pen--with a Relief nib he would be able to go on for hours without
getting tired--and a large square sheet of writing-paper.
"HATCH HOUSE,
BLAYBURY,
WILTS.
Station: Cogham, 3 miles; Nobes Monacorum, 4½ miles."
Stupid of people to have their stationery printed in red, when black
or blue is so much nicer! He inked over the letters.
He held up the paper to the light; there was a watermark, "Pimlico
Bond." What an admirable name for the hero of a novel! Pimlico Bond.
. . .
"There's be-eef in the la-arder
And du-ucks in the pond;
Crying dilly dilly, dilly dilly . . ."
He bit the end of his pen. "What I want to get," he said to himself,
"is something very hard, very external. Intense emotion, but one will
somehow have got outside it." He made a movement of hands, arms, and
shoulders, tightening his muscles in an effort to express to himself
physically that hardness and tightness and firmness of style after
which he was struggling!
He began to draw on his virgin paper. A woman, naked, one arm lifted
over her head, so that it pulled up her breast by that wonderful
curving muscle that comes down from the shoulder. The inner surface of
the thighs, remember, is slightly concave. The feet, seen from the
front, are always a difficulty.
It would never do to leave that about. What would the servants think?
He turned the nipples into eyes, drew heavy lines for nose, mouth, and
chin, slopped on the ink thick; it made a passable face now--though an
acute observer might have detected the original nudity. He tore it up
into very small pieces.
A crescendo booming filled the house. It was the gong. He looked at
his watch. Lunch-time, and he had done nothing. O God! . . .
III
IT was dinner-time on the last evening of Guy's leave. The uncovered
mahogany table was like a pool of brown unruffled water within whose
depths flowers and the glinting shapes of glass and silver hung dimly
reflected. Mr. Petherton sat at the head of the board, flanked by his
brother Roger and Jacobsen. Youth, in the persons of Marjorie, Guy,
and George White, had collected at the other end. They had reached the
stage of dessert.
"This is excellent port," said Roger, sleek and glossy like a well-fed
black cob under his silken clerical waistcoat. He was a strong,
thick-set man of about fifty, with a red neck as thick as his head.
His hair was cropped with military closeness; he liked to set a good
example to the boys, some of whom showed distressing "æsthetic"
tendencies and wore their hair long.
"I'm glad you like it. I mayn't touch it myself, of course. Have
another glass." Alfred Petherton's face wore an expression of
dyspeptic melancholy. He was wishing he hadn't taken quite so much of
that duck.
"Thank you, I will." Roger took the decanter with a smile of
satisfaction. "The tired schoolmaster is worthy of his second glass.
White, you look rather pale; I think you must have another." Roger had
a hearty, jocular manner, calculated to prove to his pupils that he
was not one of the slimy sort of parsons, not a Creeping Jesus.
There was an absorbing conversation going on at the youthful end of
the table. Secretly irritated at having been thus interrupted in the
middle of it, White turned round and smiled vaguely at Roger.
"Oh, thank you, sir," he said, and pushed his glass forward to be
filled. The "sir" slipped out unawares; it was, after all, such a
little while since he had been a schoolboy under Roger's dominion.
"One is lucky," Roger went on seriously, "to get any port wine at all
now. I'm thankful to say I bought ten dozen from my old college some
years ago to lay down; otherwise I don't know what I should do. My
wine merchant tells me he couldn't let me have a single bottle.
Indeed, he offered to buy some off me, if I'd sell. But I wasn't
having any. A bottle in the cellar is worth ten shillings in the
pocket these days. I always say that port has become a necessity now
one gets so little meat. Lambourne! you are another of our brave
defenders; you deserve a second glass."
"No, thanks," said Guy, hardly looking up. "I've had enough." He went
on talking to Marjorie--about the different views of life held by the
French and the Russians.
Roger helped himself to cherries. "One has to select them carefully,"
he remarked for the benefit of the unwillingly listening George.
"There is nothing that gives you such stomach-aches as unripe
cherries."
