen Sophie,
when a girl, was brought up by her grandmother, Queen Victoria. She
had Kensington Palace for her playground and her first paddling was
performed on the beach at Eastbourne. And now, to be exiled, through
no fault of her own, from the country which she loved so well, to be
forbidden to see her friends, her relatives....
‘I suppose you have heard a great many stories about me?’ she said,
when I had exhausted England as a topic of conversation.
I nodded.
‘For example?’ she asked with a smile.
‘That’s not fair,’ I said. It was quite impossible to tell her even a
fraction of the things one had heard.
‘No. Perhaps it isn’t. Well, I’ll tell you a few of them. I was
supposed, of course, to be in daily touch with my brother in Berlin, by
wireless. I never quite gathered where the wireless was, but I believe
they said it was in a tree in the garden. I was supposed to concoct
elaborate plans for the destruction of the British Army. How, I don’t
quite know, because my husband always tells me I know nothing whatever
about war. I was also reputed to teach all my children nothing but
German. I presume that is why I have had nobody to teach them but an
English governess who has been here for ten years, and whom you must
meet. She’s a very charming lady. In fact--I’m quite impossible. I
wonder you dare come to see me.’
She laughed, and then became serious again.
‘I want you to realize,’ she said, ‘something of the absolute’--she
paused for a word, her hands tightly clenched together--‘the absolute
_agony_ of my position at the beginning of the war. I loved England.
I was brought up there. I had dozens of English relatives. I loved
Germany, too. My brother was the Emperor. That sounds, I suppose, a
crime, to love Germany. But try to clear your mind of the prejudice
of the war. Try to realize--as I think we can now--that every German
wasn’t necessarily a devil, and that every Frenchman wasn’t necessarily
an angel. And then you will realize something of what I have suffered.’
She paused, and then said a sentence which I shall never forget. ‘_I
was in a horrible No-Man’s-Land of distraction!_
‘What did I do? What _was_ there to do, except to shut my eyes, and to
think only of Greece? If I was to follow the struggle--first from this
side and then from that--I should have gone mad. And so, as I say, I
devoted myself to Greece. I nursed. I did my best in the hospitals. I
busied myself in the gardens. I did anything but think....’
She rose to her feet with a sigh. ‘Let’s go into the garden, and forget
all about it.’
She led the way from the room, and I followed her down endless
corridors, in which sentries sprung to attention as we passed, and
ladies-in-waiting smiled and curtsied from the shadows. Out in the
sunshine we paused, and she looked at me with a curious smile.
‘Before we go any farther,’ she said, ‘I want to show you something
which will interest you. You have come out here to write a book,
haven’t you? Well--this thing which I shall show you, will make you, at
least, _think_.’
We turned to the left, skirted the front of the palace, went through a
sort of shrubbery, and then stopped.
‘Look!’ said the Queen.
I looked. Standing straight in front of me, against the wall, was a
fourteen-inch shell. Not a pleasant-looking object. It was about the
height of a child of six, and was, I should imagine, sufficiently
powerful to blow up half the palace if it had landed in the right place.
‘That shell,’ she said quietly, ‘was a present from the French. Every
Englishman who sees it says that surely the French would not bombard a
neutral country? Surely the French, the apostles of culture, would not
bombard, of all places in the world, Athens, the birthplace of culture?
But you have a lot to learn. The date was December 2, 1916. Greece was
still neutral. The bombardment began at ten o’clock in the morning, and
went on intermittently till six at night.’
‘And where were you all that time?’
She laughed. ‘In the cellars. I can laugh at it now, but at the time it
was not a laughing matter. You see, my children were with me. They were
terrified. And I was distracted. Look at that shell, for example. If it
had fallen three feet farther to the right, it would have gone straight
through the window of my husband’s study. He was in there at the time.
It would not have been a very pleasant thing for the Allies, would it,
to have had the murder of the King of a neutral country on their hands?’
There was nothing that I could say. I muttered something about looking
into the matter.
‘Yes. Look into it. That is all we ask of you, that you should try to
find out the truth. And don’t forget that though I may be the sister of
the Kaiser, I’m also the daughter of the Princess Royal.’
I was nearly six months in Athens, with every possible facility for
studying the truth, and I doubt even now if I discovered it. That the
Queen was utterly sincere and genuine, I do not doubt. That the French,
in the desperation of the struggle, behaved foolishly, I am convinced.
But as to the exact measure of blame, I remain undecided.
However, I did not set out to write a book of political arguments, but
a book of human studies. And I hope that by this tiny sketch a few
people at least will see Queen Sophie in a more kindly light than has
hitherto been thrown upon her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Strange Tales of a Monarch and a Novelist
A fortnight later I was sitting in the lounge of the Hotel Grande
Bretagne, when a message arrived saying that Tino would like to see me
at six o’clock.
It was then a little after four, and the hectic, unnatural pageant
of Athenian Society was drifting by in full swing. Look well at that
pageant, for Athens, in this January of 1922, seemed a sinking city in
a doomed land, and there is a romance about such cities which is denied
to the more prosperous metropoles of the West, a romance which comes
from the knowledge that everybody is playing a part, and that a hundred
undercurrents of intrigue are running between the apparently smooth
surface of the waters.
There are several beautiful people in the lounge, and the most
attractive of all are Russians. There are, at the time, nearly ten
thousand Russian refugees in Athens, and their plight is such that,
thinking of them, it is not too easy to sleep at night. The women by
now have mostly found ‘protectors,’ accepting with a bored smile a
situation which, five years ago, they would have found impossible.
Some have attached themselves to rich merchants of the Levant, others
have wormed their way into the affections of the military, a few have
even achieved the success of an unhappy marriage. And now they are all
sitting in this lounge, smoking cigarettes, and blowing out the smoke
through purple and impassive lips, waiting.
The men are worse off than the women. Look at this one who approaches
me. He was once an officer in the Imperial Guard. To-day he wears a
patched white coat, well tied in at the waist, and blue trousers of a
common Russian soldier. One thin white hand is grasping a stick, and
in the other is a little tray containing his paintings--such pathetic,
amateurish paintings, which he is trying to sell. He stands in front
of me and tries to smile. It is a grotesque caricature of a smile--a
little twitch of the lip. His whole body is trembling as though from a
violent chill. Shell shock, and one lung already destroyed.
I buy one of his little paintings, and try to look as though I were
buying it because I wanted it. He is of the stuff which gentlemen are
made of. If there had been no war, he would have been a smart young
fellow playing gentle havoc with hearts in Petrograd.
He passes on, and is lost in the crowd of cosmopolitan adventurers.
There is a fat man from Paris, who is reputed to be doing a big deal
in raisins, and looks as though he had eaten most of them in a fit
of absent-mindedness. There is a little row of very silly _soignée_
Greek women, eyeing each other’s dresses, and pining for Paris. They
think it chic to talk French, and to affect to despise this backward,
out-of-the-way place that they call Athens. There are several young
officers on leave from the front. They stare moodily in front of them,
for they, at least, have a tale to tell, having been mobilized, some of
them, for seven years, and having seen the army gradually losing its
rifles, its boots, and its morale. There are several prosperous-looking
Germans, gabbling at the tops of their voices. One of them has a row
of enormous volumes on Greek statuary in front of him.
I pay for my tea with a bank-note cut in half--a strange procedure
worthy of explanation. Greece was in the direst financial straits. It
was quite useless to suggest a new loan, for nobody would subscribe to
it. And so an ingenious chancellor suddenly thought of a way by which
the peasants could all be made to disgorge half of their savings. Every
paper note in the kingdom had to be cut in half. The left half must
be immediately given to the bank, where it would be credited to one’s
account, with an interest of 5 per cent. The right half might be used
as currency. Thus, a note worth a pound automatically became worth ten
shillings cash, the other ten shillings being placed in the bank. All
this cutting and snipping of notes had to be done in a fortnight.
I arrived at the palace at six o’clock, and was shown up to Tino’s
study--a pleasant, English-looking room, with plenty of books, and
windows that gave on to one of the prettiest parts of the garden. He
was sitting down on the sofa, reading, and as he rose to greet me he
seemed enormous. He must have been at least six feet six, and six feet
six in a soldier who holds himself well erect is a good deal more than
many of the drooping six foot sixers one sees slouching down Piccadilly.
It was characteristic of him, as I afterwards learnt, that as soon
as we had shaken hands he almost pushed me into a chair, practically
stuffed a cigar between my lips (I loathe cigars) and before I had time
to light it, plunged straight into the heart of the controversy which
was raging round his throne.
‘You realize,’ he said, ‘that you’re talking to a King who’s disowned
by the greater part of Europe, and also by the United States. Don’t
you?’
I did realize it.
‘Very well, then. We are therefore in a position to talk quite frankly.
I’ve certainly nothing to lose by telling you the truth.’ He paused.
‘However shocking it may be,’ he added with a grim smile, ‘I’m under
no sort of illusion as to how they regard me in England. I’ve seen
caricatures of myself in every conceivable attitude in the English
papers--some of them rather funny as a matter of fact, funnier, at any
rate, than the German ones. Perhaps it never struck you that they’d
caricature me in German papers? I assure you they do. You see, Germany
doesn’t like me any more than England. I am altogether a most unpopular
person. Except in Greece.’ Again the grim smile.
‘However, we didn’t come here to talk about caricatures. I just want
to give you a few ideas, that’s all. You can verify them afterwards
at your leisure. The first thing on which I want you to fix your
attention is the beginning of the war. When war was declared I
received a telegram from the Kaiser. He writes admirable telegrams, my
brother-in-law. It suggested that I should at once throw in my lot with
the Central Powers. I was at Tatoy when the telegram arrived, having
a very innocent but a very excellent tea. As soon as I had read it I
remember saying to my wife “Good God! He seems to forget that Greece
is practically an island.” By which, I was referring, you see, to the
consummate foolishness of the Kaiser in thinking that any Greek in his
right mind--whatever his private sentiments--should consider, even for
a moment, declaring war against the rulers of the seas.
‘I then summoned certain ministers, and drafted my reply. If you take
the trouble to look it up you will see that it was an emphatic refusal.
I tried to make it polite, but apparently the Kaiser didn’t think it
was polite enough. In any case, he was particularly rude to my minister
in Berlin, Monsieur Theotokis.
‘Nobody has ever quoted that telegram. They probably never will,
because it doesn’t fit in with the Tino legend. However, it is there,
in all the blue books. Just have a look at it when you get the time.
‘The next thing I want you to consider is my various offers of help to
the Allies. I shan’t particularize because you can find them all in
the official résumés of diplomatic correspondence which every country
publishes. Besides, dates and things of that sort are dull.
‘What was my position at the beginning of the war? What was, rather,
the position of Greece? I will tell you. We were in a pretty bad way.
We had none too much money. We had been exhausted by a long series of
wars. We needed, above all things, rest. However, when the Great War
broke out, there were two courses open to us. We could either remain
neutral or we could join the Allies. The idea of throwing our lot in
with Germany was absolutely out of the question, for, as I have said
before, Greece is to all intents and purposes, an island, and it would
have been suicidal to fight England, even had any of us wanted to do
so.
‘Well, as you will see in the blue books, I offered my assistance. It
was refused. Why? Because, according to Lord Grey, it was important not
to _froisser_ Bulgaria, not to annoy King Ferdinand!’ He brought his
fist down on the table with a bang which quite shattered my cigar ash.
‘I warned Grey,’ he said. ‘I warned your Foreign Office, not once but
half a dozen times, that Bulgaria was arming against you, that she
was not to be trusted, that she was about to throw in her lot with
Germany. I was not heeded. I was either answered with polite shrugs of
diplomatic shoulders, or I was not answered at all.’
He stared in front of him gloomily, and when he resumed it was in a
quieter voice.
‘You know the next stage. The Dardanelles. Now every third-rate
politician and every third-rate staff officer in the countries, not
only of the Allies but of the Central Powers, has very decided opinions
upon the Dardanelles. They say, “If only Tino had done this,” or “If
only Tino had done that,” or “If only the Turks had been a few days
later, or the Allies a few days sooner,” or “If only Winston had had
his way.” In fact they go on saying “if only” until the whole thing
becomes a tragic farce.
‘But I tell you, young man, that I _know_ the Dardanelles. I _know_ the
Black Sea. I _know_ that there are certain ways in which Constantinople
can be attacked, and certain ways in which it can’t. I know a good
deal more about both the military and the naval sides of the question
than even your friend Mr. Winston Churchill, and my staff probably
know more than I do myself. Don’t you see that for generations the
eyes of Greece have been fixed on Constantinople? Don’t you realize
that in the heart of every Greek there lies the dream that one day he
will be able to throw his cap into the air at the news that Greece
has re-entered into the inheritance which every Greek regards as his
natural birthright? Why, there is even a legend that when there sits on
the Greek throne a monarch of the name of Constantine and a Queen of
the name of Sophie, ... Greece will capture Constantinople. A foolish
legend, perhaps you may say. But the conditions of it were fulfilled
when, thirty years ago, I married my wife. And the coincidence has been
working in my people’s imagination ever since.’
He paused, rose from his seat, and went over to the window. And when he
went on talking it was with his eyes fixed on the quiet lawns outside.
‘Now,’ he resumed, ‘I’m not saying that this dream is right or wrong.
I’m merely telling you that the dream is there. And since it is there,
and since the Greeks, though they may be superstitious, are also a
practical people, it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that the Greek
Officers and Staff, not only of the army but of the navy, should have
the whole situation at their finger-ends? Doesn’t it? Tell me. Am I
being logical or am I not?’
I reassured him on that point.
‘Very well then,’ he continued. ‘When I first heard of the Dardanelles
Campaign, I knew that it was doomed to failure. I knew it in my very
bones. I expressed my opinion in public and in private. I was called
a pro-German because I would not join it, because I would not send at
least 10,000 Greek soldiers to help the Allies. Was I right or wrong?
I knew that if I sent 10,000 soldiers that there would be 10,000 widows
in Greece in a few weeks. And I was damned if I would do it.’
And then he said something which made me sit up. ‘_If I had been
pro-German I could have wrecked the whole Allied course in the Near
East as easily as I can flick my fingers._’ And he flicked his fingers
in my face.
‘How?’
He laughed. ‘You’re an inquisitive youth, aren’t you? Well, I’ll
explain.
‘You may remember,’ he said, ‘that in the autumn of 1915 the Allies
were in a very bad way. The armies of Austria and Germany were
sweeping down through the Balkans like a great black cloud. Serbia was
overrun and desolated. The whole of the north was in the grip of the
Central Powers. Bulgaria was closing in on the east. The only refuge
was--Greece.
‘I had already violated my neutrality in favour of the Allies by
allowing General Sarrail, the Allied Commander, to use Salonika as a
base for his troops. A fat lot of thanks I got for it--but that is by
the way. I was therefore in an exceedingly difficult position. If I
allowed the Allies to retreat over my frontier I could hardly, as a
neutral monarch, forbid the Germans from doing the same thing. To do so
would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Germany.
‘Consider the position if you want to prove that I was _not_
pro-German. Here was the Allied Army retreating into Greece, beaten
and exhausted. They were cut off from the north and from the east.
My own army was in their rear, fresh and intact. _If I had wished to
declare War on the Allies could you possibly imagine a more favourable
opportunity?_ I could have wiped out Sarrail without the loss of
more than a thousand men. The whole of the Balkans would have been
completely, irrecoverably German. And the war would not have ended as
it has done.
‘But what did I do? For that I would again refer you, not to the
newspapers, but to the official documents. I sent a telegram to the
Kaiser stating that if one German soldier advanced a yard over the
Greek frontier, I should consider it a hostile act, and should declare
war. In other words, I saved the Allies at one of the most critical
moments of the struggle.’
He stopped abruptly. ‘And that,’ he said, ‘is all I’ve got to say to
you this evening.’
I rose to go, feeling a little bewildered. When I returned to my hotel
I wrote down the whole of the foregoing conversation, word for word,
and I think it is almost verbally accurate.
And that is all I am going to write about the Greek question, for I
have discovered, on bitter experience, that people don’t care a damn
about it, and that the whole question bristles with difficulties.
I only write to ease my own conscience, and to pay a humble little
tribute to two people whom I learnt to regard as friends.
One cannot, however, write about Tino without also writing about
Compton MacKenzie. It may seem a long step from the most hated monarch
of Europe to a man who used to be one of England’s most popular
novelists, but it is not quite so long as you might imagine, for,
according to Greek Royalists, Compton MacKenzie was the evil genius of
Greece during the war.
In early 1915 (I think it was) he was appointed head of the
Anglo-French police in Athens. A curious appointment, one would think,
but those days of chaos abounded in curious appointments, and at least
one could say about Compton MacKenzie that he had a sense of style.
They told me that he fell out of a balloon somewhere in the Near East,
and was on the point of being invalided out of the army when this
appointment suddenly became vacant. He accepted it with alacrity, for
he had very clear ideas on the Greek question. The first of these ideas
was that Tino was violently pro-German and as treacherous as they
make them. The second was that he himself was called, whatever the
sacrifice, to lead a crusade of neo-Hellenism against the Turk, the
Bulgarian, the German, or any other nation that got in the way.
His methods of work, they alleged, were remarkable. He is said to have
taken a little office, and there concocted his wicked schemes, clad in
garments more fitted for the less reputable colleges of Oxford than
for His Majesty’s Service. I was told of purple waistcoats, long black
walking-sticks, heavy cloaks lined with green silk, black stock ties.
It cannot be true, but at least there is something most intriguing in
the picture of this young and rather decorative relic of the nineties
carrying out Balkan intrigues against a background of classic pillars
and traitorous monarchs.
They alleged also (I am scattering that blessed word ‘alleged’
all over the place, as a sort of disinfectant against libel
actions)--they alleged that on several occasions he tried to murder
King Constantine--rather hot work for the head of the British police
stationed in a neutral and officially friendly country. I saw a
newspaper cutting of some Greek paper in which there was a photograph
of one of the King’s bodyguard, together with a long legend that
Compton MacKenzie had bribed him to put poison in the King’s wine. The
story ran something like this. MacKenzie, having found out that bombs
were too dangerous and that daggers made too much mess, decided that he
would employ the more cleanly and efficient aid of arsenic. He obtained
the arsenic and also managed, somehow or other, to get hold of a very
simple and child-like soldier who was in attendance on the King, at a
time when the King’s health was giving rise to grave anxiety.
‘Do you know why the King is so ill?’ he is alleged to have said to the
Evson.
‘No?’
‘Because he is bewitched by the Queen.’
Here the Evson began to take keen interest. He knew all about
witcheries, and such-like.
‘Yes,’ MacKenzie is alleged to have continued. ‘And the only way in
which we can break the spell is for you to put this powder into his
glass when he is at dinner. It is a very wonderful powder--the crushed
essence of a herb that only grows in England. When he has drunk it you
will find that immediately he will be cured.’
After a little persuasion, the story runs, and a rather larger amount
of bribery, the Evson departed with the arsenic, promising faithfully
that he would give it to the King. But as the evening shadows fell
his courage failed him. Supposing that, after all, the herb should not
do its work? Supposing that it did his master actual harm? No. It was
really a little risky. And so he went to a certain Court official and
told him the story. Consternation. Curses against England. Salvation of
King Constantine. Tableau.
A childish story of course. But it was believed by a great many
otherwise sane people. And it only shows you how careful you must be in
the Secret Service.
Another, and even more lurid tale, was told about Mr. Compton
MacKenzie. I never saw any newspaper cuttings on the subject, because I
don’t think it got into the Press. But I _was_ furnished with a great
many strange-looking documents, much thumbed, and decorated at all the
available corners with red sealing-wax. This story was also concerned
with an alleged attempt by the English novelist on King Constantine’s
life--an attempt that, if it had been true, would have been about the
most ingenious piece of inventive work that he had ever done.
In the summer of 1915 (I think that is the right date), the King’s
Palace at Tatoy--some twenty miles outside Athens--was burnt. For miles
round the heath and scrub were devastated by fire. The King was in his
Palace at the time and only escaped by a miracle. And even so, several
of his bodyguard were burned to death.
All this, the Royalists alleged, was the work of Compton MacKenzie.
With devilish ingenuity he was described as having obtained the
services of some half-dozen of the riff-raff of Athens, among whom
was a German prostitute in the pay of the Allies, of having bought a
quantity of petrol and benzine, hired four motor-cars, and set out from
a low café at dawn in order to accomplish his dirty work. The plan was
to surround the Palace with fire from all sides, so that there should
be no possible escape, and with this object some six points had been
marked on a map, in the form of a wide circle, which were to be soaked
with benzine and set alight. The wind would do the rest.
I myself saw a map which was supposed to have been stolen from
Compton MacKenzie’s headquarters, but had, as a matter of fact, been
manufactured by my informant. It showed a number of mysterious crosses,
and subsequent inquiry proved that fires had actually broken out,
almost simultaneously, at all these places, proving beyond a shadow
of doubt that the ‘accident’ was not an accident at all. But why poor
Compton MacKenzie should have been accused of it I could never quite
make out.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
From the Regal to the Ridiculous
Those little Balkan Courts were terribly pathetic. They always gave me
the impression of a rather threadbare musical comedy on tour. There was
so much pomp, such a glitter of uniforms, and so little money. I shall
never forget my first sight of a Royal car. Tino was in it, plumed and
feathered, and were it not for the large crown painted on the back, one
would have said that the car was a dilapidated Ford. So dilapidated
that the tyres were bound up with tape and seemed to be of different
shapes. I watched the car trundle out of sight, and just as it turned
the corner there was a loud bang. The first tyre had burst, and Tino
had to get out and watch his chauffeur struggling in the dust.
If Queen Sophie had sold her pearls, which were amazingly beautiful,
the whole Royal Family would have had plenty for the rest of their
lives. But I suppose she could not do that, since they were Crown
jewels. As things were, the severest economy had to be used to make
both ends meet.
