GETTING ON WITH THE WAR
The floors of the Reynolds Galleries were covered with some hundreds
of very well-dressed and very expensively-dressed women and some
scores of men. The walls were covered with a loan collection of
oil-paintings, water-colour drawings, and etchings--English and
French, but chiefly English. A very large proportion of the pictures
were portraits of women done by a select group of very expensive
painters in the highest vogue. These portraits were the main
attraction of the elegant crowd, which included many of the sitters;
as for the latter, they failed to hide under an unconvincing mask of
indifference their curiosity as to their own effectiveness in a frame.
The portraits for the most part had every quality save that of
sincerity. They were transcendantly adroit and they reeked of talent.
They were luxurious, refined, sensual, titillating, exquisite, tender,
compact, of striking poses and subtle new tones. And while the heads
were well finished and instantly recognisable as likenesses, the
impressionism of the hands and of the provocative draperies showed
that the artists had fully realised the necessity of being modern. The
mischief and the damnation were that the sitters liked them because
they produced in the sitters the illusion that the sitters were really
what the sitters wanted to be, and what indeed nearly every woman in
the galleries wanted to be; and the ideal of the sitters was a low
ideal. The portraits flattered; but only a few guessed that they
flattered ignobly; scarcely any even of the artists guessed that.
The portraits were a success; the exhibition was a success; and all
the people at the private view justly felt that they were part of and
contributing to the success. And though seemingly the aim of everybody
was to prove to everybody else that no war, not the greatest war,
could disturb the appearances of social life in London, yet many were
properly serious and proud in their seriousness. It was the autumn of
1915. British troops were triumphantly on the road to Kut, and British
forces were approaching decisive victory in Gallipoli. The Russians
had turned on their pursuers. The French had initiated in Champagne
an offensive so dramatic that it was regarded as the beginning of the
end. And the British on their left, in the taking of Loos and Hill 70,
had achieved what might have been regarded as the greatest success on
the Western Front, had it not been for the rumour, current among the
informed personages at the Reynolds Galleries, that recent bulletins
had been reticent to the point of deception and that, in fact, Hill
70 had ceased to be ours a week earlier. Further, Zeppelins had raided
London and killed and wounded numerous Londoners, and all present in
the Reynolds Galleries were aware, from positive statements in the
newspapers, that whereas German morale was crumbling, all Londoners,
including themselves, had behaved with the most marvellous stoic calm
in the ordeal of the Zeppelins.
The assembly had a further and particular reason for serious pride.
It was getting on with the war, and in a most novel way. Private views
are customarily views gratis. But the entry to this private view cost
a guinea, and there was absolutely no free list. The guineas were
going to the support of the Lechford Hospitals in France. The happy
idea was G.J.'s own, and Lady Queenie Paulle and her mother had taken
the right influential measures to ensure its grandiose execution. A
queen had visited the private view for half an hour. Thus all the very
well-dressed and very expensively-dressed women, and all the men who
admired and desired them as they moved, in voluptuous perfection, amid
dazzling pictures with the soft illumination of screened skylights
above and the reflections in polished parquet below--all of both sexes
were comfortably conscious of virtue in the undoubted fact that they
were helping to support two renowned hospitals where at that very
moment dissevered legs and arms were being thrown into buckets.
In a little room at the end of the galleries was a small but choice
collection of the etchings of Félicien Rops: a collection for
connoisseurs, as the critics were to point out in the newspapers the
next morning. For Rops, though he had an undeniable partiality for
subjects in which ugly and prurient women displayed themselves in
nothing but the inessentials of costume, was a classic before whom it
was necessary to bow the head in homage.
G.J. was in this room in company with a young and handsome Staff
officer, Lieutenant Molder, home on convalescent leave from Suvla Bay.
Mr. Molder had left Oxford in order to join the army; he had behaved
admirably, and well earned the red shoulder-ornaments which pure
accident had given him. He was a youth of artistic and literary
tastes, with genuine ambitions quite other than military, and after a
year of horrible existence in which he had hungered for the arts
more than for anything, he was solacing and renewing himself in the
contemplation of all the masterpieces that London could show. He
greatly esteemed G.J.'s connoisseurship, and G.J. had taken him in
hand. At the close of a conscientious and highly critical round of
the galleries they had at length reached the Rops room, and they
were discussing every aspect of Rops except his lubricity, when Lady
Queenie Paulle approached them from behind. Molder was the first to
notice her and turn. He blushed.
"Well, Queen," said G.J., who had already had several conversations
with her in the galleries that day and on the previous days of
preparation.
She replied:
"Well, I hope you're satisfied with the results of your beautiful
idea."
The young woman, slim and pale, had long since gone out of mourning.