"I expect you're glad, Mr. Petherton, that holidays have begun at
last?" said Jacobsen.
"Glad? I should think so. One is utterly dead beat at the end of the
summer term. Isn't one, White?"
White had taken the opportunity to turn back again and listen to Guy's
conversation; recalled, like a dog who has started off on a forbidden
scent, he obediently assented that one did get tired at the end of the
summer term.
"I suppose," said Jacobsen, "you still teach the same old
things--Cæsar, Latin verses, Greek grammar, and the rest? We Americans
can hardly believe that all that still goes on."
"Thank goodness," said Roger, "we still hammer a little solid stuff
into them. But there's been a great deal of fuss lately about new
curriculums and so forth. They do a lot of science now and things of
that kind, but I don't believe the children learn anything at all.
It's pure waste of time."
"So is all education, I dare say," said Jacobsen lightly.
"Not if you teach them discipline. That's what's wanted--discipline.
Most of these little boys need plenty of beating, and they don't get
enough now. Besides, if you can't hammer knowledge in at their heads,
you can at least beat a little in at their tails."
"You're very ferocious, Roger," said Mr. Petherton, smiling. He was
feeling better; the duck was settling down.
"No, it's the vital thing. The best thing the war has brought us is
discipline. The country had got slack and wanted tightening up."
Roger's face glowed with zeal.
From the other end of the table Guy's voice could be heard saying, "Do
you know César Franck's 'Dieu s'avance à travers la lande'? It's one
of the finest bits of religious music I know."
Mr. Petherton's face lighted up; he leaned forward. "No," he said,
throwing his answer unexpectedly into the midst of the young people's
conversation. "I don't know it; but do you know this? Wait a minute."
He knitted his brows, and his lips moved as though he were trying to
recapture a formula. "Ah, I've got it. Now, can you tell me this? The
name of what famous piece of religious music do I utter when I order
an old carpenter, once a Liberal but now a renegade to Conservatism,
to make a hive for bees?"
Guy gave it up; his guardian beamed delightedly.
"Hoary Tory, oh, Judas! Make a bee-house," he said. "Do you see?
Oratorio _Judas Maccabeus._"
Guy could have wished that this bit of flotsam from Mr. Petherton's
sportive youth had not been thus washed up at his feet. He felt that
he had been peeping indecently close into the dark backward and abysm
of time.
"That was a good one," Mr. Petherton chuckled. "I must see if I can
think of some more."
Roger, who was not easily to be turned away from his favourite topic,
waited till this irrelevant spark of levity had quite expired, and
continued: "It's a remarkable and noticeable fact that you never seem
to get discipline combined with the teaching of science or modern
languages. Who ever heard of a science master having a good house at a
school? Scientists' houses are always bad."
"How very strange!" said Jacobsen.
"Strange, but a fact. It seems to me a great mistake to give them
houses at all if they can't keep discipline. And then there's the
question of religion. Some of these men never come to chapel except
when they're on duty. And then, I ask you, what happens when they
prepare their boys for Confirmation? Why, I've known boys come to me
who were supposed to have been prepared by one or other of these men,
and, on asking them, I've found that they know nothing whatever about
the most solemn facts of the Eucharist.--May I have some more of those
excellent cherries please, White?--Of course, I do my best in such
cases to tell the boys what I feel personally about these solemn
things. But there generally isn't the time; one's life is so crowded;
and so they go into Confirmation with only the very haziest knowledge
of what it's all about. You see how absurd it is to let anyone but the
classical men have anything to do with the boys' lives."
"Shake it well, dear," Mr. Petherton was saying to his daughter, who
had come with his medicine.
"What is that stuff?" asked Roger.
"Oh, it's merely my peptones. I can hardly digest at all without it,
you know."
"You have all my sympathies. My poor colleague, Flexner, suffers from
chronic colitis. I can't imagine how he goes on with his work."
"No, indeed. I find I can do nothing strenuous."