One day I went to tea with her and after tea we walked, as usual, in
the garden. It was looking exquisite that evening, the bougainvillæa, a
mass of purple, dripping from the walls, and all the lemon trees heavy
with golden fruit. By and by we came to a little pond of marble, which
was empty.
‘How lovely this must be when it is filled with water,’ I said.
‘Yes. But I don’t know when we shall be able to fill it.’
‘Is the drought as bad as all that?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I wasn’t referring to the drought. The pond
has to be cleaned before it can be filled. And that means another
gardener. And gardeners cost 15 drachmæ a day.’
Now fifteen drachmæ, at that period, was about half a crown. Can you
imagine a Queen not being able to have a pond cleaned out because she
had not the necessary half a crown?
And yet, during the war, people used to talk ridiculous nonsense about
the Greek Royal Family revelling in gold owing to the marriage of the
American millionairess, Mrs. Leeds, with Prince Christopher, the King’s
youngest brother. Sheer nonsense. She was not allowed to do so. I
believe that she was very generous and sweet in giving presents in the
ordinary run of affairs, but as for financing Tino’s family (let alone
financing Greece, as they said she did)--that was quite out of the
question.
Princess Irene--one of the most attractive girls I have ever seen--once
said to me, ‘Isn’t the price of clothes appalling?’
Mindful of tailor’s bills, I fervently agreed with her.
‘I want to get some new evening frocks,’ she added, ‘but I can’t get
any under twenty pounds.’
If only things had been different, what a paradise the Queen would
have made of Athens, and of the Palace in particular. ‘Before the
war,’ she said, ‘we had all the plans ready. We were going to have a
beautiful new hotel in Constitution Square, we were going to make the
roads good again, we were going to plant thousands of trees all over
the mountains. And I had dozens of English furniture catalogues which
I used to read and read, thinking of all the lovely things we should
have in the Palace. All that is finished--absolutely finished. We must
get along as we can. I can’t even afford to have the English magazines
now....’
And then, ‘Isn’t it perfectly _appalling_ the way we always talk
about money nowadays? I never used to. My mamma would have thought
it terrible. But now it’s, “I can’t afford this, and I can’t afford
that.” And it’s such a dreary topic of conversation. Let’s talk about
something else.’
We both laughed, and talked instead of England.
* * * * *
Endless comedies arose out of the fact that the Royal Family were not
recognized by the Allies, because the members of the British Legation
had to be officially unaware of their very existence. Francis Lindley,
our Minister at Athens, said to me that it was damnably awkward for
him, because sometimes he would meet Tino in the street, or driving in
a motor-car, and they both had to look the other way.
A regular game of hide-and-seek sometimes ensued. I remember once going
with Bridget Lindley and some others from the Legation to play tennis
in the gardens of the British School of Archæology. We had a divine
game of tennis, and when it was over strolled round the garden looking
for flowers. We had just turned a corner when, there, a few yards in
front of us was the Queen of Greece, with a lady-in-waiting. With a
hoot of dismay the young ladies from the Legation turned on their heels
and fled. (It sounds rude, but it was the only thing they could have
done.) I was left alone to greet the Queen.
‘Who were those girls who rushed away like that?’ said the Queen.
‘Oh--they were just some people who have been playing tennis.’
‘Yes. But who _were_ they?’
I had to tell her that they were the Lindleys.
She made a little gurgling noise of laughter. ‘I see. Isn’t it
ridiculous?’ And then ... ‘We might be such good friends. It’s a
pity....’
Occasionally, however, some man from the Legation, in an access of
boldness, _would_ visit the Palace, and a very good time he was given.
But these things had to be worked out with great secrecy, because
naturally, if the Minister knew, he would be forced to take severe
measures against the offenders. There was one young man (I can’t, of
course, give his name) whom we smuggled into the Palace one afternoon,
and the arrangements for getting him there and back were worthy of
an _opéra bouffe_ conspiracy. We had to go in a closed motor and be
hustled up a back staircase into the boudoir of a lady-in-waiting. It
was then arranged that the Queen and some of the Princesses should
cross the garden, come up another staircase, and enter a few minutes
later. We used to make absurd jokes about it, saying that the Queen
might suddenly shoot down the chimney, or that the Englishman should
disguise himself as a piano-tuner, and enter in that manner.
It was at one of these tea-parties that the Queen, becoming serious
for a moment, gave us just a hint of some of the tortures she must
have suffered in exile. ‘When we were exiled from Greece,’ she said,
‘the only place which was open to us was Switzerland. We went there,
and stayed at an hotel. I wanted to be just like the other guests--I
wanted, as they said I was no longer a Queen, _not_ to be a Queen,
just to be an ordinary human being. Staying in the hotel were several
of my old English friends, whom in days gone by I had known quite
intimately. They used to be of my party in the opera; I have danced
at their houses, dined with them. One and all, they cut me dead. I
shouldn’t have minded that--for, after all, there are _ways_ of cutting
people, aren’t there? But they did it in the unkindest way possible,
publicly--not only to myself but to my husband--leaving any room that I
entered, and staring me straight in the face as they went out. Now--it
isn’t like English people to do that, is it? And yet they did. It was
not till I picked up some of the English papers, and learnt what they
were saying about us over there, that I realized the reason for it.’
* * * * *
None of the restrictions which so hampered any members of the Legation
when they wanted to go to the Palace applied to me, because I had
no official position, and nobody seemed to know what I was doing in
Athens. But Athens is a very small place, and very soon some remarkable
legends began to spread about me. Some people said I was in the pay of
the Bolsheviks, others in the pay of Germany, others that I was a young
English millionaire forced to fly my country because of some scandal
connected with a Greek lady, and that I was in Athens to settle it
up. Being very young, I rather enjoyed these legends and had Compton
MacKenzie not apparently forestalled me, should probably have purchased
a wardrobe in keeping with the part I was supposed to be playing,
consisting of a red tie, a pair of check knickerbockers, and a heavy
gold watch-chain. However, I contented myself with a black evening
cloak, lined with pale grey satin, that called forth rude and Bacchic
remarks from the ladies of light virtue who lurked under the lemon
trees of an evening.
I only realized, however, the true thrill of being a political
intriguer one night towards the end of my stay in Athens when I was
walking home, along the deserted sea-front, after a night’s gambling at
a little roulette place near the harbour. It sounds very dissipated,
and I suppose, in some ways, it was. Here is the story:
The Greeks are born gamblers. They would gamble away their final
drachma on the slightest provocation, and frequently do so. Every
other day in the streets of Athens one sees boys going round with
long slender sticks, on which are pinned fluttering tickets of blue
and white--and very pretty they look, rustling in the wind. These are
lottery tickets, and have a tremendous sale. I had often purchased
them, without any result, and finding some sort of gambling essential
to existence, decided to throw in my lot with the roulette players of
the Piræus.
I wish you could have seen that Greek gambling house. It lay in a
rather deserted position facing the sea, along a road that had never
been finished. On a moonlight night you could see from its windows
the white sails of the ships that search for sponges and tunny fish
among the waters of the Archipelago, but on other nights you would see
nothing at all except a solitary lamp-post outside the door.
Inside, one discovered a sordid room, containing one long table, round
which were congregated a remarkable assemblage of persons. There were
Russian ladies of apparent wealth, Italians, swarthy and silent,
excitable Greek merchants, now and then a German, some odd-looking
Americans, and Venizelists and Royalists all jumbled together, drinking
quantities of bad whisky and smoking black cigarettes.
The value of a classical education, in such surroundings, was
immediately apparent. For one thing, the numbers were almost exactly
the same as one learnt at school, and sometimes even the pronunciation
also. For example, ochto was eight and deka was ten. That was a great
help. In addition, ‘mavro,’ for black, sounded like an old friend, and
it was easy to recognize ‘coichinou’ the word cochineal (with which, if
I remember rightly, the Greek ladies used to dye their robes in days
gone by).
Play seemed to me to be very high that night, although, as my later
and more abandoned years have taught me, it was not. Still, a man with
heavy pouched eyelids and a made-up bow had a habit of putting fifty
pounds on a single number, and sometimes winning it, which made my
hundred drachma pieces look very foolish. However, I successfully lost
twenty pounds, and feeling exceedingly irritable left the room.
It was then about two o’clock in the morning. I hadn’t any money to pay
for a taxi, and in any case there were no taxis about. And so I started
on the walk home--about seven miles.
Now, the streets of Athens at night, especially of this part of Athens,
are not as the streets of Piccadilly. For one thing, they are execrably
lit. For another they contain large holes in the middle of the road, in
which it would be quite possible to bury a dead horse. For another they
contain--dogs, lean, snarling, yellow-fanged dogs that rush out from
the darkness, growling and yelping, and taking an unhealthy interest in
one’s heels.
Several such came out during my journey home. I put on a wooden
expression, lifted my feet very high, took quick short steps, and
muttered at intervals ‘pretty doggy, pretty doggy.’ It seemed the only
thing to do. And by and by the pretty doggies departed, though the
sound of their strident voices still echoed in the distance.
I was now on a long, straight road, bounded on either side by pepper
trees and shrubberies of orange and lemon. Suddenly out of the shadows
appeared a figure ... the figure of a youngish man in a badly fitting
black coat. It sounds dramatic and it _was_ dramatic. Worse even than
the dogs.
This person accosted me. Where was I going? (He spoke in French, and
was, I believe, a Frenchman.)
I was going home, thank him very much.
So was he.
Indeed.
It was pleasant, was it not, to have company on such a lonely road?
Delightful. (Pretty doggy, pretty doggy.)
Especially on so warm a night.
Yes.
Ah! but I had not experienced the summer. That was epouvantable.
I looked at him quickly. How did he know that I had not ‘experienced’
the summer?
‘I know you quite well,’ he said. And he calmly gave my name, age,
address, and occupation.
This was all very odd. I walked a little more quickly. Athens was still
some five miles away. I could see the Acropolis gleaming like a distant
rock of refuge. A nasty young man, I thought.
Then he began to talk. He talked like a gramophone running at three
times its normal speed. A high unnatural voice. A superfluity of
gesture. And all about King Constantine. How he had betrayed the
Allies. How he had kept a private submarine. How he was a knave, a
poltroon, a pig, a female dog. How he had a hoard of German gold. And
how....
Here, at a bend in the road, he suddenly stopped, gripped my arm,
looked me straight in the eyes and said:
‘And you--you who call yourself an Englishman--are helping him!’
I regarded him as calmly as the circumstances warranted. And in English
I said:
‘You appear to be a little mad!’
‘Mad?’ He laughed hysterically, and then--(it sounds ridiculous, but it
is perfectly true)--he drew from his pocket a revolver, and though not
exactly levelling it at me, put it quite as close as was agreeable, and
said:
‘This will tell you to speak of madness.’
Which was highly disturbing. The sudden cessation of the gabble of
chatter, the wild look on his face, the revolver. Something had to be
done. I did it. I smiled, drew in my breath, and executed a powerful
high kick. It hit him, by a miracle, on the wrist; the thing went off,
spluttering up the gravel; he dropped it with a howl; I kicked it again
on to the grass, and then I ran.
All very unheroic. But, on the whole, safe. I ran and I ran down that
lonely road, and by the time I had finished running the first streaks
of dawn were in the sky, and I was feeling acute pains in my side,
my legs, my knees, my brain, everywhere. But at least one had the
satisfaction of having outwitted (or outdistanced) a very nasty young
man.
Nothing like that ever happened again. I received anonymous letters,
all threatening things highly unpleasant. But whether they were
from the young man in question I never discovered. And they never
materialized.
* * * * *
My last night in Athens was spent at the Palace. The Queen had asked
me to stay on a little longer in order to trot round with her nephew,
Prince Philip of Hesse. I was very glad that I did so, for not only was
he a most agreeable young man but by staying those few extra days I
also met the Queen of Roumania, who had come hurriedly down to Athens
in order to be with her daughter (the Crown Princess of Greece) who was
seriously ill.
I shall never forget my first sight of the Queen of Roumania. We were
all sitting down in the main salon--Tino, Queen Sophie, Princess
Irene, the Crown Prince and Princess of Roumania, some other members of
the Court, and myself. The door was slightly open, and through it one
could see a long corridor, dimly lighted. I looked down the corridor
and I saw coming towards us a figure in trailing robes of white,
walking slowly, with head erect, like some divine Lady Macbeth. As
she approached, and paused in the doorway, I thought that I had never
seen a woman more lovely. The long white sleeves of silk, the girdle
of silver at her waist, the hint of diamonds in her hair, the ropes of
pearls round her neck. And the face--wide eyes, a forehead that was
one hundred per cent. intelligence, a beautiful drooping mouth ... it
is rather useless to attempt to describe her. A photograph will do her
less injustice than my pen.
Luckily, I was very soon able to have a long talk with her.
Here, clipped of its ‘ma’ams’ and ‘majesties’ is what we talked about:
MYSELF: Is it a fearful bore to be a Queen?
THE QUEEN: It depends what sort of a Queen you are.
MYSELF: But even a Queen like yourself? Don’t you long sometimes to be
able to get away from it all, to be terribly simple, to have all sorts
of adventures which you can’t have now?
THE QUEEN (nodding, a little sadly): There are moods, of course. But
I like being a Queen because I glory in the fact that perhaps I am of
some use.
Here she paused, and said, with a smile: ‘You know, I understand a
great deal more about life than you might believe. If I had been Marie
Antoinette, _I_ should never have asked why the people could not eat
cake. And you must not think that because I am a Queen, my knowledge of
life and “adventure,” as you call it, is only gained from novels. Do
you know one of my chief regrets? It is that I am not in a position to
publish a novel which would deal with life from every aspect.
‘I said “publish,” not write. I could begin to write it to-morrow, if
I wanted, but when it came out, everybody would say, “How can she know
about things like this? How can a woman who sits half her life in her
palace” (the last thing I ever do) “know about the ways, the intrigues,
the marriages, the love-affairs, the sordid squabbles for money, that
are part of our daily lives?” And saying that, they would reject my
book in advance. But I _do_ know,’ (thumping her hand on the table), ‘I
_do_ know....
‘Then,’ I asked her, ‘do you manage to write at all? I mean, do you
find any way of getting rid of what one might call creative emotion?’
‘Oh, yes. I write fairy stories. Nobody can accuse me, in those, of
knowing more than I ought to do.’ She laughed. ‘Perhaps that does not
quite express my meaning, but you understand, don’t you? Fairy love,
fairy honour, fairy intrigue, fairy magic--in those I express all the
emotions which otherwise I should be forced to keep to myself. And
Roumania is full of fairies! Really it is. Full to the brim. When I
first came out there, from England, I hardly understood how deeply my
people were versed in folk-lore, how passionately real the little elves
and spirits were to every peasant on the hills. But I understand now,
and I, too, have caught something of that spirit.
‘Do you know,’ she added suddenly, ‘that I have written a fairy film?
I wish you could see it. It’s rather fascinating. It has a method of
production which I think is rather new. Some parts of it have been
undeveloped, so that you get the impression of a moving _negative_.
That is to say, all the figures have white hair, white eyes, white
clothes, dark hands and faces, and all sorts of queer and very
attractive shadows. If you can imagine those figures made very small
(which is quite possible) and then imagine them dancing in a sort of
half-silhouette over the crest of a hill ... can you?’
She had spoken with such animation, such intense interest, that her
face was quite transfigured.
A very remarkable woman, I thought, as she drifted away to talk to
somebody else. And largely because, of all the Queens in Europe, she
is the only one who really dramatizes her position. She is, in the
best sense of the word, a _poseuse_, by which I mean that she knows
exactly how to present herself to the public imagination. Realizing,
as she does, that in these days the Throne has to borrow a great
deal of thunder of the stage if it is to keep its position, and that
showmanship is half the craft of sovereignty, she acts accordingly. All
her gestures are studied ... sometimes daring, sometimes startlingly
‘unconventional,’ as her recent journalistic confessions have amply
shown.
But they remain the gestures of a Queen.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In which Sir William Orpen and Mrs. Elinor Glyn reveal their Souls
And now, on returning to London, I decided that it was time to
‘become a journalist.’ So many hundreds of otherwise sane young men
have made the same decision, without success, that it really might
be worth while to tell them just one thing about it. They have such
glorious dreams, at Oxford, over a cigarette and a whisky and soda, of
writing palpitating articles for vast prices, that it is only fair to
disillusion them.
The one thing which the embryo journalist must realize is that mere
writing is only one-quarter of his equipment. He may be able to produce
brilliant articles, to star every page with epigrams, to compose
perorations that wring the heart, to evolve leaders that would stir the
Empire, and still not be a successful journalist.
He must certainly begin at the beginning. And to do that he must have a
hide of brass. Brass, I said. No other substance is strong enough. He
_must_ ring up irate Duchesses at midnight and ask them what they think
of bobbed hair. He must do it, at any rate for a few months, for it is
only right for him to know how it feels. He _must_ go to successful
stockbrokers and ask them what they think of the financial situation.
He _must_ visit the Zoo and grovel about in dirty cages to see if the
latest lizard has laid an egg, or if the latest elephant has recovered
from its pain. He must do it, even though it makes him feel ill, even
though he blushes over the telephone, is terrified by elephants, and
feels like hitting the stockbroker fair and square on the chin. One
day he will be telling other people to do these things. He cannot tell
them unless he has done the things himself.
For--and this is the whole point of the matter--three-quarters of
modern journalism consists in making other people say things, not in
saying them yourself. Do not hope, my young friend, that anybody will
pay any attention to _your_ articles. You may get them accepted from
time to time, but unless you are an overpowering genius you will not
make much of a living out of it.
I could write a lot more on the subject but I won’t. Nobody ever wants
advice. It is enough to say that in the August of 1922 I ‘got on’ to a
paper.
The first man I ever ‘interviewed’ was Sir William Orpen. Really, one
could hardly call it an ‘interview,’ for it merely consisted in having
tea with him, eating quantities of very excellent cucumber sandwiches,
and smoking many cigarettes.
After about the tenth sandwich, I said, ‘I have to interview you, and I
haven’t the vaguest idea how to begin.’
‘Have another sandwich.’
‘I shall be sick.’
‘That’s what they’re for. I don’t want to be interviewed.’
‘But you said you would.’
‘Did I? Well, fire away.’ (Pause.) ‘You’re a dud sort of journalist,
aren’t you? Where’s your notebook? And your pencil that ought to leave
indelible ink stains all over your chin?’
All this, to be appreciated, would have to be written musically.
Orpen’s conversation, if one set it to music, would be pitched in the
alto clef, marked ‘prestissimo,’ and accompanied by a sort of Debussy
bass, intermittently striking weird gurgly sounds at the most effective
moment.
It would also have to be played with an Irish accent, if that were
possible. The whole result, at any rate, is very intriguing, especially
as Orpen is practically never serious, except when he is working. And
then he is a devil.
How we ever really got to business I don’t know. I thought ‘if all
interviewing is like this it will be very charming, and exceedingly
fattening, because it apparently necessitates the consumption, on the
part of the interviewer, of endless quantities of cucumber sandwiches.’
However, we did do it, and then he let me look at some of his work.
There was a picture of a woman (one of the most amusing women in
London) on the easel, in a delightful greeny dress.
‘How you must have loved painting that dress,’ I said.
‘Made her put it on.’
‘Can you?’ And then ... ‘What would you do if a woman with red hair
came and sat for you in a purple dress?’
‘Make her take it off.’
‘But supposing she wouldn’t?’
‘Take it off myself. Or else show her the door. Couldn’t paint that
sort of thing. Give me heart attack.’
‘What ought red-haired women to wear, then?’
‘Green, I should think. Depends on the hair. Fair-haired women look
fine in black. Dark women can wear orange. Anything bright. All this
is tripe anyway. Not a dress designer. Could do it, though. Might pay.
Bright idea. Have another sandwich?’
As a matter of fact, it would be rather a bright idea if a particularly
enterprising dress designer were to pay enormous fees to some artist
with a name to come for an hour a day, examine the faces and figures
of the clients, and say, ‘You ought to wear mauve georgette,’ or ‘You
would look wonderful in jade-green something or other.’ Can you imagine
John doing it? Or Orpen? The latter would probably say, ‘Wrap yourself
up in a rug and go home.’
‘Look at this,’ said Orpen. It was the picture of Lord Berkeley which
was hung in that year’s Academy, a brilliant, sparkling piece of work.
‘Nice splosh of colour. Yellow coat. Pink face. Bits of blue. Came off
pat. Not everything comes like that.’
It certainly didn’t. A friend of mine who has just had his picture done
by Orpen said that he painted out the face eleven times before he was
satisfied, and then scratched the whole thing because he didn’t like
the pose.
The next time I saw him--this time unofficially--was just after the
discovery of the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen, when the first photographs of
the lovely things inside were beginning to be published in the English
papers.
He was standing underneath the great window in his studio, stroking his
chin and looking at a full page of illustrations.
‘My word,’ he said, when he saw me, ‘what an age to have lived in! Look
at that.’
He pointed to the photograph of a lotos vase in perfect condition. Even
the reproduction in flat grey colours gave one a thrill which one gets
rarely indeed to-day.
‘Would you rather have lived with Tut-ankh-Amen than now?’ I asked him.
‘What questions you ask. Getting better though. Didn’t do anything but
eat cucumber sandwiches when you first came. Never seen anybody eat so
many cucumber sandwiches. Disgusting. Would I what? Rather have lived
with Tut-ankh-Amen? Sounds improper. Yes, I should. No other age so
stimulating. Lovely lines. _Lovely_ lines. Just look at it. Put your
nose on it. Eat it.’
And he himself devoured the picture with his own eyes.
We talked a lot about ages we should have liked to live in. I stood
up for Venice in the eighteenth century, with Longy’s masks and his
shadowy ladies who eternally hold their fingers to their lips in dim
rooms overlooking some secret canal.