She was most brilliantly attired, and no detail lacked to the
perfection of her modish outfit. Indeed, just as she was, she would
have made a marvellous mannequin, except for the fact that mannequins
are not usually allowed to perfume themselves in business hours. Her
thin, rather high voice, which somehow matched her complexion and
carriage, had its customary tone of amiable insolence, and her tired,
drooping eyes their equivocal glance, as she faced the bearded and
grave middle-aged bachelor and the handsome, muscular boy; even the
boy was older than Queen, yet she seemed to condescend to them as if
she were an immortal from everlasting to everlasting and could teach
both of them all sorts of useful things about life. Nobody could have
guessed from that serene demeanour that her self-satisfaction was
marred by any untoward detail whatever. Yet it was. All her frocks
were designed to conceal a serious defect which seriously disturbed
her: she was low-breasted.
G.J. said bluntly:
"May I present Mr. Molder?--Lady Queenie Paulle."
And he said to himself, secretly annoyed:
"Dash the infernal chit. That's what she's come for. Now she's got
it."
She gave the slightest, dubious nod to Molder, who, having faced
fighting Turks with an equanimity equal to Queenie's own, was yet
considerably flurried by the presence and the gaze of this legendary
girl. Queenie, enjoying his agitation, but affecting to ignore him,
began to talk quickly in the vein of exclusive gossip; she mentioned
in a few seconds the topics of the imminent entry of Bulgaria into
the war, the maturing Salonika expedition, the confidential terrible
utterances of K. on recruiting, and, of course, the misfortune (due to
causes which Queenie had at her finger-ends) round about Loos. Then
in regard to the last she suddenly added, quite unjustifiably implying
that the two phenomena were connected: "You know, mother's hospitals
are frightfully full just now.... But, of course, you do know. That's
why I'm so specially glad to-day's such a success."
Thus in a moment, and with no more than ten phrases, she had conveyed
the suggestion that while mere soldiers, ageing men-about-town, and
the ingenuous mass of the public might and did foolishly imagine the
war to be a simple affair, she herself, by reason of her intelligence
and her private sources of knowledge, had a full, unique apprehension
of its extremely complex and various formidableness. G.J. resented the
familiar attitude, and he resented Queenie's very appearance and the
appearance of the entire opulent scene. In his head at that precise
instant were not only the statistics of mortality and major operations
at the Lechford Hospitals, but also the astounding desolating tales of
the handsome boy about folly, ignorance, stupidity and martyrdoms at
Suvla.
He said, with the peculiar polite restraint that in him masked emotion
and acrimony:
"Yes, I'm glad it's a success. But the machinery of it is perhaps just
slightly out of proportion to the results. If people had given to
the hospitals what they have spent on clothes to come here and what
they've paid painters so that they could see themselves on the walls,
we should have made twenty times as much as we have made--a hundred
times as much. Why, good god! Queen, the whole afternoon's takings
wouldn't buy what you're wearing now, to say nothing of the five
hundred other women here." His eye rested on the badge of her
half-brother's regiment which she had had reproduced in diamonds.
At this juncture he heard himself addressed in a hearty, heavy voice
as "G.J., old soul." An officer with the solitary crown on his
sleeve, bald, stoutish, but probably not more than forty-five, touched
him--much gentler than he spoke--on the shoulder.
"Craive, my son! You back! Well, it's startling to see you at a
picture-show, anyhow."
The Major, saluting Lady Queenie as a distant acquaintance, retorted:
"Morally, you owe me a guinea, my dear G.J. I called at the flat, and
the young woman there told me you'd surely be here."
While they were talking G.J. could hear Queenie Paulle and Molder:
"Where are you back from?"
"Suvla, Lady Queenie."
"You must be oozing with interest and actuality. Tell G.J. to bring
you to tea one day, quite, quite soon, will you? _I_'ll tell him."
And Molder murmured something fatuously conventional. G.J. showed
decorously that he had caught his own name. Whereupon Lady Queenie,
instead of naming a day for tea, addressed him almost bitterly:
"G.J., what's come over you? What in the name of Pan do you suppose
all you males are fighting each other for?" She paused effectively.
"Good god! If I began to dress like a housemaid the Germans would
be in London in a month. Our job as women is quite delicate
enough without you making it worse by any damned sentimental
superficiality.... I want you to bring Mr. Molder to tea _to-morrow_,
and if you can't come he must come alone...."
With a last strange look at Molder she retired into the glitter of the
crowded larger room.
"She been driving any fresh men to suicide lately?" Major Craive
demanded acidly under his breath.
G.J. raised his eyebrows.
Then: "That's not _you_, Frankie!" said the Major with a start of
recognition towards the Staff lieutenant.
"Yes, sir," said Molder.
They shook hands. At the previous Christmas they had lain out together
on the cliffs of the east coast in wild weather, waiting to repel a
phantom army of thirty thousand Germans.
"It was the red hat put me off," the Major explained.
"Not my fault, sir," Molder smiled.
"Devilish glad to see you, my boy."
G.J. murmured to Molder:
"You don't want to go and have tea with her, do you?"
And Molder answered, with the somewhat fatuous, self-conscious
grin that no amount of intelligence can keep out of the face of a
good-looking fellow who knows that he has made an impression:
"Well, I don't know--"
G.J. raised his eyebrows again, but with indulgence, and winked at
Craive.