Roger turned and seized once more on the unhappy George. "White," he
said, "let this be a lesson to you. Take care of your inside; it's the
secret of a happy old age."
Guy looked up quickly. "Don't worry about his old age," he said in a
strange harsh voice, very different from the gentle, elaborately
modulated tone in which he generally spoke. "He won't have an old age.
His chances against surviving are about fourteen to three if the war
goes on another year."
"Come," said Roger, "don't let's be pessimistic."
"But I'm not. I assure you, I'm giving you a most rosy view of
George's chance of reaching old age."
It was felt that Guy's remarks had been in poor taste. There was a
silence; eyes floated vaguely and uneasily, trying not to encounter
one another. Roger cracked a nut loudly. When he had sufficiently
relished the situation, Jacobsen changed the subject by remarking:
"That was a fine bit of work by our destroyers this morning, wasn't
it?"
"It did one good to read about it," said Mr. Petherton. "Quite the
Nelson touch."
Roger raised his glass. "Nelson!" he said, and emptied it at a gulp.
"What a man! I am trying to persuade the Headmaster to make Trafalgar
Day a holiday. It is the best way of reminding boys of things of that
sort."
"A curiously untypical Englishman to be a national hero, isn't he?"
said Jacobsen. "So emotional and lacking in Britannic phlegm."
The Reverend Roger looked grave. "There's one thing I've never been
able to understand about Nelson, and that is, how a man who was so
much the soul of honour and of patriotism could have been--er--immoral
with Lady Hamilton. I know people say that it was the custom of the
age, that these things meant nothing then, and so forth; but all the
same, I repeat, I cannot understand how a man who was so intensely a
patriotic Englishman could have done such a thing."
"I fail to see what patriotism has got to do with it," said Guy.
Roger fixed him with his most pedagogic look and said slowly and
gravely, "Then I am sorry for you. I shouldn't have thought it was
necessary to tell an Englishman that purity of morals is a national
tradition: you especially, a public-school man."
"Let us go and have a hundred up at billiards," said Mr. Petherton.
"Roger, will you come? And you, George, and Guy?"
"I'm so incredibly bad," Guy insisted, "I'd really rather not."
"So am I," said Jacobsen.
"Then, Marjorie, you must make the fourth."
The billiard players trooped out; Guy and Jacobsen were left alone,
brooding over the wreckage of dinner. There was a long silence. The
two men sat smoking, Guy sitting in a sagging, crumpled attitude, like
a half-empty sack abandoned on a chair, Jacobsen very upright and
serene.
"Do you find you can suffer fools gladly?" asked Guy abruptly.
"Perfectly gladly."
"I wish I could. The Reverend Roger has a tendency to make my blood
boil."
"But such a good soul," Jacobsen insisted.
"I dare say, but a monster all the same."
"You should take him more calmly. I make a point of never letting
myself be moved by external things. I stick to my writing and
thinking. Truth is beauty, beauty is truth, and so forth: after all,
they're the only things of solid value." Jacobsen looked at the young
man with a smile as he said these words. There is no doubt, he said to
himself, that that boy ought to have gone into business; what a
mistake this higher education is, to be sure.
"Of course, they're the only things," Guy burst out passionately. "You
can afford to say so because you had the luck to be born twenty years
before I was, and with five thousand miles of good deep water between
you and Europe. Here am I, called upon to devote my life, in a very
different way from which you devote yours to truth and beauty--to
devote my life to--well, what? I'm not quite sure, but I preserve a
touching faith that it is good. And you tell me to ignore external
circumstances. Come and live in Flanders a little and try . . ." He
launched forth into a tirade about agony and death and blood and
putrefaction.
"What is one to do?" he concluded despairingly. "What the devil is
right? I had meant to spend my life writing and thinking, trying to
create something beautiful or discover something true. But oughtn't
one, after all, if one survives, to give up everything else and try to
make this hideous den of a world a little more habitable?"