‘M’yes. Longy’s all right. Damn fine costume. Hides ugly legs. Can’t
always live at fancy-dress ball though. Jolly interesting to know if
an age _was_ like what the painters tell us. Middle Ages, now. Wish
Renaissance painters hadn’t chosen so many Church subjects. One Virgin
very like another. Beautiful, of course, but sick of ’em. Think if
they’d painted the life around them. Like Rembrandt.’
He got up and started pacing round the room, the alto clef of his voice
deepening a little....
‘Ever seen Rembrandt’s butcher’s shop? No? See it. Beauty, beauty,
beauty. All out of a lot of meat. No, not out of that. Out of
Rembrandt’s brain. Doesn’t really matter a damn what age you live in if
you’ve got the goods. _There._’ (Tapping his forehead.)
I should think whatever age Orpen had lived in he would have reflected
life pretty brilliantly.
‘Funny thing, you know,’ he added, taking up a tube of ultramarine and
sniffing it slightly, ‘how one’s got to get away from an age quite a
long way before you can judge it purely æsthetically. Look at Sargent’s
picture of that woman, Lady What’s-her name, with the big puffed-out
sleeves. Painted in the ‘nineties. Damned fine painting. Damned
ridiculous dress. You say to yourself, “Lord, what a frump!” In fifty
years you’d just look upon it as a design. Can’t do that yet. Funny.
Earth of the earth, earthy we are.’ (Pause.) ‘Got blue paint on nose.
Why the hell didn’t you tell me?’
I left him sitting down on the hearthrug, underneath a bright
light, gazing at the photograph of the vase which had once been
Tut-ankh-Amen’s. I felt quite romantic. ‘Perhaps,’ I said to myself,
‘one of his incarnations had made that vase, and he is seeing in it
some of the beauty which he had once realized, and forgotten, and lived
again.’ Then I remembered the paint on his nose, and laughed.
* * * * *
There is nothing like variety, and journalism certainly gives you that.
Soon after the Orpen episode I came in contact with Elinor Glyn, whom
one never seems to meet in England except on business.
This lady’s appearance is so exactly like that of her own heroines that
one can hardly believe she has not just stepped from between the covers
of _Three Weeks_. I really have no idea of how I ever was admitted
to the presence, for Elinor Glyn has a very good knowledge of the
commercial value of her utterances, and is usually so hedged round with
Press agents, publishers and literary agents, all waiting to see that
her emotions are duly registered, collected, and sold, that there is
little chance of gathering anything for nothing. I do not blame Elinor
for it. If I had her reputation, I would not express an opinion even on
the English climate without demanding a fee, payable in advance.
However, I found myself, one dreary afternoon, in her flat overlooking
the Chelsea Embankment. This flat, with two exceptions, contained
nothing of the atmosphere which she herself carries with her.
One felt quite sweet and simple in it. A few books, a few rather dull
pictures, and an exceedingly upright piano. The two exceptions were,
firstly a tiger skin, draped ‘negligently’ over the sofa, and secondly
a pile of cushions, purple and mauve and black. When I saw these, I
thrilled. I felt sure that when the authoress entered the room she
would leap on to the cushions and begin to talk about life in a hoarse,
strangled voice. She entered the room, but she made no sort of attempt
to lie on the cushions. On the contrary, she sat straight and still,
looked me full in the face, and said, ‘Who arranged this?’
I told her that I had not the faintest idea.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I never give interviews. Still, I suppose
it’s all right.’
Silence. How deadly a silence can be. Then suddenly, with a charming
smile:
‘The most terrible people come to see me sometimes. People who ask
abominable questions, and look at me as though I were in a cage. You
don’t appear to do that.’
This interview was turning out to be completely different from
anything that I had anticipated. I had come prepared to listen to
views on the modern girl, and instead I was treated to a searching
cross-examination. Where was my father? Where did I live? I found
myself lured by the fascination of those green eyes and orange hair.
Suddenly she turned to me and said:
‘Do you believe in re-incarnation?’
I gave an evasive answer.
‘You should do. You, æons ago, were a horse.’
She may not have used these precise words, but she definitely stated
that if my family were traced back sufficiently far, it would
eventually prove to be equine in origin.
‘And I,’ she added, ‘come from some cat tribe. Don’t laugh.’
She smiled herself, but I think she was serious, for she added: ‘The
English people completely misunderstand me. They only know things like
_Three Weeks_ and _The Visits of Elizabeth_. They think of me only
as a foolish, sentimental, rather sensual woman. They’re blind to
the philosophy in me. However--who cares? And anyway, we must get to
business. Now what do you want to talk about?’
I gave her a cue--something on the lines of the eternal modern girl,
and as soon as she heard that phrase her nostrils quivered, her eyes
glared like lamps, her backbone seemed to stiffen like that of a cat on
the offensive. And she looked extraordinarily beautiful.
‘Women to-day,’ she said, ‘are revolting men’s senses. Look at me. Do
_I_ slouch into the room, with a guilty look, as though I had not been
to bed all night? Do _I_ take out a lip stick and slash it over my
mouth without caring where it goes? Do _I_ daub powder all over my nose
until it looks a totally different colour from the rest of my face?’
I answered her that, in our brief but entrancing acquaintance, she had
done none of these things.
‘Look at my hands.’ With a gesture of scorn she held out five very
white and exquisite fingers. ‘Are _my_ hands yellow and horrible
through incessantly smoking bad cigarettes?’ She leant forward and
showed her teeth, looking like some furious goddess. ‘Are _my_ teeth
stained, for the same reason? I ask you? No, they are not.’
She relaxed, but she still looked very grim. ‘I can’t bear it,’ she
said, ‘this abominable slackness. If I saw my daughters slouching
through life like that, I should shoot either myself or them. It is
worse in England than anywhere else.’
And then she began to talk about America. ‘Perfect dentistry, perfect
knowledge of hygiene, and a universal common sense had made the
American girl the most wonderful type in the world to-day.’ I could see
that she adored America....
She said dozens of other things, but I forget them. And one cannot
really write about Elinor Glyn, so that I shall stop here and now,
leaving this thumbnail sketch as it stands.
I liked her enormously. If there was ever any occasion on which I found
myself forced to use that nauseating word ‘queenly,’ it would be now.
She _is_ ‘queenly.’ She ought to have been born on some dark evening
when Balkan thrones were tottering like scenes on the back-cloths of
our less draughty London theatres. She ought to have been hustled over
the waters of the Ishky-Repoka by faithful nurses, while grizzled prime
ministers faced bloody men who demanded a new régime. She ought to
have grown up among surroundings of crêpe and asphodels. And then, one
day, she ought to have returned in a golden chariot, driven towards
a beflagged palace, walked slowly down immense corridors, stood on a
throne and started a world-war in a girlish caprice.
It seems a great pity that such a fiery personality should have caused
only ink, and not blood, to flow.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Concerning Two Artists in a Different Sphere
I have always been puzzled by the universal tendency of democratic
communities to attach the most revolting vices to those whom they
have chosen to govern them. It is considered a matter of course
that the King’s Speech should be composed by men in the last stages
of delirium tremens. And the majority of Cabinet Ministers are, of
course, devotees of such diversions as unnatural vice, unless their
fingers are perpetually itching to get at a hypodermic syringe. As an
entertainment, one can spend many elevating hours by fixing particular
vices to particular ministers, saying, for instance, that President
Wilson used to beat his wife, or that Clemenceau had a morning bath
of cocaine (which would still not account for his extraordinary
vitality). But when one remembers that these libels are uttered with
equal assurance by members of every party in the State, the consequent
reflection on representative government is not a pleasing one.
Artists are a little luckier than politicians. It is taken for granted,
by the great public, that they _must_ be immoral, being artists, and
their immoralities are not therefore discussed with the same relish.
Instead, it is merely asserted that they are mad, a statement which
does no harm to anybody.
I wish I could meet these mad artists. Time and again I have been
disappointed, and found, instead of straws in the hair, brilliantine,
and instead of a foaming mouth, lips pursed in eminently sane and
complacent judgment on mankind.
Even when there is some apparent foundation for the stories, they are
always grossly exaggerated. Pachmann, for example. The most astounding
tales are constantly narrated about this great little man, how he
crawls under the piano in a gibbering search for Chopin, how he is
taken from a padded cell and led to the piano by a keeper. Nonsense--or
so I judged when, not long before leaving London, I had the pleasure of
meeting him.
I had not seen Pachmann since, as a small and evil child, I had
once untied his bootlaces under my aunt’s piano, on which he used
often to perform. His behaviour on that occasion might possibly have
strengthened the mad legend, but on our second meeting, though one
realized his behaviour was a little odd, nobody but a fool would have
thought him mad. Nobody but a fool, indeed, would have failed to be
absolutely charmed by his dainty little mannerisms. He danced round the
room like some grey-haired Puck, waving his long white fingers on which
glittered two beautiful diamond rings. He was always talking nineteen
to the dozen, and never finished a sentence. Words seemed too clumsy
for him and he would flick his fingers to convey the sense he wanted.
How we laughed and talked! He turned everything to music, even his
wine. He held up a glass of champagne to the light, pointing at it and
saying--‘Bubbles! Golden, sparkling bubbles! I show you.’ And before
one could rise to stop him, he had rushed into the darkness of the next
room, seated himself at the piano, and played, with magical perfection,
a shimmering treble passage from Chopin’s Third Scherzo. After which
the champagne tasted quite flat.
He told me, after dinner, about one of his early love-affairs, in
Poland.
‘It was at --’ (some unpronounceable place) he said. ‘There was, in the
same house as myself, a plump and lovely maiden, oh, so beautiful! I
fell in love with her a great deal, and one day I arrange a rendezvous.
But I forget all about the rendezvous, because I discover a cupboard in
which the lady of the house keeps a beautiful collection of jams--I eat
the jams and I forget my Louisa. Soon Louisa, she comes into the room
and says--“For why have you jilted me? Do you not love me any more?” I
take out a plum, and I eat it, and I look at her, and I say, “I love
you, Louisa. But I love the jams still better.”’
We went into the room which contained his piano, and after a lot more
prancing about he suddenly turned to me and said:
‘Do you know why I like you?’
I certainly had no idea.
‘Because,’ said Pachmann, ‘you do not ask me to play the piano.’
It would never have occurred to me to do so. But one has to observe
that the criminal habit of asking artists out to dine and then
expecting them to pay for half-cold entrées by playing or singing, is
still quite common, even among otherwise civilized hostesses. Dame
Nellie Melba told me that when she first went to New York it was almost
unknown for any mere singer to be asked out to dine in any other than
a professional capacity. She, of course, had already become almost a
royal personage in London, but in New York she was regarded merely as
a ‘singing actress.’ And when, one night, she went to dine with one
of the Four Hundred (whatever that absurd phrase means) all the guests
whispered: ‘What’s she going to sing?’
‘She isn’t going to sing anything at all,’ said her host.
‘Not going to sing?’
They simply could not understand that a _prima donna_ could have any
place in society other than that of a _prima donna_.
All of which is a digression from Pachmann. As soon as he had made the
remark about not being asked to play, he sat down at the piano and said:
‘As a reward I shall play you some Chopin. And I shall play it in two
ways. First my old method. Secondly my new.’
He played one of the Chopin Études--not one of the best, but still a
very lovely thing. ‘That,’ he said, when he had finished, ‘is the old
way. Now listen to the new.’
He played it again. I confess that I did not notice much difference.
Both were exquisitely played, both had the Pachmann magic, which no
other Chopin player has ever been able to find. But that there actually
was an astounding difference of technique was demonstrated when, in
detail, he played over the first dozen bars. The fingering had been
entirely changed, not only in the right hand but in the left.
‘That,’ he cried triumphantly, ‘is the greatest effort of my life.
Nobody but Pachmann could have done that.’
He certainly spoke the truth, for nobody but Pachmann could, at his
advanced age, have sat down and unlearnt all they had previously
learnt, and undertaken the colossal labour of refingering the works of
Chopin. It is always more difficult to revise than to attack a thing
for the first time, and after sixty, most men would have shuddered at
the very thought of it.
Dear Pachmann! I don’t think he was very happy in London, although
he adored English audiences. London fogs and London smoke stifled
him. ‘I look out of the window in the morning,’ he said, as I bade
him good-bye, ‘and I weep. And the sky weeps too. And we both weep
together. And then, I go and play Chopin, and I weep no more, and the
sun shines.’
* * * * *
What dragons they do give the young men of Fleet Street to slay! I
heard of one rather timid and bespectacled youth (not in Carmelite
House) who had had literary leanings at Cambridge and decided that he
would be a writer. He got a job as a reporter on one of the big papers,
and the first thing they sent him to do was to ask as many members of
the House of Lords as possible what they thought of kissing under the
mistletoe. Sick at heart, he departed on his ignoble task, and after
sitting for nearly two hours in the corridor that leads to the House of
Lords, he summoned up the courage to approach a gentleman who looked
harmless enough but who turned out to be the Marquess of Salisbury. He
did not get the answer he expected, but the answer he did get sent him
rushing down the corridor, terrified, into the open street.
But one does have to ask such very peculiar questions. I once, right at
the beginning, was told to go and ask Carpentier if he found it a bore
to be so good-looking. A very delicate subject, because it meant asking
the complementary question, Would he have liked to be ugly? And one was
hearing a great deal, at that time, of Carpentier’s straight left.
Fortunately I knew one of Carpentier’s best friends, so I routed him
out, and he very kindly gave me a letter, in which he first asked
‘Georges’ to lunch, and then, as a pendant, told him what the bearer of
the note desired.
Carpentier was acting in some film or other, and I had to go out to
North London to catch him at the studio. After waiting for nearly half
an hour in a superbly gilt room, I was led through various passages
into the main studio, which rather resembled a huge barn, with a pond
in the centre, from which Carpentier had just rescued some maiden who
was dripping by the fire. He himself was sitting, an agreeable-looking
giant, on the edge of the pond, clad in one of those dressing-gowns
which tempt young men in the Burlington Arcade, of purple silk shot
with yellow flowers. All round about were supers, and men with lamps,
and men with megaphones, and everybody seemed in a very bad temper.
Carpentier beckoned me to sit by his side.
As soon as I did so, and presented my note, I was acutely conscious
that I was about to ask the heavyweight champion of Europe a very
delicate question, and that I was sitting on the edge of a cold and
damp pond, into which a comparatively gentle push would easily have
precipitated me. The pond looked so exceedingly wet that I was on the
point of changing the interview altogether, and asking him some dull
question about his views on boxing when he turned and, speaking in
French, asked me what I wanted.
I told him. Very badly, too.
‘Comment?’
Edging slightly away, I repeated the question. ‘Did he think good looks
were a blessing?’
‘Comprends pas,’ said Carpentier.
This was terrible. In a very loud voice I said, ‘Would he rather have
been born “vilain”?’
Now ‘vilain’ was quite the wrong word to use, because it applies more
to the character than to the face. I knew that perfectly well, and as
soon as I had said it, realized my mistake. Now, I thought, for the
pond! Let’s get it over.
‘Vilain?’ said Carpentier. And then he laughed. Laughed loud and long.
So did I. And when he had finished, I at last managed to convey to him
exactly what I really did want.
He was extraordinarily amusing. He told me that he was bored silly by
the number of females who fell in love with him. As soon as he arrived
in England, showers of letters, literally hundreds by each mail,
descended on him, some with photographs, some without, some written
in terms of passionate adoration, some phrased more discreetly. They
did not stop at letters, they spoke to him in the street, they lined
up outside the studio. ‘Dames de société,’ he said, had implored Mr.
Stuart Blackton, the producer, that they should be allowed even the
smallest walking-on part in the film in order that they might be near
their god. All of which, he said, with a charming little shrug of the
shoulders, was most tiresome.
‘You see,’ he said, ‘I am married. I have my wife and I have my little
daughter. Such things do not amuse me as perhaps--once--’ and he smiled
in a manner which Noel Coward would describe as winsome.
‘But ugly? Oh no. I do not wish to be ugly.’
He drew in a deep breath, and stretched out his arms--so that the
dressing-gown slipped down, revealing the figure which had been the
cause of all the trouble. A very beautiful creature, I thought. Bodily,
not facially. His face is really, when you see it close to, rather
coarse. A very thick nose, caused, I suppose, by a bash on it, and a
not very imposing forehead. (You see, I am a long way from the pond at
the time of writing.) The time he looks best is when he smiles--and
that is very often.
I think that Carpentier was quite flattered by his social success,
in fact I am sure he was, for he mentioned, rather ingenuously, some
places where he had been to parties. It would be interesting to know
who was responsible for this, but after all, it was only natural, for
everybody wanted him. But he was not always easy to get. For instance,
a certain good lady who lives in Arlington Street was giving a party,
and was threatened with high blood pressure because she could not get
Carpentier. There arrived on the scene an old friend (older than he
would like to be thought), who said that he would arrange it. I cannot
tell you his name, but he is the original of Mr. Cherrey-Marvel in
Michael Arlen’s _The Green Hat_. He rushed round London, first to the
studio, then to an hotel, then to another hotel, and finally routed out
Carpentier just as he was on the point of going to bed. Carpentier
said he would not come, because he did not want to dress. ‘Don’t dress
then,’ said Cherrey-Marvel, ‘but come.’
‘Would it be _comme il faut_ to come, without even putting on a
smoking?’
‘Anything would be _comme il faut_ that you did,’ said Cherrey-Marvel.
And so he went to the party in a lounge suit, and was an enormous
success. ‘He gives one such a thrill, doesn’t he, my dear?’ they all
said. I expect he would have given them an even greater thrill if he
had come in his little blue shorts.
A very charming, unspoilt, simple creature--that was my impression of
Carpentier on my first talk with him, and I have not had occasion to
alter it since.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Hanged by the Neck
In February, 1923, I attended the famous trial of Edith Thompson and
Fred Bywaters, which created a sensation in England keener than any
which had been felt since the Crippen case.
The first part I had to play in it was to go out, one wet, dreary
evening, to North London, to try to persuade Grayson, the father of the
murderess on trial, to give me the story of her life. All the other
newspapers were on the same job, and it was with a feeling of dismay
and depression that I walked down the long sad crescent that led to the
Graysons’ house, pushed open the rusty little gate, and rang the bell.
The door opened, and the pale face of a little oldish man appeared. He
was crying.
‘Mr. Nichols?’ he said in a voice that was half a whisper.
I nodded.
With a weary gesture he motioned me in. I found myself in a little
parlour, neatly kept. It was lit by incandescent gas, which bubbled and
fizzled, and cast green shadows in the corners. A little china sparkled
on the mantelpiece. There was no fire and the room was very cold.
We sat down. It was all like a nightmare. I could say nothing. He
could say nothing. And then his son appeared in the doorway--pale and
distracted. Somehow the presence of a third person made it easier, and,
rousing myself, I tried to put, as gently as I could, the nature of my
request.
He shook his head. It was impossible. All the papers had been there.
They had not had a minute’s peace. They could tell them nothing. I
passed that over, talking, talking--anything to prevent him again
giving way to his grief. And, by and by, he seemed to cheer up a little.
Then, suddenly, without any warning, he threw out his hands, and cried
in a broken voice ... ‘To think that this should happen to _us_!’
It was the universal cry of humanity. Why should it happen to _us_?
There were five hundred little houses, all exactly alike, in this
desolate crescent. There were five thousand equally desolate crescents
in London. Why had God picked out _this_ one little house out of so
many?
The scene passes to the Old Bailey, on which the eyes of all England at
this time were centred.
The first sight one has of the Principal Court of Justice at the Old
Bailey is not awe-inspiring. It is, of course, a completely modern
building, with an air about it which makes it look as though it were
designed for a cheerful lecture room at Cambridge. The light wood
and plaster, the glass roof, the sunlight that floods the whole
place--nothing here to promote any morbid speculation.
But as the court fills, as one by one the barristers take their places
at the long tables, as the back benches are occupied by the usual array
of stupid women hung with false pearls, as the Judge and jury file
into place, and as, finally, the prisoner is led into the dock, then
all this cheerfulness, this matter-of-fact atmosphere, this clean,
modern feeling, becomes far more horrible than if the trial were
conducted in a vault by black inquisitors under candlelight. For in
this place, tragedy is made ridiculous. The mask of pain is moulded
into a grotesque. It is almost as though an operation for life or death
were taking place before one’s eyes, without any anæsthetic. Rather be
tried before a howling mob, and bundled straight off in a tumbril to
the guillotine, than be brought up to this clean, wholesome room, like
a young man undergoing a _viva voce_, in which failure means hanging by
the neck.
The court was already packed to suffocation, and I sat down. Five
minutes to ten. In a few moments the curtain would rise on the biggest
tragedy of 1922. And yet, what was the mood of the audience? Pleasant,
amused expectation apparently. From behind me came a whiff of cheap
scent and the light chatter of many tongues. Looking up into the
gallery one could see the fatuous faces of young girls, wearing the
sort of expression you see before the lights go down at a cinema. One
of them had a box of chocolates laid on the ledge in front of her,
and from time to time she pushed it towards a young man by her side.
Standing in the group by the door was a very bad and very popular
actor, bowing ceremoniously to the scented ladies. The only people who
looked at all serious were the police, and one felt that they were
serious only because they had duties to perform.
Ten o’clock. The curtain rises. I shut my eyes. There is a mumble of
voices, a shuffling of feet, a rustle of papers. Silence. I open my
eyes again to find that the ‘female prisoner’ is already in the dock,
and that the play has begun.
Look at her, this ‘female prisoner.’ Look at her, this Edith Thompson,
_née_ Grayson, who has spent twenty-eight passionate, unhappy years on
this earth, and is now being sent to eternal darkness. (I am drifting
irresistibly into the style of Carlyle, but I can’t help it.) A lovely
creature, one would say. A neck like the stem of a flower, and a face
equally flower-like. So very white, with the pallor of old lilies
carved in ivory. So very tired, as though no longer could that one head
support the burden of so much pain.
Oh yes. I know that she is a murderess. I know that she is an
adulteress. That foully, and with felonious intent, she did, on divers
occasions attempt to do to death an honest and an upright man. I know
all that, and a good deal more besides. But I also know that my heart
is wrung with pity.