The Major shut his lips tight, then stood with his mouth open for a
second or two in the attitude of a man suddenly receiving the onset of
a great and original idea.
"She's right, hang it all!" he exclaimed. "She's right! Of course she
is! Why, what's all this"--he waved an arm at the whole scene--"what's
all this but sex? Look at 'em! And look at their portraits! You aren't
going to tell me! What's the good of pretending? Hang it all, when my
own aunt comes down to breakfast in a low-cut blouse that would have
given her fits even in the evening ten years ago!... And jolly fine
too. I'm all for it. The more of it the merrier--that's what I say.
And don't any of you high-brows go trying to alter it. If you do I
retire, and you can defend your own bally Front."
"Craive," said G.J. affectionately, "until you and Queen came along
Molder and I really thought we were at a picture exhibition, and we
still think so, don't we, Molder?" The Lieutenant nodded. "Now, as
you're here, just let me show you one or two things."
"Oh!" breathed the Major, "have pity. It's not any canvas woman that
I want--By Jove!" He caught sight of an invention of Félicien Rops, a
pig on the end of a string, leading, or being driven by, a woman who
wore nothing but stockings, boots and a hat. "What do you call that?"
"My dear fellow, that's one of the most famous etchings in the world."
"Is it?" the Major said. "Well, I'm not surprised. There's more in
this business than I imagined." He set himself to examine all the
exhibits by Rops, and when he had finished he turned to G.J.
"Listen here, G.J. We're going to make a night of it. I've decided on
that."
"Sorry, dear heart," said G.J. "I'm engaged with Molder to-night. We
shall have some private chamber-music at my rooms--just for ourselves.
You ought to come. Much better for your health."
"What time will the din be over?"
"About eleven."
"Now I say again--listen here. Let's talk business. I'll come to your
chamber-music. I've been before, and survived, and I'll come again.
But afterwards you'll come with me to the Guinea-Fowl."
"But, my dear chap, I can't throw Molder out into Vigo Street at
eleven o'clock," G.J. protested, startled by the blunt mention of the
notorious night-club in the young man's presence.
"Naturally you can't. He'll come along with us. Frankie and I have
nearly fallen into the North Sea or German Ocean together, haven't we,
Frankie? It'll be my show. And I'll turn up with the stuff--one, two
or three pretty ladies according as your worship wishes."
G.J. was now more than startled; he was shocked; he felt his cheeks
reddening. It was the presence of Molder that confused him. Never had
he talked to Molder on any subjects but the arts, and if they had once
or twice lighted on the topic of women it was only in connection with
the arts. He was really interested in and admired Molder's unusual
aesthetic intelligence, and he had done what he could to foster it,
and he immensely appreciated Molder's youthful esteem for himself.
Moreover, he was easily old enough to be Molder's father. It seemed
to him that though two generations might properly mingle in anything
else, they ought not to mingle in licence. Craive's crudity was
extraordinary.
"See here!" Craive went on, serious and determined. "You know the sort
of thing I've come from. I got four days unexpected. I had to run down
to my uncle's. The old things would have died if I hadn't. To-morrow I
go back. This is my last night. I haven't had a scratch up to now.
But my turn's coming, you bet. Next week I may be in heaven or hell or
anywhere, or blind for life or without my legs or any damn thing you
please. But I'm going to have to-night, and you're going to join in."
G.J. saw the look of simple, half-worshipful appeal that sometimes
came into Craive's rather ingenuous face. He well knew that look, and
it always touched him. He remembered certain descriptive letters
which he had received from Craive at the Front,--they corresponded
faithfully. He could not have explained the intimacy of his relations
with Craive. They had begun at a club, over cards. The two had little
in common--Craive was a stockbroker when world-wars did not happen
to be in progress--but G.J. greatly liked him because, with all his
crudity, he was such a decent, natural fellow, so kind-hearted,
so fresh and unassuming. And Craive on his part had developed an
admiration for G.J. which G.J. was quite at a loss to account for. The
one clue to the origin of the mysterious attachment between them had
been a naive phrase which he had once overheard Craive utter to a
mutual acquaintance: "Old G.J.'s so subtle, isn't he?"
G.J. said to himself, reconsidering the proposal:
"And why on earth not?"
And then aloud, soothingly, to Craive:
"All right! All right!"
The Major brightened and said to Molder:
"You'll come, of course?"
"Oh, rather!" answered Molder, quite simply.
And G.J., again to himself, said:
"I am a simpleton."
The Major's pleading, and the spectacle of the two officers with their
precarious hold on life, humiliated G.J. as well as touched him. And,
if only in order to avoid the momentary humiliation, he would have
been well content to be able to roll back his existence and to have
had a military training and to be with them in the sacred and proud
uniform.
"Now listen here!" said the Major. "About the aforesaid pretty
ladies--"
There they stood together in the corner, hiding several of Rops's
eccentricities, ostensibly discussing art, charity, world-politics,
the strategy of war, the casualty lists.