Forgive me for this rotten series of scraps and post-cards, but I’m a
lazy devil, and there hasn’t been a place to sit down in for the last
fortnight. Lathom’s things are all over the place, and when I fling
myself into a chair in exhaustion, after hours of shifting furniture,
I’m sure to get up with one of his tubes of Permanent Blue adhering to
my pants.
This place isn’t too bad—rather Bayswatery, but there is a good north
light for Lathom’s doings, and that is the essential. We have the two
top floors in this mid-Victorian skyscraper, and share the hall and
staircase with the people downstairs, which is rather a blight on our
young lives, but I daresay we shall survive it.
Unfortunately, Lathom, who is one of those companionable blighters, has
gone and struck up an acquaintance with the Harrisons, and yesterday
evening I was hauled down to see them. Apparently Mr. H. goes in for
dabbling in water-colours, and wanted Lathom’s advice about some
lighting for his studio. Lathom grumbled a good deal, but I told him it
was his own fault if he would go about being so chatty.
I didn’t think much of Mrs. H—she’s a sort of suburban vamp, an
ex-typist or something, and entirely wrapped up, I should say, in her
own attractions, but she’s evidently got her husband by the short hairs.
Not good-looking, but full of S.A. and all that. He is a cut above her,
I imagine, and at least twenty years older; small, thin, rather
stooping, goatee beard, gold specs. And wears his forehead well over the
top of his head. He has a decentish post of some kind with a firm of
civil engineers. I gather she is his second wife, and that he has a son
_en premières noces_, also an engineer, now building a bridge in Central
Africa and doing rather well. The old boy is not a bad old bird, but an
alarming bore on the subject of Art with a capital A. We had to go
through an exhibition of his masterpieces—Devonshire lanes and nice
little bits in the Cotswolds, with trees and cottages. Lathom stuck it
very well, and said they were very nice, which is his way of expressing
utter damnation—but Harrison didn’t know that, so they got on together
like a house afire.
They’ve got an appalling sitting-room, all arty stuff from Tottenham
Court Road, with blue and mauve cushions, and everything ghastly about
it—like Ye Olde Oake Tea-Roomes. Harrison is fearfully proud of his
wife’s taste, and played showman rather pathetically. They keep a
“lady-help”—they would!—a dreadful middle-aged female with a
come-hither eye. She cornered me at the front door the other morning,
just as I was popping out for my daily dozen round the houses. She was
prowling round the hall in rose-pink pyjamas and a pale-blue _négligé_,
pretending to take in the milk. I dawdled on the stairs as long as I
could, to give her a chance to run to cover, but as she appeared to be
determined, and the situation was becoming rather absurd, I marched out,
and was, of course, involved in a conversation. I made myself as
repellent as I could, but the good lady’s curiosity would take no
denial. Last night was like a friendly evening with the Grand
Inquisitor. I told her all she wanted to know about my income and
prospects and family, and Lathom’s ditto so far as I knew them, and by
that time she was chatting so archly (lovely word!) about the young
ladies of the neighbourhood that I thought it best just to mention that
I was engaged. That worked her up into still greater excitement, but I
didn’t tell her much, Bungie, old dear. I’ve got a sort of weakness
about you, though you mightn’t think it, my child, so I said nothing.
Hadn’t I got a photograph? No, I didn’t approve of photographs. Well, of
course, they were only mechanical, weren’t they? Hadn’t Mr. Lathom
painted a portrait of my fiancée? I said that, though I had few
illusions about any of my belongings, I couldn’t expose you to the
ordeal of being painted by Lathom. So she said how like a man to talk of
his belongings, and she supposed Mr. Lathom was very Modern (capital M).
I said yes, terrifically so, and that he always painted his sitters with
green mouths and their noses all askew. So she said she supposed I wrote
poems to you instead. I replied that poems to one’s fiancée were a
little old-fashioned, didn’t she think so, and she agreed, and said,
“What was the title of my next volume?” So I said at random “Spawn,”
which I thought was rather good for the spur of the moment, and it
rather shut her up, because she wasn’t quite sure of the right answer,
and just said that that sounded very modern too, and she hoped I would
present her with a copy when it was printed. Then I got reckless, and
said I feared it never would be printed, because Jix had his eye on me
and opened all my letters to my publishers. You’d adore these people, my
dear—they are like something out of one of your own books. How is the
new work getting on?
I must stop now, old thing: I’ve been quill-driving all day on the
_Life_, and I’m just about dead. But I had to write you some sort of
yarn, just to show I hadn’t been and gone and deserted you.
Yours, Bungie, if indeed anything of one’s self can ever be anybody
else’s which, as an up-to-date young woman, you will conscientiously
doubt, but, at any rate, with the usual damned feeling of incompleteness
in your absence, yours, blast you! yours,