A man with a red face is cross-examining her. He leans forward,
and reads from a letter in his hand. It is one of those amazing
love-letters which this strange creature had sent from her dingy suburb
to her boy lover.
_Your love to me Is new, it is something different, it is my life, and
if things should go badly with us, I shall always have this past year
to look back upon and feel that ‘then I lived.’ I never did before and
never shall again._
_Darlingest lover, what happened last night? I don’t know myself,
I only know how I felt--no, not really how I felt, but how I could
feel--if time and place or circumstances were different._
_It seems like a great welling up of love, of feeling, of inertia,
just as if I am wax in your hands to do with as you will, and I feel
that if you do as you wish I shall be happy. I can’t really describe
it--but you will understand, darlint, won’t you? You said you knew
it would be like this one day--if it hadn’t would you have been
disappointed?_
And again, when he was far away:
_I’ve nothing to talk about, darlint, not a tiny little thing.
Life--the life I and we lead is gradually drawing near. Soon, I’ll
be like the Sahara--just a desert ‘Shulamite.’ You must read that
book--it’s interesting, absorbing. Aren’t books a consolation and a
solace? We ourselves die and live in the books we read while we are
reading them, and when we have finished, the books die and we live or
exist. Just drag on thro’ years and years until when? Who knows? I’m
beginning to think no one does--not even you and I. We are not the
shapers of our destiny. I will always love you, darlint._
I found myself longing for their escape, planning for it, wondering if
by some miracle it could not be brought about. The main well of the
court is surmounted by a glass roof. If only, I thought, some friend
could land on that roof in an aeroplane, shatter the glass with a
single blow, throw down a rope to the two tortured creatures in the
dock, and pull them up, up, out of this hell into the clean air above.
If only there would be an earthquake to rend the walls, so that this
gloating crowd would rush away affrighted, and leave the lovers to
themselves. If only there would be an utter darkness, to cover all
this shame, and set us free. Bad reasoning of course, on my part. Bad
sociology. Bad law. Justice has to be done, and all that sort of
thing. But I defy any sensitive person to sit through a long trial
of this description, to see a beautiful woman and a strong young man
slowly done to death, without siding, heart and soul, with the accused.
During the whole of that tragic trial, through gloom to deepening
gloom, I was in constant touch with the Grayson family. As I saw more
of them, I marvelled that so utterly commonplace and kindly a group
of individuals should have, as one of their members, the complex,
passionate character of Edith Thompson. The mother I hardly recollect,
save as a little, broken woman in black, whose hand was always to
her eyes and who walked with uncertain steps, as though stumbling in
darkness. But there was a sister whom I often saw. She seemed to have
more control over herself than any other member of the family. She was
cool, almost dominating, in the witness-box, and in her own home she
was the one who assumed the chief burden of work and responsibility. A
brother, too, I remember, with a face drained of all colour and eyes
red with secret weeping. As for Grayson himself, he was just stunned.
There is no other word which adequately describes his slow, mumbling
speech, his downcast eyes, his dumb look of pain.
At three o’clock on Saturday afternoon during the trial, I used to meet
Grayson as he came out of Holloway Prison. Do you know Holloway Prison?
It is of all places the most dreary and forlorn. It lies at the end of
the long and dismal Caledonian Road in North London. It has no colour
save the faded advertisement hoardings which peel from the dirty
walls, no animation but for the noisy trams that rattle down the end of
the street, and the cries of pale children playing in the gutter.
The prison itself is built of grey stone, like a fortress. It has
narrow windows and high walls. Over the whole pile broods an air of
monstrous cruelty and strength, from the rusted spikes that guard the
outer wall’s summits to the heavy gates that shut out its inmates
from the world. I would stand watching these gates for five minutes,
ten minutes, half an hour, and then they would swing slowly open and
through them would emerge the little sombre procession, Grayson, the
brother--sometimes the sister and the mother as well.
Silently I would join them and walk with them down the road, while
the trams rattled by, and the newsboys shouted out the latest
details of the case, and lovers jostled us, arm-in-arm. And then the
cross-examination would begin.
‘How was she?’
‘She was better. Brighter.’
‘Were you allowed to go into her room?’
‘No. They put a table across the door. We spoke to her over that. We
stood in the corridor. There was a warder by her side.’
‘What was she wearing?’
‘A dressing-gown. You see, she’s been in bed. Ill. Very ill. Exhausted,
they say. Still, she was better, and she has been reading.’
‘What books has she been reading?’
‘Dickens, she told us. She said that she wanted life and comedy, and
Dickens gave her that. Full-blooded life--that was the word she used.’
‘Did she say anything about--him?’
‘Him?’
‘Yes. Bywaters?’
‘No. His name never crossed her lips. She asked about her appeal, and
she seemed quite hopeful about it. And then--she began to remember
things.’
‘Remember things?’
‘Yes. Last Christmas for example. She said, “Do you remember the party
we had last Christmas? And all the presents I had? And the crackers?
And the Christmas tree?”’
And then I would shake them by the hand, and wish them good cheer,
and say that I was sure the appeal would turn out right--anything to
take away that look of tragedy from their eyes. They would brighten,
perhaps, for a moment, and then the mask would fall over their faces
again, as they turned away, and went down the windy street.
The most horrible meeting of all, as far as I was concerned, was on
the day after she had been hanged. I was in the office, writing some
ridiculous account of an agricultural exhibition, when word was brought
that Grayson wished to see me.
It was the most difficult thing I have ever had to do. I found him
sitting in the waiting-room, under a glaring electric light. Standing
by his side, with one hand on his shoulder, was the son. We looked at
each other in silence. What was there to say? What language was ever
invented which could possibly be fitted to an occasion so forlorn?
Eventually we did speak--or rather, I spoke. ‘Bit knocked up,’ was all
he could say. ‘Bit knocked up.’ Over and over again, like a child
repeating a lesson it had learnt and did not understand. I told him
that they must all go away to the country, to the sea, anywhere, as
long as they were away from prying eyes, from the memory of the dead.
He went out. ‘Bit knocked up,’ he said again, and that was the last I
heard of him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Two Plain and One Coloured
Quite the most amusing person I met at about this time was H. L.
Mencken, whose books _Prejudices_ so perfectly describe the particular
standpoint in art which he has adopted. We met, as far as I remember,
at some party or other at the Café Royal, but as it was impossible
to talk in that establishment, under the distracting influence of
Epsteins, Augustus Johns, Laverys and successive glasses of absinthe,
we arranged to meet the next morning at his hotel. ‘And then I’ll give
you something that’ll wake you up.’
He did. And it did. When I called on him he was tramping backwards and
forwards in his rooms, making a strange spluttering noise with his lips
that suggested a large and angry bird stalking round its cage. After
refusing the inevitable double whisky which Americans apparently seem
to consider an hourly necessity for Englishmen, I asked him what was
the matter.
‘Matter?’ Again the spluttering noise, this time a little louder. ‘I’ve
just been looking at London. What the devil are you doing to it? Do you
want to make it another New York? A filthy sky-scraper in the Strand,
half the most exquisite buildings being scrapped and thrown on to the
muck heap, and obscene advertising signs that are as bad as anything
we’ve got on Broadway.’
Splutter, splutter, splutter.
I thought it would be a good idea to ask him what he would do if he
were suddenly given despotic powers over the reconstruction of London.
‘The first thing I’d do,’ he said, lighting a cigar with a sort of
aggressive courage that reminded one of firing a torpedo, ‘would be to
hang every mother’s son of an architect who was polluting one of the
world’s best cities. And when they were dangling high and dry, I’d go
out with a packet of dynamite, blow up all the monstrosities in Regent
Street, get hold of Nash’s old plans, and slave-drive a few thousand
British navvies until we’d got the thing back as it used to be--superb
crescent, full of grace and beauty.’
Splutter, splutter, splutter.
He resumed his perambulation round the room. ‘Then I’d invent a whole
lot of brand-new tortures for any hulking Philistine of a manufacturer
who started writing his blasted name on God’s sky at night. Piccadilly
Circus nowadays is an eyesore. It’s bad enough in Broadway. But you can
at least say there that the vast scale on which the signs are put up,
the enormous size of the whole thing, does at least leave a certain
feeling of awe on one’s mind. Disgust too, but at least, _big_. Whereas
in Piccadilly you’ve got a lot of footling little electric squares and
circles, a yellow baby spitting fire, an undersized motor squiggling
its wheels, a God-forsaken bottle pouring red liquid into a glass so
damned small that it wouldn’t make me tight if I drank out of it all
night. Take ’em away!’ (Splutter, splutter.) ‘Take ’em away! You’re
killing London!’
I think I have got in most of his adjectives. His conversation was also
scattered with a good many examples of that word which Bernard Shaw
employed with such effect in _Pygmalion_. These I have omitted.
He went on for some time in this strain, until I felt it time to point
out to him that at least we were putting up a few new buildings that
were quite worthy to stand by the old ones.
‘Show ’em to me!’ (Splutter, splutter.) ‘Take me along to see ’em. I’ll
stand you drinks for a month if what you say is true.’
‘Well, there’s the new L.C.C. building on the other side of the Thames.
Knott’s the architect. One of the biggest buildings of its kind in the
world, and one of the most beautiful.’
He looked at me despairingly. ‘Oh, you ought to have been an American
if you say a monstrosity like that’s beautiful. I looked at it
yesterday, and I spat in the Thames to show my contempt of it.’
‘But the line of it is perfect--the proportions are admirable....’
‘Perfect rot. For one thing, what on earth induced the fool who built
it to stick a hulking great red roof on top of it? All down that side
of the Thames is grey. Grey old buildings, peering out of the mist,
like veiled faces, tumble-down old ruins, wharfs, docks, bridges, grey,
all grey. And then this fool comes along and sticks up a blasted Noah’s
Ark, covered with pillars and crowned with this futile roof. What’s the
good of that?’
I told him that if he were a real Londoner, he might not be so angry at
the sight of an occasional touch of colour. He might not be so keen on
his universal touch of grey if he had to live in it for ever. He might,
if he had to cross the Thames day by day, year by year, come to welcome
that red roof, sparkling across the grey water, and bringing even into
the dullest days a glow of cheerfulness, as of reflected sunshine.
But he would have none of it. The roof should have been grey, and that
was an end to the matter. I understood then why he had written three
books called _Prejudices_.
None the less, a charming man, who is more American than he would care
to think, for all his constant nagging at his own country. I said
something vaguely derogatory of a certain section of American opinion,
and he was down on me like a shot. I liked him best at that moment.
* * * * *
One of the most tiresome things I ever had to do was--Rudolf Valentino.
It was only after hours of ringing up and fixing appointments, over
which more trouble was spent than if he had been an Arch-Duchess, that
I eventually was told I could see him one morning at ten o’clock at the
Carlton Hotel. The Carlton Hotel, in fact any hotel, is sufficiently
depressing at ten o’clock in the morning, and when I discovered that
Valentino, instead of giving a private appointment, was standing in the
centre of a circle of admiring females, telling them, I should imagine,
a lot of nonsense, I felt like going straight away and leaving him to
his own devices.
However, after a time, I got him into a corner, and by carrying on
the conversation in atrocious French, kept the subject of most our
remarks a secret from 50 per cent of the said females. Unfortunately
there proved to be nothing to keep secret. ‘Did he get many letters?’
‘Yes, he got three thousand a week.’ ‘Were there many letters from
adorers?’ ‘They all adored him.’ ‘What sort of letters?’ ‘He never read
them.’ And so on. He could say nothing as to whether he was elated by
his success, he had no sort of theories, not even bad ones, on the
film as a medium of art, and he was without a spark of humour in his
composition. This is the most adored man throughout two continents.
The only subjects in which he seemed to be at all interested were,
firstly, his own photographs, and secondly, clothes. Of photographs
there were literally hundreds, lying scattered all over the room. He
pointed to a pile and said, ‘These go off by the next mail.’ Surely he
saw some romance in that? I tried to get him to understand the thrill
that most people would have at the thought of their own faces smiling
down from ten thousand London mantelpieces and bringing, presumably, a
disturbing ecstasy into the hearts of ten thousand maidens. He merely
looked blankly at me and said he supposed it was good publicity.
But when it came to discussing the photographs themselves it was a very
different matter. Did I like this one looking down, or did I prefer the
one looking up? Would the chin be a little better if it were switched
round more to the right, and did I not think that the eyes had come out
beautifully in that one? Yes, I said, the chin _was_ nicely switched,
and the eyes _had_ come out beautifully. Upon which he brightened
considerably, and offered me a photograph for myself, which I declined.
The only thing we had in common appeared to be a tailor. He asked me
if I had heard of any good tailors (not if I _went_ to a good one, a
rather intriguing difference) and I told him that I always went to a
certain place, which made clothes that appeared to fit, and also gave
one as much credit as anybody could reasonably desire. ‘Why, that’s
where I’m going myself,’ he said. ‘How extraordinary.’
He certainly did know a great deal about clothes, as I discovered later
when a man from the firm in question called on me one morning with some
new and demoralizing stuffs from Paris. He had just finished cutting
three new double-breasted grey flannel suits for Valentino, and had
evidently met a kindred spirit.
I should imagine that half Valentino’s success (once one has
acknowledged the purely sensual attraction of his face and his shapely
limbs) came from his wife. A very beautiful creature, I thought her,
with a vivacity and a sparkle that Valentino will never have.
* * * * *
Of caricaturists there are legion, but I never met one even vaguely
resembling the genius that is ‘Sem.’ Sem is, of course, famous all over
France, and in a good many other countries as well. Queens of every
description have screamed when they opened his portfolio, and they tell
me that as soon as the Aga Khan heard that he was one of Sem’s victims,
his knees clattered together in soft and mutual sympathy. For some
reason, however, he is not so well known in England, though, naturally
enough, many lovely ladies have unsuccessfully offered enormous sums,
if only Sem would make them sufficiently ridiculous.
You would not think, when you met him, that Sem ‘had it in him’ to be
so very naughty. Such a tiny little man, rather like an amiable monkey,
with a small wizened face, and eyes that blink perpetually in a sort of
mild surprise at the fantastic comedy of life. It is only when his face
suddenly sets, and his neck cranes forward, that you realize that here
is a man who sees more than you would even imagine there was to be seen.
It was just after the publication of one of his most sensational
folios that we met. I wanted to know how he did it--a sufficiently
comprehensive question to ask any artist.
‘Do you go about with a pencil and paper, looking for monstrosities?’ I
asked him. ‘Getting a nose here, a neck there, a double chin somewhere
else?’
He shook his head emphatically. ‘Never do I draw a line from life,’ he
asserted. ‘I look at people when they do not know that they are being
watched. At Deauville, when they are plunging into the water, in the
theatre, when they are excited by the stage, at dinner, when they are
excited by the soup. At times like that they forget that they must make
the best of themselves. The large women forget to hide their chins, the
large men forget to be dignified. That is the time for me. But I do not
_draw_, then. Oh no! I wait a week, a month, six months. And suddenly I
think, that woman, she was like a horse, or that fellow, he resemble a
camel. Then I draw.’
One of his caricatures which had struck me as most delightful was that
of Lady Idina Gordon, whom he saw as a heron, and whom everybody will
see as a heron for the rest of her natural life.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I say, that is a heron, as soon as she comes. Very
English. Head so. Neck so. And the voice. Just like I draw. And the Aga
Khan? You see him like a fish too, like me? All of a fishiness, I see
him, with the large eyes and the mouth.’ He made an exquisite little
grimace to illustrate his meaning.
‘And the King of Spain? They say I am rude to draw him so, but it is
not rudeness. It is only Truth. I draw them as I see them. I do not
make a monkey of a lion, nor a peacock of a sparrow.’
And yet, Sem can be kind as well as cruel. He dips his pen alternately
in poison and soothing syrup, and draws, first with a knife and then
with a caress. His curly, twisting nib worms right into the heart of
his subject, dragging out the most astonishing intimacies. A twist
of the lip and he has condemned not only an individual but a whole
class. A swelling of the stomach and the whole monstrous regiment of
profiteers stands shameless before you.
He didn’t seem much impressed by English caricaturists. Even after his
second Bronx, the mention of Max Beerbohm merely drew a sigh from his
lips and a little flick of the monkey fingers. ‘There is nothing much
about him,’ he said. ‘He is not a caricaturist. He is a commentator.
His drawing is not strong enough to stand alone, and so he must put
little bubbles into the mouths of his characters, and make them speak
for him. That is amusing’ (and here he nibbled his moist cherry much as
monkeys nibble peanuts at the Zoo) ‘but it is not caricature.’
He swallowed the cherry and, leaning forward, burst into French.
‘Caricature,’ he said, ‘must stand by itself. It must have a line that
shatters, a cut that kills. There must be no mists, no legends, no
little sentences stuck here and there to say “this is a fool.” You must
_draw_ him as a fool, and your very _line_ must be foolish, it must
wriggle with absurdity, it must twist itself remorselessly into the
grotesque. There is only one man in England who can do that to-day.’
‘And who is that?’ I asked.
‘Bateman. Mr. H. M. Bateman. Now he has no need to put balloons into
the mouths of his characters. They speak for themselves. They laugh out
loud. He is a great caricaturist, that man. He could kill a man with a
single drop of ink.’
He leant back and closed his eyes. Poor Sem has bad eyes, and he
blinks, not through astonishment, as I first surmised, but because a
strong light hurts him. All round us surged the highly coloured and
slightly ridiculous set of people who are always to be seen drifting
through the lounges of London’s three hotels at cocktail time. Women
whose complexions all come out of the same sort of bottle, men whose
clothes all come from the same sort of tailor. The same tired voices,
the same overfed stomachs, the same underfed intelligences. Immediately
in front of us was a much _soignée_ lady in black--dress by Molyneux,
diamonds by Cartier, furs by Reville, perfume, I should imagine, by
request. I wished that Sem would look at her.
But he was already looking at her. ‘I shall draw her,’ he said, ‘as a
cat.’
And he did.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A Lamb in Wolf’s Clothing
I now retired to a nursing home for an operation. The operation
had nothing to do with my visit to Valentino, for it was only
‘tonsils’--and I spent my few days of rest in reading _Main Street_,
which had a very cheering effect by making one remember how many
disagreeable people there were in the world with whom it was not
necessary to live.
One afternoon I was deep in the atmosphere of the Middle West when I
looked up and saw, standing in the doorway, a youth with fair hair,
agreeable features, quizzical smile, and appalling clothes.
‘Who are you?’ I said.
‘I’m Oliver Baldwin,’ replied the apparition.
Now, Oliver Baldwin is, to the best of one’s knowledge, a figure unique
in English history, and as biographies will certainly be written about
him when he is old and respectable there seems every reason for writing
something about him while he is young and--Oliver.
Oliver’s father is, of course, Prime Minister. But Oliver himself was
and is the most violent revolutionary, with a considerable flair for
public speaking, a complete independence of thought, and an absolute
loathing for his father’s Party.
England was therefore presented with the engaging spectacle of a young
man filling the bookshelves of Number 11 Downing Street with treatises
on the best way to blow up Cabinet Ministers. In fairness to Oliver
it should be observed that he only did this while his father was
Chancellor of the Exchequer. In the more exalted days of the present
he avoids Downing Street like the plague.
In spite of the discouragement of tonsils we were very soon talking
with gusto.
‘Does your father mind your wanting to be the President of the First
English Republic?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know. Never asked him.’
‘But isn’t it--don’t you think it’s rather ... I mean....’ (Impossible
to finish this sentence.)
Oliver smiled. ‘You mean, don’t I think it’s bad form to attack my own
papa in public? No. The only things which are bad form are the things
which are not sincere. I am terribly sincere. And I’m not attacking
_him_, I’m attacking the programme he stands for.’
More talk, Oliver departed, and it was arranged that we should meet
again.
In the meanwhile I found out a little more about Master Baldwin which
made me realize that he was a person with whom, one day, we should be
forced to reckon. Before his exploits the adventures of Huckleberry
Finn pale into insignificance. After a cloistered youth in the shadow
of Eton, he suddenly, at the outbreak of war, enlisted in the Second
Cambridge Cadet Corps, became a sergeant-instructor, an officer in the
Irish Guards, went through France, and was a seasoned warrior before he
was out of his teens. The war over, he departed to Russia to fight the
Bolsheviks, was imprisoned by these gentlemen for months under sentence
of death, escaped, got into Armenia, avoided meeting Mr. Michael Arlen,
grew (with infinite pains) a beard, joined the Armenian army, became
in rapid succession a Captain, Major, Colonel, General, bought a white
horse, and led, like a new Joan of Arc, the army of the Armenians
against the Bolsheviks. All these things--even the beard--probably had
singularly little effect on the course of events, but they showed the
stuff of which Oliver was made.
Oliver is not in the least the vulgar tub-thumper of popular
imagination. He is almost absurdly sensitive about his position. I
remember motoring down from London to Oxford with him once, coming
within a few miles of Chequers, and demanding firmly to be driven there
at once. ‘Do you think we ought to?’ he said. ‘Why not?’ said I. ‘There
won’t be any Cabinet Ministers there, and even if there are, they can’t
bite us. I rather wish they could. It would be fun to be bitten by the
Chancellor of the Exchequer.’
So we went to Chequers, simply because I shamelessly insisted.
We arrived when it was still early morning, with the mist of an English
autumn drifting down the lanes and lying, like a caress, over the
little green fields. What a paradise! When the Lees left it to the
Prime Ministers of England, they must have been thinking of future
Labour governments, because this old place is so peaceful, so mellow,
so typical of all that is gracious and lovely in English history (as
we fondly imagine it to have been), that nobody could dwell within its
walls for more than a few hours without wishing to preserve the spirit
which had created it.
I won’t give a catalogue of the treasures of Chequers, because they
would fill a whole volume, from the magnificent Rembrandt which dreams
in the dusk of the tall entrance hall to the marvellous collection of
unique volumes which line the shelves of the long, quiet library. What
most appealed to one was the entire absence of any ‘museum’ feeling,
all the more remarkable when one remembers that Chequers belongs to the
nation, and is only a temporary resting-place for successive ministers.
Nothing is locked up under glass cases. Looking back on it, I think
that it might be just as well if some of the things were protected. For
example, when Oliver was not looking, I put a ring of Queen Elizabeth
on my finger (she must have had very large fingers), clasped a sword
of Oliver Cromwell’s in my hand and read aloud the original Cromwell
letter in which he describes the rout of the Cavaliers as ‘God made
them as stubble to our swords.’ The combined effect of all these
actions gave one a feeling that was a cross between a museum and the
worst type of tourist.
At Chequers there is a very charming lady who occupies the post of
châtelaine, and who could probably tell more secrets than any other
woman in Europe, for she has seen all the Prime Ministers in their
moments of play and rest, when they have been most likely to tell the
truth. However, she is discretion itself, and when one asked if Lloyd
George ever said what he really thought about Asquith, or if any of
the Prime Ministers ever got drunk, one was met with an evasive smile.
However, I did learn later, from another source, that they were all
passionately devoted to Chequers itself. In fact, as soon as the news
of Lloyd George’s downfall came through, Megan Lloyd George, who was
in the entrance hall at the time, walked disconsolately to the window,
looked out over the moonlit garden, and said, ‘Oh dear! This means that
we shall have to leave Chequers.’ The thought of that, you see, had
eclipsed even the disaster which had befallen her father.
Another thing which one realized while at Chequers was the insatiable
passion of British Prime Ministers for music. In the great banqueting
hall (where nobody banquets now) is a pianola. The first thing which
harassed Premiers always did was to rush to this pianola, switch it
on, and lie back, forgetting the trials of office. Lloyd George,
whose natural taste would seem, to the uninitiated, to be for marches
and military music, found himself most soothed by Chopin nocturnes.
Baldwin, on the other hand, invariably played, as his first number,
some Schubert variations on a theme by (I believe) Mozart. Winston
Churchill had the best taste of the lot. He confined himself rigorously
to Beethoven.
The surroundings of Chequers are ideally beautiful. On one side, level
meadows, on the other, rising hills, thickly wooded. As soon as we had
‘done’ Chequers, we motored away, got out again, and went for a walk in
these woods. And there, under the yellowing leaves of immemorial elms,
like the two thoroughly shameless young men that we were, improvised a
debate in which Oliver was the President of the First English Republic,
and I was the leader of the fast vanishing and decadent English
aristocracy--rôles of singular charm for both of us. The subject was a
fantastic one, being concerned with a Bill brought in by the government
to requisition all the sticks and leaves in the country for the purpose
of burning the House of Lords. Still, it gave us endless opportunities
for rhetoric, and as our words floated out into the valley, I wondered
if there would ever come a time when the scene would be transferred to
the realms of reality. I should imagine that it is most unlikely.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Two Big Men and One Medium
Rudyard Kipling is a fine example of a great man who will forgive
almost everything to Youth. He certainly forgave me as charmingly as it
was possible to do so.
It happened during lunch. I felt very guilty when they said that
Rudyard Kipling was coming, because two years before, when still at
Oxford, I had written a letter to the _Morning Post_ on the subject
of ‘Our Modern Youth,’ in which there were a great many violent (and
rather silly) remarks levelled against anybody who had the misfortune
to be over forty. The letter attacked, with sublime indifference, such
diverse subjects as militarism, old age, imperialism, prime ministers
and incidentally Kipling, whom I had never read, but who seemed to
sum up a great many aggressive tendencies. ‘Where,’ I asked, in the
peroration, ‘will you find the spirit of the age? Not in the flamboyant
insolence of Rudyard Kipling, not in the ... etc.’
Not one of my best works, that letter. But it was written in a hammock,
on a hot summer’s day, with flies buzzing round, and certainly without
the thought that perhaps, one day, the writer would meet the man whom
he had attacked.
However, when Kipling was announced, he came straight up to me (where I
was hiding in a corner) and said:
‘You’re the young man who was so rude to me in the _Morning Post_,
aren’t you?’
I admitted that this was so. ‘I’m awfully sorry ...’ I began.
‘Sorry? What for?’ said Kipling. ‘I used to be much ruder to people
when I was your age. The only thing that I should be sorry for was that
you didn’t make it worse.’
I heaved a sigh of relief.
‘Besides,’ said Kipling, ‘that was a jolly good phrase--flamboyant
insolence--I liked it.’
And then he began to talk about literary style with a gusto that is
more often found in amateurs than in celebrities.
Kipling did not strike one, in the very least, as ‘literary.’ If one
had not seen his face caricatured in a hundred newspapers, one would
gather that he was a successful surgeon or a prosperous architect.
Especially does he convey the surgeon, with his keen bright eyes, his
more-than-bedside manner, and the strong, capable hands, that push
out eagerly from the white cuffs as though they were about to carve
something.
Carving, too, is a phrase that might be applied to his prose. He hacks
out his sentences, cuts up his paragraphs, snips at his descriptions.
I was struck, even at the beginning, with his positively encyclopædic
knowledge of subjects about which he might well have pleaded
justifiable ignorance. Drugs, for example. Somebody mentioned
anæsthetics, and that led to a wider discussion of all drugs that
partially or wholly remove consciousness. Kipling suddenly broke into
the conversation, held it and dominated it, illustrating everything
he said with the most apposite examples. He told me that when he was
in India, as a young man, he had experimented in taking a very potent
drug which even the natives can only imbibe in small quantities. ‘It
laid me out completely,’ he said, ‘and I didn’t dream a bit, as I had
hoped. I woke up, with a splitting headache, but fortunately I knew
the cure--hot milk, as much of it as you can drink. If ever you find
yourself in that condition in India, you put your last dollar on hot
milk. It’s the only thing that will pull you round.’
It was an amusing luncheon party, for everybody talked about the things
that most interested them. I remember Princess Alice,[1] for example,
talking about Bolshevism with an authority and an understanding that
came to me as rather a surprise.
[1] Countess of Athlone.
‘How do you know so much about these things?’ I asked.
‘I think it’s my duty to know about them,’ she said. And then ... ‘I
_must_ tell you the story of when I went down to speak at a meeting at
Poplar. Poplar at the time was seething with Bolshevism, and everybody
said it was madness for me to go. To make matters worse, just before
the meeting I received a message to say that the whole audience were
going to wear red rosettes to show their revolutionary sympathies. Very
well, said I, I’ll wear a red rosette too. So I got my maid to make me
a beautiful scarlet rosette, and pinned it to my dress, where it looked
charming. It quite took the wind out of their sails when they saw me
get up on the platform wearing exactly the same emblem as themselves.
And there wasn’t any Red Flag sung that night--only God Save the King,
rather out of time, but with a great deal of fervour, all the same.’
Another rare type I met just then was Sir Thomas Lipton, whose yachts
have floated all over the sea, and whose tea has floated into every
interior. He wanted me to do a job of work for him, and though I had
a shrewd suspicion that there would never be time to do it, I kept my
appointment, simply in order to see what he was like.
Lipton himself was charming. And I admired his courage in decorating
his house in a manner which some might find disturbing, but which he
liked. There was no compromise with modernity. It was frankly Victorian.
From the outside the house looked quite innocuous. It was one of
those roomy, squarely built mansions, that stand in respectable
gardens on the outskirts of North London. But the porch showed a true
individuality. It contained two highly glazed yellow pots, filled with
aspidistras, standing on a floor of coloured tiles.
As soon as one entered the hall the fun began. There were black china
negresses, ‘nice bright’ wallpapers, heads of healthy animals, glazed
oleographs, and at every turn, photographs of some royalty in a large
silver frame. One object in the billiard-room I particularly admired.
This was a sofa, covered with cushions of really inspiring colours.
One cushion, which was placed between a blue and orange stripe and a
form of black check, had for its main design the Star-spangled Banner,
worked in blue and crimson wools.
Conversation amid such surroundings was bound to be exciting. Lipton
got under way, and let flow an apparently inexhaustible stream of
reminiscences. There was something very appealing in listening to the
candid confessions of an entirely self-made multi-millionaire, who
gloried in the fact that he _was_ self-made.
Lipton told me that he was the first English tradesman who really
understood advertising.
‘When I got my first little shop,’ he said, speaking with a beautiful
Scottish burr, ‘I realized two things: first, that if you wanted to
sell more goods than the man next door, you had to sell better goods.
Secondly, that if you wanted to sell a _great many_ more goods, you had
to make people look at ’em, whether they wanted to or not.
‘D’you know what I did?’ And here he slapped his thigh and chuckled to
himself, ‘I got hold of two fat pigs, painted “Lipton’s Orphans” on
their backs, and used to lead ’em home from the market-place every day.
That was good advertising, wasn’t it?’
I agreed.
‘But even better’s to come, even better’s to come!’ (Here the secretary
departed, and I had a suspicion that he had heard the story before.) ‘I
trained those pigs to lie down in the middle of the road just opposite
my wee shop! Think of it. Two braw pigs lying down like that. They
stopped the traffic. When we got a crowd round, somebody would say
“Why! _There’s_ the wee shop!” And they’d all trot along and look at my
window. What d’you think of that?’
And then he told me the story of Lipton’s Bank Notes--almost the best
piece of publicity that can ever have been invented. One of his chief
slogans was: ‘Lipton gives £1 value for 15_s._,’ something to that
effect, and in order to spread this slogan all over England he had £1
notes issued with a note in very small type at the bottom that goods
to the value of £1 could be bought for only 15_s._ at any of Lipton’s
stores. So beautifully were these notes engraved that occasionally they
would be used, by canny and dishonest persons, in place of the real
article. The authorities learnt this and Lipton had to stop his notes.
But not before several little comedies had occurred.
‘D’you know,’ said Sir Thomas, with a sparkle in his eye, ‘that a man
in an hotel at Edinburgh actually gave me one of my own notes as part
of my change? Did I what? No, I didn’t. He was a clever fellow, and I
let him keep it.
‘_And_ ...’ here he leant back in a sudden paroxysm of mirth, ‘I was
travelling in the train once with two elders and they were talking of
the collection at the Kirk the Sabbath before.
‘“Five pounds seventeen and elevenpence,” said one of ’em.
‘“Aye,” said the other, “but three of the notes were Liptons.”’
Lipton has, of course, a real veneration for Kings and Queens. He
adores them with a fervour that at times almost becomes poetical,
and he can never quite rid himself of the shy wonder that he, the
ex-factory boy who started life on 2_s._ 6_d._ a week, should have
risen to such heights.
He took me into his drawing-room (which I believe he called a parlour)
and showed me some of his collection of royal photographs, with the
remark that:
‘No other commoner in the United Kingdom has ever entertained the same
number of crowned heads.’
Looking at the photographs, I could quite believe it. Royal photographs
are all very well in small numbers, but in quantities they become a
little oppressive. There were several rows of them on the piano, all
in heavy silver frames, there were pictures of Queen Victoria on the
wall, slightly fly-blown, there were portraits of King Edward, stout
and urbane, on the mantelpiece, and every table had on it a photograph
of some high-busted lady or be-whiskered gentleman, signed Augusta
or Charles or Emelia or John, or some such name, with the signature
written in that curious scrawl which denotes either a royal origin,
success behind the footlights, or delirium tremens.
And yet--Lipton himself was still simple and charming. His pride was so
naïve that one could not possibly object to it. ‘The Kaiser said to me
...’ ‘Her Majesty remarked ...’ ‘The Prince of Wales and I ...’--they
were all only little pats on the back of the ex-factory boy.
Even when he said to me:
‘I’ve the largest collection of Press cuttings in the whole world,’ the
remark seemed, by the way in which it was said, to be in the best of
taste.
The quality which I found most lovable about Sir Thomas Lipton was his
intense devotion to his mother. That was the only time when he was
really serious. He told me that all his life he had worked for her and
for her alone, and that he had never found any other woman in the world
who could make him forget her. And his very last words to me were:
‘You stick to your mother, laddie, as you would stick to life. As long
as you do that, you won’t go far wrong.’
* * * * *
I don’t know what it is about Hugh Walpole that I find, no doubt
wrongly, a little worrying, unless it is his appearance of complacency.
He _is_ so successful, isn’t he? I have really no right to mention him
at all, for I only met him once, and that was at a station, when we
were both ‘seeing off’ a mutual friend to America--a situation which
was sufficient to make enemies of us for life. But I had heard--oh,
a great deal about him from the friend in question, who was a very
delightful American woman who has been fairy godmother to a great many
young authors and artists.
We were in Venice together (the very delightful American woman and I)
and one day she said, ‘Let’s go and get some lemons for Hugh Walpole.’
‘Lemons? They’ll go bad long before we get home.’
‘Not real lemons. Glass apples. Venetian glass. Hugh has taken a new
house in London and I want to give him a present.’
So we entered a gondola, pushed off across the silver water, and were
soon in Salvati’s, buying beautiful glass lemons for Hugh.
If this is to be a history of my life, as it is rapidly appearing to
become, I had better get the subject of Venetian glass off my chest
at once. It used to drive me quite mad with excitement, and still
does--in Venice. On the morning in which the very delightful American
woman and I went in search of the lemons, a new and most divine set
of glass had just come in fresh from the factory. There were pieces
of yellow glass that were like frozen sunlight, shadowy goblets that
seemed to be bubbles poised on a puff of smoke, dim bowls that might
just have been taken dripping from the green depths of the sea, pots
of plain, clean glass with tiny fruits in sharp colours on the tops,
little twinkling plums and vivid sour green apples. There were rich
goblets engraved with golden dragons, and tall slim cups of grey glass,
like pale ladies coming out of a mist.
We chose our lemons, entered the gondola, and drifted down the grand
canal. I did not particularly want to hear about Hugh Walpole, but he
was apparently ‘in the air,’ so I asked why he was so great a success
in America.
‘Because they think he’s typically English. They also think he’s
exceeding clever,’ said the very delightful American woman (who may be
referred to as the V.D.A.W.).
‘But he’s neither.’
‘How do you know? You’ve never met him’ (which was perfectly true). ‘He
_is_ typically English. His face is like an old English squire’s. And
he is very clever. Or at least we think so.’
And then the V.D.A.W. delivered herself of a very good piece of
literary criticism.
‘You’ll find Hugh Walpole’s books in every best bedroom in the United
States, except possibly, in the very best ones, where you will not
find works in English but in French, to show that we have travelled.
Way out in the Middle West, there will be a copy of _The Dark Forest_
or _The Prelude to Adventure_ carefully placed on a table near the
radiator. It will probably never have been read, but it will be there.
That’s culture.’
An extraordinary idea. ‘How does one get this reputation for culture?’
I said. ‘My books have just as nice covers as Hugh Walpole’s, and there
is no reason why they should not also have the benefit of steam heat.’
‘You’re too young,’ was the only answer I got.
However, I learnt more about Hugh Walpole, and at least discovered that
he had this very admirable quality--the capacity to plod. Right at the
beginning, apparently, Henry James had told him that if he went on, and
on, and on, he would eventually get there. It seems to me that he _has_
gone on, and on, and on, but that he has not got there. Still, the
going is good.
Then I met him. The scene was Victoria Station on a raw morning in
winter, with little wisps of yellow fog lurking under the high roof.
The V.D.A.W. was ensconced in her carriage behind a large bouquet of
roses which he had given to her. In her lap was an American magazine
which he had also given her. I noticed with a slight amusement that it
was ‘featuring’ a story by Hugh Walpole himself.
When the train bearing the V.D.A.W. had departed into the fog, we
walked out of the station together.
‘I hate seeing people off,’ he said.
‘So do I. Especially people I like.’
‘Quite.’
He paused in the middle of the station and scratched his head.
‘I should like to write a guide,’ he said, ‘on how to see people off.
It would be done in several moods. Grave and gay. Topics to be avoided.
Time-limits.’
‘The chief thing,’ I suggested, ‘would be to strictly limit’ (I noticed
that the split infinitive made him blink, genteel man of letters
that he was) ‘to strictly limit the number of times one said, “Well,
good-bye.” We must have said it at least sixteen times this morning.
Every whistle made us say it.’
‘I don’t remember saying it more than once,’ he remarked.
Then we entered the Tube, and endeavoured to converse by shouting
feverishly into each other’s ears. (Oh! There is no doubt that we were
meant to be enemies for life.)
‘I hear you’re doing dramatic criticism and book-reviewing,’ he
screamed.
‘No, I’m not,’ I bellowed. ‘I’m only a reporter.’
Bang, bang, bang.
‘Well,’ he shrieked, ‘that’s not as bad as the other.’
‘What is not as bad as which?’ I howled.
‘I mean that book-reviewing’ (and here the train suddenly came to a
halt so that his voice boomed out like a sergeant-major’s) ‘is far more
soul-destroying than reporting.’
I should like to see Hugh Walpole battering at East End doors on
windy nights in winter, trying to gain admission to a house where a
murder has just been committed, and see which he thought was more
‘soul-destroying.’
‘I did book-reviewing for a long time on the _Evening Standard_,’ he
confided, in a hoarse whisper, ‘and’ (here the train started, so he
again had to yell) ‘it nearly killed me.’
Bang, bang, bang.
‘And what about the dramatic criticism?’ I howled.
He gathered all the remaining wind that was in his lungs and shrieked,
‘Don’t know so much about it. But I should think that would rot your
brain before long.’
He got out at Charing Cross, and as I hurtled along towards the
unaristocratic destination of Blackfriars, I pondered on the type of
mind that thought dramatic criticism would rot the brain. To see, night
after night, the curtain rise on the flash and light of the drama. To
feel, as every daylight faded, that some new pageant was gathering
to spread itself out before one’s eyes. To sit in the warm, scented
darkness and analyse the motives, the construction, the technique of
the play, even if it is a bad play. To have always the hope, sometimes
justified, that one would be caught up in the sudden rapture that
comes from great acting. Is that ‘rotting the brain’? Not, I think,
to a young man. However, Hugh Walpole is not a young man. He was born
middle-aged. But he is rapidly achieving his first childhood.
CHAPTER TWENTY
A Memory--And Some Songs
One of the most wonderful evenings of my life was when, in the heart of
the Australian Bush, Melba sang for me alone.
I ought, if I had a tidy mind, to describe how I got to the Australian
Bush, and how so divine a person as Melba should be singing to me
at all. But that can come in due course. For the moment I want to
recapture that scene as I lived it.
There is a long room, panelled in green, lit only by the misty glow
from outside the windows, fragrant with the scent of yellow roses.
There are wonderful old mirrors that catch the dying sparkle of a Marie
Antoinette Chandelier. In the half-light so many lovely things shine
dimly ... a picture of dark, closely-clustered flowers, a case of fans,
delicate as the world of fairies....
I am standing at the window. There is a long veranda, and in the
distance I can see, faintly outlined, the pillars of the loggia that
leads to an Italian garden. Mountains, fabulously blue, rise on the
horizon and everything is very quiet. Only a few hours ago the air
had been rent with the shrill cries of parrots, flying to their
resting-place in the forests. Even while we had dined we could hear the
liquid warbling of magpies, that strange noise, like water gurgling
from a flask, which brings all Australia before me as I write. And
after dinner, while we had taken our coffee, the whole of the fields
around had echoed with the chirping of crickets. But now ... silence.
And then, like a moonbeam stealing into an empty room, that voice,
which is as no other has ever been...
_Dans ton cœur dort un clair de lune..._
The notes die away and there is silence again. I go on looking at the
blue mountains. Then, from the other end of the room, a sudden laugh,
the sort of laugh that people may make in Heaven, and--
‘Well, did you like me?’
I laugh too. It seems so utterly fantastic to attempt to appreciate in
words an art like this. Nobody ought ever to clap Melba. They ought to
remain silent. The greatest things in art are above applause.
It was in, I believe, 1923, that I first had the delight of meeting
her, but it was not till the season had really begun, and I found
myself in Covent Garden, listening to the first opening bars of ‘_Mi
Chiamano Mimi_,’ that I really came under her spell. It was not the
first time I had heard her sing. As a small boy of nine I had been
taken to one of her concerts by my mother, and had greatly irritated my
family by informing them, when I returned home, that I thought she sang
exactly like myself.
In a sense, there was truth as well as youthful complacency in that
criticism. Her voice _is_ like a choirboy’s, as crystalline, as utterly
removed from things of the earth.
One day she said to me, with characteristic directness, ‘You’re not
well. You’re poisoned. You’ve been working too hard. You ought to come
out to Australia and help me with my Opera Season.’
I denied indignantly that I was poisoned. (My doctor afterwards
confirmed her diagnosis.) I said that I knew nothing about Opera. But
all the same, though it was some six months later, I went out to join
her in Australia--that was in the beginning of 1924.
Melba is so great a woman--I use the word ‘great’ in the fullest
sense--that one cannot possibly attempt a full-length portrait of her
in a few pages. But, from the notebook of my imagination, I may perhaps
draw out a few pages, roughly scribbled over with thumbnail sketches,
that may make you feel you know her a little.
I shall take the sketches simply as they occur, without attempting
to put them in order. The first one is labelled ‘energy.’ The
face of Melba appears, rising calmly over a heavy _chaise-longue_
which, unassisted, she is pushing across the room. It is one of her
furniture-moving days. The whole of her boudoir is upside down.
Pictures stand in rows against the walls, china is ranged along the
floor, and over the chairs and sofas are scattered quantities of
bibelots--pieces of jade, little mother-of-pearl boxes bearing the
words _Souvenir_ and _Je pense à toi_, crystal clocks, a tiny gold case
containing a singing bird with emerald eyes.
The furniture-moving goes on. I endeavour to help, and am told with
great frankness that I am far more bother than I am worth, and that I
had better content myself with watching. And so I watch, amazed. Little
by little the room takes shape. At one moment she is standing on a
chair, and the next she is kneeling on the floor, doing the work of six
British labourers. _Voilà._ It is done. And she is at the piano again,
trilling like a newly fed thrush.
If Melba had had no voice she might have made a fortune as an art
connoisseur. I have been driving with her sometimes, and have seen,
on the other side of the street, a window full of antiques. ‘Look,’ I
have said. ‘Don’t you think there might be some fascinating things in
there?’ She looks. In the space of ten seconds her eye has taken in the
entire contents of the window, and she either says ‘All fake,’ or she
stops the car. I have never known her wrong. It is as inexplicable to
me as the feat of the eagle which can see a mouse hidden in a field of
corn a mile beneath.
So many people who like to pretend that they are artistic will tell you
that they cannot bear to live with ugly things. They will say this with
pained expressions, even when they are sitting, apparently unmoved,
beneath a Landseer stag, on a Victorian settee. With Melba it really
is pain. Whenever I see her in an ugly room I know the exact feeling
of the Oyster who is irritated by a piece of sand. She is restless.
Her eyes dart hither and thither. She bites her lips. For two pins she
would get up and hurl things out of the window.
I shall never forget once when she was singing three times a week in
the Opera at one of the great Australian cities, and was staying in
an hotel in order to be near the theatre. She came down at about ten
o’clock to go for a drive. I met her in the hall. As we were going out
she paused in the entrance way and said:
‘Those pots. Look at them. They’re hideous enough in all conscience,
but they’re made ten times worse by being pushed out in that ridiculous
position. Let’s push them back against the wall.’
Now wherever Melba goes in Australia there is always a little crowd in
her wake, as though she were the Queen of the Continent, which indeed
she is. And the prospect of moving pots in the entrance of an hotel
struck me as alarming in the extreme.
I mumbled something about ‘waiting.’ She looked at me scornfully.
‘Wait?’ she said. ‘What for? Come on.’
Without the faintest interest in the sensation she was making, she
bent over and began to move the first pot into position. I shall never
forget the sparkling look of satisfaction on her face, the slight flush
that the effort caused, the waving ospreys in her hat, and the cry of
‘There--isn’t that better?’ when the first pot was placed in position.
I saw a tall red-faced individual glowering down on us.
‘Excuse me,’ he said.
‘I’m Melba,’ she said. ‘I’m doing some furniture-moving for you.’
He was quite speechless for a moment. Then, after a gulp he managed to
say, ‘But, Madame....’
‘Oh, I shan’t charge you anything,’ she remarked.
Those pots are as she placed them to this day.
The next sketch is labelled ‘The Singing Lesson.’ There are the
outlines of a long bare room, a platform, some seats in front, occupied
by professor and pupils. Melba sits by herself in a corner, biting a
pencil. A pupil steps on to the platform and begins to sing. Suddenly
the voice rings out, ‘Stop!’
As though she had been shot, the pupil stops dead. Melba gets up from
her seat, goes to the platform, says to the accompanist, ‘Let me sit
down a minute,’ and then turns to the girl.
‘I’m not going to eat you,’ she says. Her own smile brings an answering
smile to the face of the girl.
‘Sing me “Ah.”’
‘Ah.’
‘No--“Ah”--’ up here, in the front of the mouth.
‘Ah!’
‘No. You’re still swallowing it. Listen. Sing mah. Close your lips,
hum, and then open them suddenly. Mah, mah, mah.’
‘Mah, mah, mah.’
‘That’s better. Now higher. Right. Higher.’
She takes her up the scale. At F sharp she stops. ‘Piano. Please,
please, _pianissimo_! You’ll ruin your voice if you sing top notes so
loud. Better, but still too loud. _Pianissimo!_’ She leans forward, one
finger to her lips.
Somewhere about the top B flat the girl cracks. She blushes and turns
appealingly to Melba. Melba takes no notice and strikes a note higher.
‘I don’t think I can....’
‘I don’t care what you think,’ says Melba. ‘Sing it.’
‘But I shall crack.’
‘That doesn’t matter, I don’t mind what sort of noise you make. I just
want to hear it.’
The girl attempts it again, the note is pure and round.
Melba rises from the piano and steps briskly from the platform. ‘She’s
got a lovely voice,’ she says. ‘A lyric soprano. She’s taking her chest
notes too high, that’s all. Send her up to me and I’ll make that all
right.’
I wonder how many other prima donnas there are in this world who would
do that, who would put themselves to endless pains and expense, simply
for the love of song.
I have yet to be informed of their names and addresses.
The third sketch is labelled--the artist. The scene is a rehearsal of
_Othello_. For three hours she has been singing, directing, talking
at one moment to the orchestra, at the next, to the stage hands, to
anybody and everybody. The scene is set for the last act, and with
her meticulous sense of detail she has been busying herself with
the crimson draperies that overhang the bed. Now she is standing in
mid-stage, sending her voice up to the men who work the lights. ‘More
yellow,’ she is crying, ‘more yellow. This isn’t a surgery. You’re
blinding me. That’s better. Wait a minute. Not so much of that spot
light on the bed. I am not a music-hall artist.’ Then, _sotto voce_,
‘How on earth does the poor man think that Desdemona could go to sleep
with a light like that in her eyes?’
She is almost the only woman I have ever known who has an absolute
horror of the slip-shod. Study her day when she is singing in opera.
She is up with the lark. After breakfast she is in her boudoir,
‘warming’ her voice, studying her rôle from start to finish. She
lunches frugally, drinking only water. After lunch she drives or walks.
At five there is the pretence of a meal--an omelette or a little fish.
From now onwards she eats nothing till after the performance.
She is in her dressing-room from an hour and a half to two hours
before the performance. Her make-up is scrupulous. She describes in
her autobiography the importance which she attaches to the minutest
details of make-up, but I don’t think that even her own description
quite makes one realize the perfection of it. From her wig to her
shoes, everything is as it should be. I have seen her reject fifty
shawls for the part of Mimi, simply because they were not in keeping
with her idea of the character.
Sketch four might be named Courage. I remember a day when we were
driving together, and, as she stepped from the car, the chauffeur
slammed the door full on to her fingers, crushing them cruelly. She
cried--‘Oh, my hand!’ and the door was feverishly dragged open again.
She bit her lip, walked into the theatre, sat down and closed her eyes.
That was all. There was no hysterics, no ‘Vapours,’ not even a tear.
It is not only in physical courage that she excels. She has the sort
of gay fearlessness which allows her to motor late at night through
the Australian Bush with only a single chauffeur, and jewels of more
value than I should care to estimate. One night she was motoring home
with Lady Stradbroke, who is the wife of the Governor of Victoria. The
car broke down in the middle of a forest. The chauffeur had to run off
into the darkness, leaving the women alone. There they sat for a full
hour. Any tramp, any of the roving, husky ‘sun-downers’ with whom the
Bush abounds, might have come along and taken all they wanted. Lady
Stradbroke told me that though she herself was shaking in her shoes,
Melba kept up a perpetual babble of chatter. I asked her when at two
o’clock in the morning they arrived, if she had not been fearfully
agitated. She laughed her unforgettable laugh. ‘Agitated? Me? They
wouldn’t hurt _me_. I’m Melba.’
‘I’m Melba.’ It is something to be able to say that. Something to be
able to go up to an old woman selling roses in the streets of Paris
and say ‘_C’est_ Melba’ and to have the roses pressed into your hands
in a sort of homage. Something to know that wherever music is played
or songs are sung all over the world, the artist who is playing before
you is giving his utmost. Something to be able to lean back in the
theatre stalls at a first night, and to say to Bernard Shaw, as I once
observed, ‘I know who _you_ are’ and to receive the answer: ‘You don’t
know me nearly as well as I know you.’
And to remain, at the end of it all, so simple that you are never
happier than when eating macaroni in a restaurant where you may have
your fill for two shilling, so humble that you will kiss the cheek of
the youngest débutante whom, you feel, has in her something of the
divine fire.
Melba, I salute you. It is not my fault that this sketch of you is so
inadequate. It is yours. I cannot paint landscapes on threepenny bits.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Hicks--Hicks--and Nothing but Hicks
It is a matter of very small importance either to Seymour Hicks or
to anybody else that I regard him as capable of the finest acting on
our stage. It merely gives a keynote to what is written below, if you
should be kind enough to read it.
I never really knew Seymour until we went to Australia on the same
ship, and if you want to know anybody well, go through that very
disagreeable experience, and nothing will be hidden from you. I had of
course met him in London, we had eaten together, drunk together, and
had feverish conversations in his dressing-room when he had arrived
late for his Act and was endeavouring to put on grease paint at the
rate of greased lightning.
But all that goes for nothing. Wait till you have eaten stale fish
and bottled cream at the same table for six weeks, till you have been
bitten by mosquitoes at Colombo and rolled together in the Australian
Bight, till you have been bored silly by the ship’s wits and driven
almost crazy by the ship’s sopranos--wait till you have done all those
things, and somehow managed to come through them smiling, and then you
can certainly call a man a friend.
Admiration is never a bad basis on which to start a friendship, and
I passionately admired the artistry of Seymour Hicks. Only recently
I had seen his performance in _The Love Habit_, and my eyes were
still dazzled by his performance. The accomplishment of the man! The
tricks! The diabolical cleverness! Watch him _listen_, for example.
There is no more difficult or less understood art on the stage than
this one of listening, and when you have seen Seymour listening, you
have seen the whole thing, inside out, upside down, backwards. The
head slightly forward, the eyes fixed on the speaker, the whole body
set in a poise which seems to suggest a question mark that gradually
straightens itself out as the question is resolved, to end as a mark
of exclamation. And the face! As each sentence is uttered, he seems
to hear it for the first time. A tiny flicker at the mouth, a faint
narrowing of the eyes, an almost imperceptible wrinkling of the
forehead ... if I were an actor I should go and hide my head in shame
after such an example of virtuosity.
And yet, with the exception of _The Man in Dress Clothes_, things seem
to have gone wrong with him lately, while mediocre artists have made
messes of plays which he might have transfigured with his genius.
One of the first things he ever told me was the truth about _The Man
in Dress Clothes_--the play which was changed, in one night, from a
failure to a success owing to the intervention of Northcliffe.
‘Funny thing, isn’t it, what the Press can do for a man?’ he said
to me one day. We were gliding silently one evening down the long,
straight reaches of the Suez Canal, and the atmosphere of desert and
clean-washed sky seemed to lend itself to conversation. ‘Take _The Man
in Dress Clothes_, for example. It had been running for three weeks
when Northcliffe saw it, and up till then it had been an absolute
failure.’
‘Why did Northcliffe come at all?’ I asked.
‘Max Pemberton. He told him about it, and Northcliffe wrote me a
letter saying, “Dear Mr. Hicks, I don’t usually like plays, but I will
come to yours.” He came to a matinée. After the first Act he sent a
special messenger down to Carmelite House to order some of his staff up
to the theatre at once, and when I went to see him after the second Act
he said to me:
‘“These gentlemen have just been instructed to boom your play, Mr.
Hicks. It’s the best play I’ve ever seen. There will be a photograph
of it in every edition of the _Daily Mail_ for the next month, and a
paragraph in the _Evening News_ telling London that London has got to
come and see it.”
‘And, by Jove, they did come to see it. On the next day, in the
_Evening News_ appeared an article about my play headed “The best play
in London,” and the same night the receipts were multiplied five times
over. It became almost embarrassing. I used to get almost afraid of
opening the Northcliffe papers to see what they had written next. All
the same, it kept that play running for a year, and I am eternally
grateful to Northcliffe for that.’
One of the most interesting conversations I ever had with him was, of
all places, at the Sydney Zoo. Not that the Sydney Zoo is like ordinary
zoos. It is very superior, in fact almost beautiful. It lies above the
eternal blue of Sydney harbour, looking over the waves to where the
white houses and red roofs glitter in the sunshine. There are wattle
trees to give you a touch of yellow (how I wish Australians would call
wattle by its proper name--mimosa) and there are flame trees to give
you a touch of scarlet. And the animals in this particular zoo do not
seem to be in the zoo at all, for there are not cages, but pits. So
that there is a fine thrill waiting for anybody who does not know
this, for all the animals look as though they are about to leap out to
devour.
The zoo had nothing to do with our conversation, but I cannot
dissociate it from its surroundings. Seymour was standing in front
of a paddock containing a number of kangaroos, which leapt about,
disdainfully regarding the stale monkey-nuts which were thrown to them
by sticky children. The kangaroo does not eat stale monkey-nuts. I have
no idea what he does eat, but he does not eat that.
He gazed absently at the kangaroo for a moment, threw it a peppermint
drop, and said:
‘Of course the only critic who’s going to be of any use to the English
Theatre to-day is the man who talks about the _acting_.’
‘You mean the acting before the play?’ I said. ‘I love talking to you,
because you agree with everything I say. You may say that the star
system is overdone, but no star, if he _was_ a star, has ever done
anything but good to the theatre. He ennobles everything he touches.’
Seymour nodded. ‘Look at Edmund Kean. Columns and columns of Press
cuttings I’ve got about him. They really criticized in those days.
They watched every movement, every gesture, they listened to every
intonation of the voice. They put him through a third degree of
criticism.’
‘And he came out triumphant?’
‘Not always. Pretty often. Anyway, what I mean is, they concentrated on
the _acting_, and they set tremendously high standards. Look at half
the critics to-day. They don’t care a damn. They spend half their time
in an analysis of the play itself, which interests nobody, and then
they say that somebody or other was “brilliant.” It’s wrong. A critic
ought to have two ink-pots, vitriol and gold. And he ought to be jolly
sparing with the gold one.’
‘The very first thing that struck me about the theatre,’ I said (I
wanted, you see, to encourage him to talk), ‘when I began criticism,
was that we were too afraid of being theatrical. Now, I like a theatre
to look like a theatre, to smell like a theatre, to feel like a
theatre. I don’t like a theatre that looks like a church or a town
hall. I like....’
This conversation is beginning to sound like a dialogue in the deceased
_Pall Mall Gazette_, but I really don’t mind. Seymour agreed with me,
and said:
‘I’d far rather see somebody come on and say, “Gadsooks. My mistress
has forsaken me,” and say it as though he meant it, than see a young
man in a beautiful dinner-jacket light a cigarette, and mumble, “Oh
really, Flora seems to have gone off with Rupert,” as though he were
saying, “It’s a rather cold morning, isn’t it?” The last thing an actor
should fear is to be thought theatrical. When a really good actor of
the old school came on he struck an attitude. He bounced. He filled the
stage. You said, “By God, here’s an actor,” and you jolly well watched
what he did. Irving for example.
‘Irving realized the enormous importance of a first entrance. Look at
his King Lear. Heralds approach. A train of soldiers. More heralds. The
suspense increasing every moment. You can almost feel him coming. You
lean forward in your seat, awake, expectant. And then--enter Irving,
slowly, with a falcon on his wrist. Now that’s _acting_. That isn’t
any nonsense about being life-like or trying to look as though you
weren’t an actor. As soon as a man does that, he _doesn’t_ look like an
actor, because he isn’t one, and never will be, and his place is in the
thirtieth row of a cinema, watching glycerine run down Mary Pickford’s
cheeks.’
There is more sound sense--I _could_ call it profound wisdom, but I
won’t--in those remarks than in half the nonsense that is written
to-day about ‘realistic’ plays and ‘realistic’ acting. You might as
well talk about ‘realistic’ music and praise a composer who sits down
at the piano and tries to imitate a waterfall.
One night I was dining with Ellaline Terris and him, and it suddenly
occurred to me to tell them the plot of a rather gruesome short story
which had come into my head a few days before. When I had finished
Seymour said, ‘My word, what a play!’ In fact, everybody said, ‘My
word, what a play!’ And there and then we hunched ourselves round the
table and began to talk it out.
Of course, we never did talk it out. That is why it is so charming a
memory. But Seymour can teach one more about play-making in a few hours
than most of the books (or, indeed, the plays) in the world. And people
seem to be interested in play-making. They like to know ‘how it is
done.’ So here goes.
The first thing that he talked about was the absolute necessity of
deciding exactly who the characters _were_. It sounds obvious enough,
but if you have ever thought of writing a play you will probably
remember that you thought of a woman in a certain situation, and
beyond the fact that you knew she was good, bad, or merely improper,
you did not know the first thing about her.
But, before we decided on a single line, we had to make those people
real people. We had to know not only what their lives were, but what
they had been, and why. In other words, we had to delve deep back into
the past (long before the period of my short story), into the drama of
the past, in order that we might approach the drama of the present with
minds forewarned.
And then, when we had decided who the people were, we had to decide
exactly what the story was. All this sounds fantastically obvious,
but I assure you, it is not so obvious as it sounds. Take again your
own case, if you are an amateur playwright, as I feel convinced you
are, you have probably thought of it all in _Acts_. You have said
the first Act will be set in an attic, and will end with the arrest
of Joseph on a charge of some vice--(naming your own favourite one).
The second Act will be in a ballroom, in which Joseph’s fiancée will
spurn the Duke. And the third Act will be in a court of justice, where
Joseph is declared innocent. It is all wrong. You mustn’t do that. You
mustn’t even think of the theatre at all. You must think of life, of
what is happening to these people in the open air, in bed, when they
are asleep, when they are in their baths. Think of them as real human
beings. And then, when you have decided what they are doing, what they
have done, and what they are going to do, then go at it for all you’re
worth, and be as theatrical as a Christmas fairy, and good luck to you.
And the other thing I learnt during those hours after midnight in
which we sat conspiring together, was that not a line must be written
before the construction is absolutely water-tight. You have to build
a play--a good play--like a jigsaw puzzle. Every little bit must fit.
There must be so much this, and so much that. There must be a place for
everything, and everything in its place. If you dribble into dialogue
too soon, you are done. God help you, for you will be like a ship
without a rudder, and you will lose your way in a sea of talk, blown by
the winds of every passing mood.
It sounds prosaic. There is nothing of the thrill, which comes to
those who dash to their tables at midnight, and write out passionate
speeches in which perfect ladies declare their innocence and imperfect
women their guilt. But, after all, the greatest fun, I should think, is
seeing your play _played_. And the impromptu, passionate sort of play
doesn’t usually get beyond the paper on which it is scrawled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Showing how a Genius worshipped Devils in the Mountains
All young men love paying pilgrimages, especially when the pilgrimage
is to some rather exotic and remote hermit who happens to be in the
vogue. Incidentally, I am quite convinced that the hermits like it
too. How often has one read, in memoirs, of the humble, too humble,
delight of some wild musician who is visited, in his retreat in the
Northern Hebrides, by young things from Oxford, who group themselves
in decorative attitudes round his carpet slippers. ‘To me, living in
the realm of art,’ he writes, ‘these visits from fellow-spirits in the
outer world are infinitely sweet, infinitely welcome. Mr. Bernard Bank,
of Brasenose, arrived to-day at dawn, praying that I might come down,
so that he should throw himself at my feet. I did. And he did. I feel
“remarkably refreshed.”’
I rather wish that I had gone to see Norman Lindsay in this way. He has
all the qualifications for a really good hermit scene. He lives in the
heart of the Blue Mountains beyond Sydney, he is an utterly isolated
figure in an immense continent, and his finely erotic designs have
given a great many dull people fits.
But my visit to him, though picturesque, was sophisticated. I went out
to see him with Melba in an exceedingly comfortable car, and after
three hours of speeding along under tall white gum-trees, with the
flash of green parrots in the branches, we arrived at the broken,
tumble-down road which leads to the house where Norman Lindsay lives
with his wife and children.
The instant I had passed through the wooden gate, which was blistered
by the eternal blaze of sunshine, I had a feeling of stepping on to
enchanted ground. (You observe, the hermit complex was already at
work.) From some bushes over in the corner a fawn’s head leered at
me through the shadows, and on the grass leading up to the house a
concrete lady with an enormous chest stared haughtily in front of her.
Advancing to the veranda one had a glimpse of the same lady, flying in
haste from presumably the same fawn--a really beautiful piece of rough
statuary which Lindsay afterwards informed me had been roughly ‘thrown
together’ in the space of a single afternoon.
As for Lindsay himself--he did not walk towards us--he fluttered to us,
like a bird. So like a bird is he that I had a feeling, all the time,
that I must catch hold of the end of his jacket in order that he should
not fly up to a gum-tree and pipe his distracting arguments from the
topmost branch. He was so thin, so fluttering, his eyes were so bright,
his nose so like a beak, perched on top of the tiny neck.
As for his talk--that, too, was bird-like--the words pouring out one
after the other, making one think of when the swallows homeward fly.
As difficult to follow, too, as a bird. In the first half-hour of
our conversation--(I say ‘our,’ although my contribution was limited
to negatives and affirmatives)--he had smashed the whole Christian
philosophy, set Nietzsche on a pedestal, made at least a hundred
genuflexions to him, pulled a long nose at Rubens, kicked Chopin out of
the house, and invited me three times to have a drink without doing
anything more about it.
We went for a walk in the garden, Lindsay still talking. A child
appeared--a rosy cheeked thing with cherries embroidered round its
collar. It was clasping a doll firmly in its arms.
‘The maternal instinct developed already, you see,’ he said.
Odd, I thought. I felt that Freud had dropped something which Lindsay
had picked up, taken to a looking-glass, and read backwards.
Somebody again suggested a glass of white wine. This time his eyes
sparkled. We went back into the house and drank. I watched him. He
talked of the wine as though he were a Bacchanalian. One had the
impression that he was only five minutes off a bout of drunkenness.
Yet, he sipped only a mouthful, and even that was taken with pursed
lips, as an old lady takes her tea.
Odd, again. It was the _idea_ of intoxication, you see, that appealed
to him. The gesture was the important thing, not the reality. I
honestly believe that Lindsay could get quite drunk on coloured water,
if he were persuaded the water was wine.
And then we went into lunch. I remember a room with huge windows and
sunshine blazing in. I remember an enormous plate of chicken and some
very red carrots. And most of all I remember Lindsay’s sudden pæan of
praise in favour of Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata.
‘He’s my god,’ he said excitedly, digging his fork into a particularly
beautiful carrot and waving it wildly about. ‘My god. The Appassionata
Sonata contains everything of life that life has to give. In its
rhythm you can find the secret of the entire universe.’ He ran from the
room and returned bearing a mask of Beethoven which he triumphantly
placed beside him.
I cannot give you much of Norman Lindsay’s talk because I simply did
not understand it. He talks at such an immense speed, dragging so
many tattered philosophies in his wake, that one could only follow,
exceedingly faint, but pursuing.
However, I did not give up the attempt. I tried to keep him strictly
to facts, and after lunch I led him to one of his concrete ladies and
asked him how he did it.
His thin hand stroked the concrete lady’s chin with a lingering
affection. But he took not the faintest notice of my question, and
started off on a different tack.
‘There are only two people whom I want to meet in England,’ he said. ‘I
wonder if you can guess who they are?’
Now, I never guess when asked. It is too dangerous. Do you know the
sort of people who have a face massage, arrange the lights, hold their
chins very high, and say, ‘You won’t guess _my_ age, I’m sure.’ They
are quite right. I won’t.
Norman Lindsay relieved the suspense. ‘Aldous Huxley and Dennis
Bradley,’ he said.
‘_What?_’
There must have been something a little tactless in my tone of voice,
for he frowned and said, ‘Well, I don’t see why you should be so
surprised.’
I was surprised, however, because it seemed such an odd couple to
choose. Lytton Strachey I could have imagined. Shaw, at a pinch.
Augustus John more than most. But Aldous Huxley and Dennis Bradley....
I still do not know, from the whirl of words with which he defended
his two idols, exactly what he meant. But from out of the chaos
there did eventually emerge something--that he considered them both
anti-Christian. Perhaps, after the psychic experiments of Dennis
Bradley, his ardour may have abated. I don’t know.
Lindsay hates Christ. He hates him as one man hates another. It is in
no way the feeble sort of dislike which so many modern anti-Christians
entertain--the dislike which is explained merely by the fact that
Christ makes them feel uncomfortable, as though he were a skeleton
at the feast of life. It is a militant, violent hatred, the clash of
one philosophy against another. He ranges himself, a solitary figure,
against the angels, his whole mind and body tense with rage, his hand
gripped grimly round an unsheathed sword.
It was not till I went with him to his studio, which is a sort of
wooden shack at the end of the garden, that I began to understand this
dislike. He danced round with portfolio after portfolio, producing
drawings which were a riot of pagan beauty, a miracle of design. But
the beauty and the art he seemed to pass by. It was the satire--the
anti-Christian satire--which he was longing to show me.
‘Look,’ he said. I looked. He was holding up an immense engraving
crowded with figures. I have a dim memory of light shining through
pillars, of an endless staircase, of a conglomeration of strange,
dishevelled shapes, darkly etched in the foreground.
‘Amazing,’ I said.
‘Yes--yes--but don’t you see him?’
‘Him?’
‘Jesus Christ, man. Look.’
He put his finger on to the design. It touched a pale face--sickly,
anæmic, almost half-witted. It was like a patch of fever in the riotous
health and brutality which crowded it in on all sides.
He laughed loud and long. I could not laugh. I felt absurdly,
desolatingly shocked. Not, I think, by what Lindsay had shown me of
Christ. But by something which he had shown me of--myself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A Defence of Dramatic Critics
A little while ago Mr. Philip Guedalla (that squib who never stops
fizzing) annoyed me very much by making rude remarks about dramatic
critics. He said that they looked like waiters or conjurers. I should
not in the least mind looking like some waiters I have seen, but he
was not referring to face or figure. He was being sartorial. And when
Guedalla is sartorial, God alone knows what will happen.
He referred to the ‘dingy uniform’ of this ‘Sad Guild.’ It struck me as
slightly vulgar and entirely inaccurate. I would match my own exquisite
waistcoats (you know the sort--nothing at the back and a broad pique in
front) with Mr. Guedalla’s any day. It would be rather an entertaining
match. I can imagine our respective laundresses panting for days
beforehand, and I can see us strutting round and round, examining each
other for the faintest sign of a wrinkle.
But it is not of clothes that I would write, but of dramatic
criticism, and the only excuse I have for holding up an imaginary
Guedalla by the scruff of his neck is because of that phrase ‘Sad
Guild.’ It is a childish, facile, meaningless phrase. It calls up the
stale conventional vision of rows of gloomy faces, ‘like Micawbers
waiting for something to turn down.’ It is the sort of phrase that
an unsuccessful playwright might use, to excuse his failure. As if
critics, by some Satanic grace, were gifted with power to fool _all_
the public, in _all_ the theatres, _all_ the time.
I am a dramatic critic. I know of no sad guild. I have yet to wear a
dingy uniform. Every time that I go to a theatre it is with a heart
beating high in hope. Every time that I open a programme and read that
‘the curtain will be lowered for thirty seconds in Act II to denote the
passing of a hundred years,’ I tremble with the satisfaction that only
make-belief can give. Every time I read that Mr. Clarkson has sold a
few more wigs, my being trembles with delight. To be a dramatic critic
does not imply that one must be old and shrivelled and pessimistic.
I was absurdly young when I began. And I didn’t care a damn. If love of
the theatre was any qualification for criticism, then I was qualified
with the highest degrees. My first toy was a toy theatre. In the misty
days of the late King Edward VII I have laid for whole seasons on my
small stomach putting pink heroines and black villains in their proper
places. I have burnt candles for footlights as ardently as any human
saint burnt candles for sacrifice. I have drawn thunder from a tin can
and lightning from a piece of tinsel. And at school, when I should
have been engaged on more orthodox matters, I have routed out ancient
books on the theatre--as Æschylus knew it in Greece, as Goldoni knew
it in Italy, and, in dreams, have fought my youthful battles on those
vanished stages, made mock love with adolescent passion, closed my
eyes, and been, in rapid succession, hero, heroine, cynic, clown, every
emotion tearing my young heart to tatters.
If you please, therefore, Mr. Guedalla, protrude your pink tongue,
apply your blue pencil to it, and erase that phrase about the sad guild
in its dingy uniform. It is unworthy of you, for you can fizz very
prettily, at times.
I forget the name of the first play which I was ever called upon to
criticize, except that it was a worthless ‘comedy’ in the West End by
somebody who was evidently not fit to produce even a one-act sketch.
But with what infinite conscientiousness I attacked my task! I went
armed with pencils, one of which I produced from time to time in order
to scribble furtively on the back of the programme, trying not to be
seen and yet half hoping that somebody would see me, and realize that
I really was a dramatic critic. However, it was exceedingly difficult
to work under such conditions. One had rather to bend down and crumple
one’s waistcoat (which would bring one perilously near the condition of
‘sad uniform’), or else content oneself with a few desultory scrawls
which were usually illegible at the end of the performance.
From such scraps, at first, was the criticism written, late at night,
while the echo of the drama still seemed to hover in the air. But
after a time I learnt that far the best criticisms were written
entirely from memory, at least a day after the play. Sometimes, if
there was a première on the night in which we were going to press, it
would be necessary to dash into the office and write half a column in
twenty minutes, surrounded by the buzz and clash of great machines
printing late editions. But criticizing in those circumstances
was dangerous--very dangerous. So elating, so intoxicating is the
atmosphere of the theatre, that a good actress seems transfigured, for
the moment, into a great genius. Not until the morning comes do we
realize only too often that she is just--good.
For every capable play I saw--not great, but well-constructed and
interesting--I must have seen, at a very charitable estimate, twenty
bad ones. A mysterious thing the theatre. Entirely incalculable, one
would imagine, for the average run of men. I have asked myself time and
again, during the last year or so, by what dark process certain plays
have ever been born at all. I have sat back in my stall, in wide-eyed
innocence, listening to the sort of dialogue that, one imagines, takes
place during the meat-teas of our lesser lunatic asylums, endeavouring
to be interested in situations that contain nothing new, nothing
dramatic, nothing vital in any way whatever. And I say why? Why?
I ask myself the same question during the _entr’acte_ in the bar,
with its warm humanity, its grotesque barmaids, its sparkling taps
and glasses. Here, where life is throbbing and intense, where the
presumably evil passions of those who have not drunk are offset by
the soft desires of those who have, the drama which one has just been
observing seems infinitely petty--the _dramatis personæ_ as ghosts
blown willy-nilly across a desolate stage by the winds of nonsense.
Again I wonder why?
Before I endeavour to answer that question let me say that when I see
a real play I do not go to the bar. I either remain attached to my
seat in a state of trance, or else I go out by myself into the street,
collide violently with the stomachs of large fat men, get splashed by
motor-buses, and creep back, like a worshipper, just as the lights are
being turned down.
We have still not answered the question, Why do such bad plays get
produced at all? The chief reason, I believe, is that one of the most
important people in the theatre is still paid rather less than the
ladies who sweep the carpets. That person is the play-reader. Mr.
Edward Knoblock was a play-reader before he wrote _Kismet_, and told
me that he used to read something like three thousand plays a year,
working all day and a good deal of the night, for some fantastically
small sum, like two pounds a week. Yet, on his decision (and very often
on his extra work in re-writing them), depended the expenditure of
thousands of pounds, and the making or losing of a small fortune.
We have recently had a very illuminating illustration of the mentality
of the play-reader. A woman who for twenty years has been reading plays
for London managers (who, presumably, have been guided by her advice),
suddenly wrote a play herself, in collaboration with a man whose name I
forget.
The play was duly produced, and it ran, by a miracle, for a week.
It was a farce, in both senses of the word. No adjective in any
language can describe its dreariness. (I believe there is a word in
Russian, which deals with a particular mental disease known only among
grave-diggers, but I have forgotten it.) If a nonconformist father and
a Baptist mother had produced a daughter of the lowest intelligence,
who had sedulously been kept from entering the theatre until she was
thirty, at which date she had been to a pierrot performance on a small
sea-side pier on a rainy day at the end of the season, and had then
returned with a splitting headache to record her impressions, that was
the sort of play she would write. Ten sentences of it, in typescript,
would have given the average reader a feeling of desolate despair that
the human brain could conceive such banalities.
And yet, the author, for twenty years, has been (and to the best of
my knowledge, still is) a form of despot before whom all aspiring
young playwrights must make obeisance. She is the gate through which
they must pass, the play-doctor who must pronounce them sound. It is
all wrong. She may be a good mother, a brave woman, with a positive
passion for dumb animals. But she never has, never will, and never can,
be qualified to judge of any matter even remotely connected with the
theatre.
With one notable exception--I need not name him--we know practically
nothing about ‘scene’ in the sense that Mr. Gordon Craig uses the word.
We use a lighting system as casually as we switch on a light in our
own bathrooms. We stick chairs higgledy-piggledy all over the room,
not realizing that in a play a chair is a perpetual _note_, a monotone
perhaps, but still playing its part in the general harmony or discord.
We have had one or two attempts at significant scenery in England
lately, but the scenery was so significant that it entirely dwarfed the
actors, who themselves were none too strong that they should be robbed
of even a little of their personality. One had a sense of infinite
sideboards, one was caught in the rapture that belongs to a really
seductive sofa. And the play went to pot.
It has needed an American to show us what scenery can be. Need I
say that I refer to Mr. Robert Jones’s designs for John Barrymore’s
production of _Hamlet_? It is the most superb scenery I have seen in
any part of the world--the soaring arch, lost in gloom, brooding,
sometimes outlined in a sudden fretted splendour, tremendously aloof,
like the gesture of some genius who alone fully comprehended the
recessed mysteries of Hamlet’s soul. If I know the smallest thing about
the theatre, that was great scenery--as great, in its way, as the play
itself.
Writing of Robert Jones--who, as one of the most important men in the
modern theatre, ought to be as well known in this country as Bernard
Shaw is in America--makes me want to ‘have you meet him,’ because
hardly anybody over here seems even to have heard of him at all. He
is exquisitely erratic. I have spoken of the marvellous arch which he
made for _Hamlet_, but I did not betray the secret of its inspiration.
That came from Mont St. Michel. And this was Robert Jones’s method of
getting to Mont St. Michel.
He was going to Paris with an old friend. By some strange freak they
entered a train which was continually stopping at stations. After an
hour or so it stopped at a tiny station, surrounded by fields of blue
flowers, with hills beckoning in the distance.
‘Let’s get out,’ said Robert.
‘Let’s,’ replied the friend, who, with geniuses, always acquiesced.
They got out, seized their luggage. Outside was an old Ford car. The
luggage was placed upon it.
Robert took out a map. ‘It is only a few hundred miles from here,’
he said, ‘to the sea. If we go straight across country we shall
reach Mont St. Michel.’ He made a rapid calculation. ‘We should
arrive at dawn. The towers will be rising out of the mist.’ (To the
coachman)--‘Drive to Mont St. Michel.’
And by that fiery spirit was created the scene which, to me, is the
only setting worthy of _Hamlet_.
It would be interesting to know the extent to which the censor has
contributed to the present state of affairs. I think he is more
objectionable as a distasteful symbol than as a functioning official.
The obvious and natural idea that censorship in any form whatever is
more immoral than the most indecent work that can come from a human
brain has not yet penetrated our still medieval intelligences, but it
is gradually becoming evident.
Professor A. M. Low, that brilliant young inventor, once said to me
that in a few hundred years an umbrella will seem as monstrously
absurd to our descendants as witch-burning seems to-day. The idea
of censorship will, I believe, share the fate of the umbrella. If a
dramatist wishes to express an idea by filling his stage with naked and
debased creatures, it seems to me amazing that anybody should have the
impudence to stop him. You are not forced into a theatre, any more than
you are forced to observe the antics of dogs in the streets. You can
stay away. You can....
But there. This is not 2125. It is 1925. One must wait--like the
witches.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In which William Somerset Maugham makes a Delicate Grimace
William Somerset Maugham has no public personality. Although _Lady
Frederick_ has been prancing about the stages of the world for nearly
twenty years--dear thing--although the ‘leaves’ still ‘tremble,’ and
although ‘Rain’ is apparently never going to cease showering golden
drops into the pocket of its creator, William Somerset Maugham remains
William Somerset Maugham. He does not, like other successful authors,
suddenly develop piercing eyes, or a villa in Capri, or a pony, or a
rose garden, or any of the usual accompaniments of fame.
Why there are so few tales about him, I can’t imagine, for his life
abounds in the sort of ‘copy’ which would bring a flush to the cheeks
of even the weariest Press agent. The story of his early struggles, for
example. He told it to me on one evening full of hope, when the first
adolescent strawberries had been discovered in the Café Royal, and were
blushing at the last oysters, the like of which they would never see
again, it being the last of April’s days.
I can see him now, one cheek pink by the light of the red lamp by his
side, the other pale by the light of nature. His black eyes sparkled
like sloes dipped in wine, and, had a hundred others not forestalled
me, I should have said that ‘the eyelids were a little weary, as
though this were the head upon which all the ends of the world were
come.’ Maugham’s eyelids always are a little weary, but his mouth is
invariably on the verge of a smile.
‘When I came to London,’ he said, ‘I had £3,000. I was twenty years
old, and I made up my mind that I should write for a living. For ten
years I wrote, but I hardly lived. Nobody would put on my plays, and
though my novels were published, nobody appeared anxious to read them.
‘When I was thirty I had reached my last hundred pounds. I was mildly
desperate. And then, somebody suddenly decided, in a moment of
aberration, that they would produce a play of mine. The play was _Lady
Frederick_.
‘I knew that if _Lady Frederick_ was a failure I should have to give
up the idea of writing any more, and should spend the rest of my days
in an office. I had no particular hope that it would be anything but a
failure, especially as the producer came to me, a few days before the
first night, and told me that there weren’t enough epigrams. “We want
at least two dozen more epigrams,” he said. I blinked at him, went away
to have a cup of tea, and put in the epigrams with a trembling hand,
rather as though I were a new cook sticking almonds on to the top of
her first cake.
‘Well, I arrived at the theatre on the first night, knowing that I
should leave it either as an accomplished dramatist or an embryo bank
clerk. I left it as the former. I knew, from the very beginning that
the play was a success, because they began to laugh almost as soon as
the curtain had risen. I think it’s a great thing to get a laugh in
one’s first few lines.’
The adjective which is always used as a sort of sign-post when Maugham
is under discussion is the one word in the English language which I
thoroughly detest. I mean, of course, ‘cynical.’ It is the sort of
word that is used by speckled young women at tennis parties, when
one attempts to vary the monotony of the game by making a few gentle
reflections to one’s partner on the futility of existence. I once met
somebody (this is terrible, but true), who said to me the meaningless,
damning words, ‘I’m an awful cynic, you know.’ That person went to
prison. I understand the warders were so kind to him that he is now a
raving sentimentalist.
We will, therefore, if you please, rule out this epicene adjective
from our discussion of William Somerset Maugham. Let us say, rather,
that he has the honesty to admit that he finds life quite meaningless,
seeing it merely as a procession of grotesque, painted figures winding
out of the darkness into a momentary patch of light, and then drifting
into a deeper darkness still. But he does not beat his breast, in the
manner of Thomas Hardy, and rend the clouds over Bryanston Square with
blasphemies. He lies back, lights a cigarette, beckons to a few of
the more ridiculous persons in the procession, and sets them dancing
on the stage of his own imagination. And I can quite believe that the
substantial royalties which result are far more satisfactory than any
misty philosophies.
I am not speaking without the book. He summed it all up once by saying
to me, ‘I think that life has a great deal of rhyme and absolutely no
reason. I entirely fail to see that it means anything whatever. It
justifies itself only by the amusement it gives one.’
The occasion on which these bold and bad words issued from his
lips was, if I remember rightly, at a party where he, in the velvet
smoking-jacket which he wears on all possible occasions, was lying
gracefully against the back of a sofa. H. G. Wells was sitting bolt
upright in an arm-chair, while I sat most appropriately on the floor.
Thus I was at the feet of two masters at the same time. A sensation
which, had I been an American tourist, would probably have resulted
in apoplexy. H. G. Wells had admitted to a completely open mind on
the whole problem of existence, which, I presume, was the cause of
Maugham’s confession.
But I don’t wish to give the impression that he strikes one merely as
a facile, elegant figure, skating on the surface of things, cutting
arabesques on the ice. His polished agnosticism is the result of a
deeper thought than the hearty optimism of many tiresome philosophers.
He told me once of the lasting emotion he experienced when, in a
remote cave in Java, he discovered frescoes, a thousand years old, of
peasants, using almost precisely the same instruments as were used in
the fields of Devonshire and Cornwall to-day.
For a moment he looked entirely serious. ‘It gave me an overwhelming
realization of the changelessness of man,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t so much
the fact that they were using the same sorts of spades and hoes. One
saw beyond that into the essential sameness of their personalities.
Nothing is ever altered.’ And then the smile came back again. ‘I can’t
make out whether it depresses me or not.’
His style, in the same way, is no airy stringing of words, no naïve and
unstudied grouping of language. Like his philosophy, it has emerged
from many experiments. ‘I think I have at last got down to the bare
bones of style,’ he said. ‘I try to say what I have to say with the
greatest possible economy of language. I used to be terribly elaborate
and ornate. Now I write as though I were writing telegrams. And when I
have finished, I go over it all again to see what can be deleted.’
Maugham, I think, is eternally surprised that people find him shocking.
It is odd, but not so odd as the fact that _The Circle_ (which was
regarded in London as so innocent that hardly a single bishop fell
out of his pulpit about it) was found so hideously immoral in Paris
that the great majority of managers refused to take the responsibility
of putting it on. I was even more amazed when he told me that _Lady
Frederick_, which the Edwardians so genteelly applauded, caused a
great many heads to be shaken in Germany, and apparently provided the
Teutonic race with an excellent proof of the decadence of English
society.
Speaking of the translations of his plays reminds me of a good story. I
once asked him what sort of sensation one had when one heard one’s work
played in a foreign language; if it made the author’s breast swell with
pride, or if it was merely irritating.
‘I once found myself in Petrograd,’ he said, ‘and I was excessively
bored. I hardly understood Russian at all, but I decided that the only
way in which to cheer myself up was to go to the theatre. I went to the
theatre, choosing the largest and cleanest-looking one I could find,
and sat down to watch the play.
‘It was a comedy, and, as far as one could judge, the audience seemed
to find it amusing. It did not amuse me in the least, because I
couldn’t understand a single word of what it was about. But towards the
end of the first Act it seemed to me that there was something vaguely
familiar about the situation on the stage. I had a sense of listening
to something I had heard in a dream. I looked down at the programme to
discover who had written it. The author’s name was Mum. And the name of
the play was _Jack Straw_.’
It was at Wembley, strangely enough, that he made the most provocative
statement which I have ever heard him make--the sort of statement
which sticks uncomfortably in one’s mind, like a burr. It was really
my fault, because Wembley, as usual, had depressed me to distraction.
To wander through halls of bottled gooseberries, called ‘Canada,’ and
bottled peaches, called ‘Australia’; to drag one’s feet past hideous
engines, labelled ‘Industry,’ and to listen to the indecent shrieks of
young women on toboggans, called ‘Amusement,’ strikes me as one of the
grimmest jests which life has to offer.
There was only one thing to do in this sort of environment, and that
was, to talk about love. To talk at it, rather. I began to mutter
platitudes about love being a condition impossible of attainment, an
alchemy that had never been discovered. That no two people ever loved
each other with an equal fire. That the only possible love implied the
most rigid and exacting fidelity, in thought as well as in deed. And
that nobody (except bores and half-wits) ever achieved this condition.
Then suddenly Maugham cut through these gloomy clouds with one
shattering sentence. ‘_I don’t see why one shouldn’t love people
flippantly_,’ he said.
‘Flippantly!’
There danced before my eyes the ghosts of light ladies on broad
terraces, terraces which only knew the moonlight and were always
mysterious with the heady scent of dark roses. Flippantly! So many
difficulties solved, so many problems blown, like a puff of smoke, over
the thick forest in which I was wandering. If only one could recapture
the age in which those remarks really expressed a mode of life.
Here, in the British Empire Exhibition, the idea of ‘loving anybody
flippantly’ sounded almost like treason, as though one had stolen into
the Australian pavilion by night, and had extracted one of the bottled
gooseberries to see if they really tasted as nasty as they looked.
And yet, I believe it is the right attitude.--No, I don’t. I believe it
is the most comfortable attitude. It is neither right nor wrong, it is
simply a matter of temperament. If, however, there were a little more
flippancy in the world, there might be a few less wars. Swords cannot
be unsheathed flippantly. Poison cannot be made with an airy gesture.
Notes cannot be flicked across the Channel from one ambassador to
another, like blowing kisses. If they could, they might not cause so
much trouble.
That is, I think, the tremendously important function that Maugham
plays in the world to-day. He says to the world, ‘I know no more
about things than you. I have not the faintest idea where I came
from, whither I am going. Yes, I quite agree that we are in a very
distressful condition. But, just a moment ...’ (and here he takes one
by the arm), ‘if you look over in that direction, you will see a man
with an extraordinarily amusing face. He is talking to a woman who is
pretending to be in love with him. How tragic? Not in the least. If you
only realized, it is exceptionally amusing. Now listen, and I will tell
you a story....’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
In which Michael Arlen Disdains Pink Chestnuts
In 1870, had you chanced to be walking over one of the rough and
alarming roads that stretched across the Balkans, from Roustchouk to
Constantinople, you might have met a young man driving a bullock cart.
He would have been tall and dark, with a certain weariness round his
black eyes, and what might be described as ‘a grim determination’ round
his lips. (Yes--we will get to Michael Arlen in a moment.)
The young man was setting out to make his fortune. And he made it. Not
all at once, it is true, for the road from Roustchouk to Constantinople
is long, and I should imagine, in 1870 it was even longer. And one
cannot make a great fortune quickly when one has only £20 with which
to buy Turkish delights, even when one sells them at double the money.
Bandits, too, who emerged from the forlorn countryside and attacked
one in the rear, were apt to make great inroads into one’s fortune.
However, in time, the young man had saved £50, at the age of 19. (Yes,
Michael Arlen is getting nearer and nearer.)
When the young man had made his £50 he bought a beautiful coat of blue
velvet, with a scarf of coloured wool, and he was the beau of the
village. All the Armenian girls cast their black eyes in his direction.
His weariness, in consequence, was slightly alleviated. (I can hear
Michael Arlen chafing in the next paragraph.)
One Sunday, this fine young man put on his velvet suit and went for a
drive round the town in an open cab. Apart from the open cab, it was
perhaps the greatest day in his life. For as he was passing under a
certain high window, he looked up and saw a girl who was fairer than
any girl he had ever seen. Their eyes met, and they were in love. She
drew back from the window, and cried, as all true lovers should. He
frowned, told the cab to drive him home, and went in his blue velvet
coat to demand her hand from her father. And as soon as her father had
said ‘yes,’ the first line, one might say, was written of _The Green
Hat_. For the young man was Michael Arlen’s father.
I have introduced Michael Arlen in this manner because it seems in some
way to heighten the romance of his career. They had a great deal in
common, his father and he. They both treated life as an adventure, and
doing so, gained a rich reward. The only difference being that Arlen
senior went into business, whereas Arlen junior kept out of it. Arlen
senior lost his money in the war. Arlen junior made his money in the
peace.
A very dainty young man I thought him, when we first drank wine
together at an hour when the last silk hat has drifted shamelessly
home in the Mayfair dawn--(which is as no other dawn). I use the word
‘dainty,’ not to indicate effeminacy, but to convey a certain nicety of
manner, a delicacy of tact. A very charming young man, it seemed, after
the third glass of wine. A very brilliant young man, I was convinced,
after the sixth. And I keep to the latter opinion, now that I am sober.
So few people know him. He has such a tiresome legend attached to
him--a gilt-edged legend. He has been dehumanized in the popular
imagination by his success. I hate writing biographies of anybody but
myself and so, if I scrawl down a few disjointed lines, it is all the
information that you will get. But it is more than most people will
give you.
Eleven years ago--a pound a week--alone in London. ‘So lonely I was,’
he told me once, ‘I had nobody to speak to but my landlady. And even
landladies, after a time, lose their charm. They are the last people
who do, but still, it is inevitable.’
‘The New Age’--essays for two years--one friend. The friend, oddly
enough, was young Frank Henderson, whose delightful old father ties a
red tie better than any other Socialist in London, and runs ‘The Bomb
Shop,’ where one may buy the sweetest seditious literature on this side
of the English Channel. ‘I used to sit at the back of the shop, without
a bob, talking to Frank,’ he said. ‘I still do. We roar with laughter
as we see people coming in to buy _Mayfair_.’
_The London Venture_--£30 profit--a visit to Bruce Ingram, the Editor
of _The Sketch_--a commission to do twelve short stories of 1,500 words
each, at a remuneration of £8 apiece. ‘And now,’ he tells me, ‘I have
a contract for the rest of my life, which brings me in £900 for every
short story I write, whether it is published or not. Isn’t it silly?’
I liked that remark, ‘Isn’t it silly?’ It is the sort of remark that
any young man, with his pockets full of unexpected dollars, might make.
He sits down and writes. His stories are sent drifting round the world.
They come drifting back. Then, one day, they do not drift back. They
are published. They create a sensation. And he is ‘made.’
‘I have never met anybody who liked my books.’ Now that I have put it
down, that seems to me the most extraordinary sentence I have ever
written. ‘Never met anybody who liked my books.’ I can see him now,
as he said it, propped up against a pile of cushions in his flat in
Charles Street. The flat in question is at the extreme end of the
street, rather crowded out by its richer relatives, like a raw recruit
who has just shuffled hastily into line, and tries to look as though he
had been there from the beginning.
‘You see,’ he went on, ‘I’m not really a fashion. I’m a disease. An
international disease. Nobody likes me. Most of the people who read me
say, “How horrid, or how silly, or how tiresome.” And yet they read me.
They’ve _got_ to, don’t you see? That’s really the cleverest thing I
did. I saw the rather feverish state of the body politic and social.
And I disseminated my poisonous prose right and left. They did not
catch it at first. A few people who have been thoroughly inoculated by
a habit of taking Wordsworth neat have not caught it even yet. But the
great majority have fallen by the wayside. And how they hate it!’
* * * * *
I don’t like people who do not adore their mothers. It seems a strange
thing to say, just like that, in the middle of this little caper with
Michael Arlen, but it is not quite so irrelevant as you think. Michael
Arlen is a nice young man, and he adores his mother. The first proceeds
of _The Green Hat_ may now be seen round Mrs. Arlen’s neck, in the
shape of a chain of glistening pearls.
‘She reads _The Green Hat_ serially in an Armenian paper published in
Constantinople, which is sent to her in Cheshire,’ he told me. ‘You
see, she hardly speaks a word of English. But,’--and here he looked
almost earnest for a moment--‘I defy anybody to tell me that I write
English like a foreigner.’
He doesn’t. He analysed his style to me as ‘influenced by an early
study of de Quincey, with a side glance at the eighteenth century.’
I think it a very beautiful style. A liqueur style, of course, to be
sipped with discretion. But one does not sneer at yellow chartreuse
because one cannot turn it on from a tap. There is a lingering cadence
about it, a lazy passion, as though he were lying on a sofa by a bowl
of roses and picking them to pieces one by one. I shudder at that awful
simile. But it shall stand. It vaguely expresses what I mean.
I mentioned yellow chartreuse. Immediately it brought into my mind’s
eye the huge yellow Rolls-Royce which he suddenly bought, and equally
suddenly gave away--(to his mother). Somehow that car seemed to help
me to understand him. It was luxurious, and he adores luxury. It was
six inches longer than any other car in London, and who would not, in
their heart of hearts, delight in that distinction? And it had, on the
number plate, M.A. He had taken the car all the way to Manchester to
be registered, in order to have that mark put on it. ‘It is exactly
the sort of car that my sort of success demands,’ he said, a little
wistfully. It was.
I remember driving round and round Hyde Park in this car, on one of
those early summer evenings when one feels one’s whole life has been
devoted to the consumption of strawberries. We drove round until I felt
slightly dizzy. But in spite of the dizziness I remember a great many
things we said, for we were in good form just then, and Michael had
been lying in bed all day, ‘from fatigue.’
‘One day,’ he said, and his eyes were half closed, ‘there will be a
house in a square--fountains and silky animals--women....’
I wondered. Silky animals? Women? Which was which? Or was each,
neither? If you understand me....
‘And,’ he said, ‘I shall go away, sell everything, go right away.’ The
car whirled round a corner. ‘With two innovation trunks.’
We were on a straight piece of road, and my head was clearer.
‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘about _The Green Hat_.’
‘There is nothing to tell.’
‘There is everything to tell about something which makes one a
millionaire.’
‘Ah!’ The Albert Memorial hove in sight, and we were both silent, and
a little awed. Then, ‘It was written in two months. At a place called
Southport, in Lancashire. I wrote solidly every day for ten hours. Lots
of drink and no friends. I would write all the morning. Then, in the
afternoon, I would read what I had written. Then in the evening I would
re-write it again.’
The Albert Memorial had vanished into the distance, as even Albert
Memorials do (which is the consolation of life), and he told me more.
‘And on each new morning,’ he said, ‘I would begin by writing the last
two pages over again, to get me into the mood of the thing. There are a
hundred thousand words in _The Green Hat_.’
‘It makes me feel exceedingly hearty,’ I said, ‘to think that “we
authors”’ (you see, the Albert Memorial was still with us in spirit),
‘are capable of such a physical strain.’
The car whizzed once more round a bend. ‘Look quickly,’ I said. ‘Over
there. A pink chestnut has forgotten the time of year. It ought to have
been over long ago. And look at it now. _Please_....’ I was becoming
agonized.
‘I never look at views,’ he said, examining his small hands with
intense interest.
‘A pink chestnut is not a view. It is an emotion.’
He flicked his fingers, and sighed. ‘Only people,’ he said. ‘And
streets, of course. But I hate views. Going across America I never
looked out of the window. I was too excited by the people inside. Trees
and hills and valleys say nothing to me. Weather says very little to
me. Environment leaves me cold.’
We had whizzed far enough. I called a halt, and I got out. And Michael
Arlen waved his hand with an eighteenth-century grace, the pink
chestnut outlining his head like a halo that has missed its way.
_Au revoir_--you charming person! I seem to see you wandering away from
me, rather inconsequently, down one of the grey, misty streets of the
Mayfair which you love. You make, in some vague way, romance even of
Berkeley Square. I had always regarded it as dull. But to you, it has
a beauty. It tells you so many secrets. And though, in the morning, I
feel that I know the answer to those secrets, at night you touch them
with magic, you colour them with something of your own subtle spirit.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Containing the Hideous Truth about Noel Coward
I should like to draw Noel Coward rather than to talk about him--to
take up my pen and trace, with infinite subtlety, the rather bumpy
forehead, the keen nose, the darting eyes--the mouth, especially the
mouth, which seems constantly on the point of uttering delicious
impudences.
But when I draw people, they are always Queen Victoria. They have
invariably the same dejected eyelids, the same flaccid lips. Even
the addition of a moustache fails to conceal the resemblance. And
though Queen Victoria and Noel Coward have much in common--(e.g., an
invincible determination, and a well-founded conviction that they are
typical of their age)--I must content myself with words, and not with
lines.
I first really began to know him one evening before the production of
_London Calling_. It was a cold night, there had been a party, and, as
far as I remember, a number of us found ourselves in a long, golden
room, faintly fragrant with something of Coty’s. It was late, but
nobody minded, for there was a feeling about the room which was neither
of night nor of day, but of that exquisite indetermination which lulls
the senses into a lazy oblivion. To complete the picture, you must add
an immense couch, covered with green cushions and purple women, and one
of those sleek, black pianos that simply demand to be played upon.
It was played upon, by Noel Coward. I wish I could recapture that
scene--his curious, agile fingers, the husky voice in which he half
sang, half spoke, his lyrics--rather insolently tossing us an
occasional spark of wit, drifting with complete indifference, into a
line of baroque poetry:
‘_Parisian pierrot, society’s hero_....’
And all the time, propped up against the piano, a languid French doll
was regarding him with painted eyes, as though it were saying, ‘_You_
are the only person who understands me here.’
But it wasn’t. I think I understood him, too, rather better than the
purple women. For he was outside this curious and typical scene, as
a spectator, not as a participator. Even though he was the centre
of attraction, he was, in a sense, hovering on the edge of it all,
intensely interested, entirely detached. Somebody would say to him,
‘Isn’t that marvellous?’ And though he replied, ‘_too_ marvellous,’
with exactly the intonation that was required of him, there was a look
in his eyes which suggested that he really meant, ‘It is not marvellous
at all. And you, my dear, are an empty-headed fool for calling it so.’
‘_Parisian pierrot, society’s hero_....’
There is more in those four words than most of the amiable young ladies
who play it in the wrong key would imagine. Something of a sneer, I
believe. I have an imaginary picture in my mind which illustrates the
phrase. The party is over, the last cigarette has burnt itself into an
obscene mess in the ash tray, the roses have drooped their expensive
and artificial heads in a despairing gesture. Only the doll remains
alert, staring in front of it with the same painted eyes. This is the
doll’s hour. And Noel goes up to it, smiling--(I should like to say
‘sardonically,’ but it sounds too like a tailor’s advertisement), and
negligently twitches its hand, and fingers its ruff, and probably, as a
final gesture of contempt, flicks his finger on its stumpy nose.
As a matter of fact, no such touching scene was enacted after this
particular party, for we walked back to my flat together, and there, in
an atmosphere devoid of dolls, in front of one of those gas fires which
look like skulls roasting in hell, I learnt a great deal about Noel
which I had never hitherto suspected.
I learnt, for example, that his first trip to the United States, which
was announced with so harmonious a flourish of trumpets, had been
accomplished on the sum of £50. ‘Nobody would put on any of my plays,’
he said. ‘There was nothing for me to do in England. So I sold some
songs and went to America. I published a book which nobody read. I was
a failure. But--oh--how successful I pretended to be.’
That was typical of Noel. His conceit he reserves only for his public.
For himself and for his friends he has none at all. That bold and
impudent mask with which he covers his real feelings when attacked by
the Press is gently lowered as soon as the last reporter has vanished
through the front door, and with a sigh he returns to the abnormal,
weary of misrepresenting himself to mediocre minds. He is not in the
least affected by the numerous women who powder their noses at his
newly erected shrine. He demands criticism.
One picture of him will always remain in my mind. It was behind the
stage at the Everyman Theatre after the first night of _The Vortex_.
Noel was hunched up in a chair in front of a fire, on which a kettle
was making pleasant domestic noises. His face was still haggard from
the ghastly make-up which he wears in the third Act, and he flaunted
a dressing-gown of flowered silk which I have never ceased to covet.
We were in semi-darkness. As the firelight flickered, so did our
conversation--staccato, a little taut and weary.
‘You’re terribly kind,’ he said. ‘And now please tell me the truth.’
‘I’ve told you nothing but the truth.’
‘The whole truth?’
I laughed. ‘Well--the last Act--the very last few minutes....’
The flowered silk rustled. He was sitting upright.
‘Yes.’
‘I thought it too indeterminate. You plunged us into that terrible
swamp of emotion and you left us there, sticking. I wanted some sort of
sign-post. I didn’t know whether I was going to sink or swim.’
‘I know. You’re absolutely right. I muddled that to-night.’
I thought to myself how infuriated I should have been if anybody in
that triumphant moment had dared to suggest imperfections, especially
if I had asked them to do so.
‘There _is_ a sign-post,’ he went on. ‘Just the words, “we’ll both
try.” I meant to say them very clearly. I always shall in future.’
It is the habit among many dreary young men, whose failure in life may
be measured by the faultless fit of their waistcoats, to croon to each
other: ‘Noel, twenty-five? My dear, he’s at least thirty.’ One has the
impression that their pockets are stuffed with the birth certificates
of their enemies. It is not on the tedious evidence of a birth
certificate that I should accept the evidence of Noel’s youth. There
have been moments when I have felt, although we are about the same age,
that I was old enough to be his grandfather.
One such moment was when we were lunching together and he suddenly
said, ‘I’ve got a secretary!’ He said it with such gusto, such a ring
of glee, that I felt exactly as though some pink and perfect child had
approached me, saying, “Look what _I’ve_ got! And if you wind it up it
will run right across to the fender.’ I am sure that Noel’s secretary
does not need to be wound up.
On another occasion--(I do trust that I am not being impertinent. I am
only trying to put before you the real Noel. If he wished to pose as
a rich dilettante whose first epigrams had echoed under expensive and
ancestral roofs, it would be different). On another occasion, I met
him in the street, strangely enough, opposite a toy shop, and he said,
in an awed whisper, ‘I almost bought a manor house the other day.’
There was something magnificent in that remark. I stood quite still,
slightly pale at the thought, and looked fixedly at one of the most
beautiful golliwogs I have ever seen. ‘I almost bought a manor house.’
That wasn’t the remark of a depraved, doped genius. ‘I almost bought
a golliwog.’ Almost, you note. I knew, and he knew, in that rare and
transient moment, that he could not really mean what he said. It was
only bluff. It was a doll’s house that he was talking about.
That last paragraph is involved, but it is meant to convey to you the
spirit for which nobody ever gives him any credit--the spirit of gay
adventure which is perhaps the most attractive thing about him.
I wish I could be a Boswell, but I am quite sure that I couldn’t. I
should always be writing down my own remarks instead of those of other
people, which is probably what Boswell really did. And so, out of all
the delicious flow of impudences which has sparkled through Noel’s
lips, I can gather up not one single drop.
But at least one thing I must say--that if Noel Coward could fall in
love, he would certainly write a greater play than _The Vortex_, in
the truest sense of that much-abused word. It may sound foolish, but I
should imagine that he found it exceedingly difficult to fall in love.
Love, in the accepted sense of the word, demands quite a great deal
of stupidity on the part of both concerned. Most of us have it. Noel
hasn’t. In the firm contours of his mind there appear none of those
unsuspected cracks through which occasionally the divine foolishness
may escape. It is as though his brain were like a perfect emerald
without a flaw in it, which is a paradox, for as Monsieur Cartier
will tell you, no emerald which does not possess a flaw is perfect.
One day, I believe, he _will_ fall in love, and the prospect is so
intriguing that I could close my eyes and allow my pen to scrawl
ahead indefinitely at the delicious prospect of Noel singing lyrics
(‘as clean as a whistle’) in the scented darkness outside many magic
casements.
And when he does, something amazing is going to happen. For he writes
as a bird flies, swiftly, without looking back. With a bird’s-eye
view, too, of the theatre, which seems to give to his work a poise and
a dexterity which is almost uncanny. He showed me once the original
manuscript of _The Vortex_. The words, lightly written in pencil,
darted down the pages like a flight of swallows. They were eloquent of
the ordered frenzy which produced them.
Finally, when anybody tells me that Noel Coward is ‘decadent,’ I feel
like hitting them across the mouth. Do you realize, you outraged
mothers and fathers of England, who sit back in your stalls deploring
the depravity of the author of _Fallen Angels_, that you are watching
a young man who for sheer pluck can give you all the points in the
game? Is it decadent to go on the stage as a little boy, and fight,
and fight, and fight, when your own sons are learning to be fools in
the numerous academies for English gentlemen which still mysteriously
flourish in our midst?
Is it decadent to go on writing, without money, without encouragement,
with very few friends, always in the dim hope that one day, perhaps,
a play may be produced? And when that play is produced, to see it a
commercial failure--and the next play too? And when success comes, at
the age of twenty-five, to work harder than ever, to stand up to the
critics and to say, ‘I don’t care a damn’? Is that decadent? Or are you
merely being slightly more silly than usual?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
In which I allow Myself to be entirely Sentimental
And thus, abruptly, I end. A line drawn, a cigarette thrown out of an
open window, a pile of manuscript pushed into the corner of one’s desk,
waiting to be sent to the typist.
And thus, I suppose, youth ends. A line drawn under one’s eyes, a
sudden realization, as one is laughing or drinking, that the ‘stuff
which will not endure’ has worn itself threadbare. To what purpose? God
alone knows. Not I.
I have enjoyed the writing of this book far too much to indulge in
any sudden moralizations. But I know my generation, this post-war
generation which has so baffled the middle-aged onlookers, who, from
the gallery, have watched the dance whirling beneath. And I know that
the one thing of which we are always accused--that we live for the
moment only--is the one thing of which we are disastrously innocent.
We are none of us living for the moment. We are far too self-conscious
for that. We have formulated a creed of which the first principle is
that happiness, as an actual emotion, does not exist. ‘Happiness,’ we
proclaim, ‘consists either in looking forward to things which will
never happen or in remembering things which never have happened.’ We
are therefore young only as long as we can cheat ourselves, as long
as we can go on dressing the future in bright garments, and spinning
a web of illusion over the past. But in both cases the kind stuff of
imagination has to be produced out of our innermost cells, like spiders
forced every day to spin two webs. The process is apt to be exhausting.
And yet--we are constantly forgetting our philosophy. A bright summer
morning will do it. An apple tree in fluffy and adorable bloom will do
it. Sometimes (for those of us who are most depraved), pink foie gras
will do it. But even then, we will not allow that we are happy. We only
admit the possibility of happiness--i.e., that there may be some form
of heaven, or even a mildly exhilarating hell.
Again--I have done. Twelve o’clock strikes. There should really be
slow music playing outside my window, so that I might work myself into
a frenzy of pathos at the thought that another day has arrived to
carry me on to middle-age. I should rather like to stay, just a little
longer. But then--better not. Accept the joke of life for what it is
worth. It is not such a very brilliant one, after all. And was there
not a man, called Browning, who wrote:
‘Grow old along with me,
The best is yet to be.’?
_The End_
Transcriber's Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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