"I think you can take it that a world which has let itself be
dragooned into this criminal folly is pretty hopeless. Follow your
inclinations; or, better, go into a bank and make a lot of money."
Guy burst out laughing, rather too loudly. "Admirable, admirable!" he
said. "To return to our old topic of fools: frankly, Jacobsen, I
cannot imagine why you should elect to pass your time with my dear old
guardian. He's a charming old man, but one must admit----" He waved
his hand.
"One must live somewhere," said Jacobsen. "I find your guardian a most
interesting man to be with.--Oh, do look at that dog!" On the
hearth-rug Marjorie's little Pekingese, Confucius, was preparing to
lie down and go to sleep. He went assiduously through the solemn farce
of scratching the floor, under the impression, no doubt, that he was
making a comfortable nest to lie in. He turned round and round,
scratching earnestly and methodically. Then he lay down, curled
himself up in a ball, and was asleep in the twinkling of an eye.
"Isn't that too wonderfully human!" exclaimed Jacobsen delightedly.
Guy thought he could see now why Jacobsen enjoyed living with Mr.
Petherton. The old man was so wonderfully human.
* * * * *
Later in the evening, when the billiards was over and Mr. Petherton
had duly commented on the anachronism of introducing the game into
Anthony and Cleopatra, Guy and Marjorie went for a stroll in the
garden. The moon had risen above the trees and lit up the front of the
house with its bright pale light that could not wake the sleeping
colours of the world.
"Moonlight is the proper architectural light," said Guy, as they stood
looking at the house. The white light and the hard black shadows
brought out all the elegance of its Georgian symmetry.
"Look, here's the ghost of a rose." Marjorie touched a big cool
flower, which one guessed rather than saw to be red, a faint equivocal
lunar crimson. "And, oh, smell the tobacco-plant flowers. Aren't they
delicious!"
"I always think there's something very mysterious about perfume
drifting through the dark like this. It seems to come from some
perfectly different immaterial world, peopled by unembodied
sensations, phantom passions. Think of the spiritual effect of incense
in a dark church. One isn't surprised that people have believed in the
existence of the soul."
They walked on in silence. Sometimes, accidentally, his hand would
brush against hers in the movement of their march. Guy felt an
intolerable emotion of expectancy, akin to fear. It made him feel
almost physically sick.
"Do you remember," he said abruptly, "that summer holiday our families
spent together in Wales? It must have been nineteen four or five. I
was ten and you were eight or thereabouts."
"Of course I remember," cried Marjorie. "Everything. There was that
funny little toy railway from the slate quarries."
"And do you remember our gold-mine? All those tons of yellow ironstone
we collected and hoarded in a cave, fully believing they were nuggets.
How incredibly remote it seems!"
"And you had a wonderful process by which you tested whether the stuff
was real gold or not. It all passed triumphantly as genuine, I
remember!"
"Having that secret together first made us friends, I believe."
"I dare say," said Marjorie. "Fourteen years ago--what a time! And you
began educating me even then: all that stuff you told me about
gold-mining, for instance."
"Fourteen years," Guy repeated reflectively, "and I shall be going out
again to-morrow . . ."
"Don't speak about it. I am so miserable when you're away." She
genuinely forgot what a delightful summer she had had, except for the
shortage of tennis.
"We must make this the happiest hour of our lives. Perhaps it may be
the last we shall be together." Guy looked up at the moon, and he
perceived, with a sudden start, that it was a sphere islanded in an
endless night, not a flat disk stuck on a wall not so very far away.
It filled him with an infinite dreariness; he felt too insignificant
to live at all.
"Guy, you mustn't talk like that," said Marjorie appealingly.
"We've got twelve hours," said Guy in a meditative voice, "but that's
only clock-work time. You can give an hour the quality of
everlastingness, and spend years which are as though they had never
been. We get our immortality here and now; it's a question of quality,
not of quantity. I don't look forward to golden harps or anything of
that sort. I know that when I am dead, I shall be dead; there isn't
any afterwards. If I'm killed, my immortality will be in your memory.
Perhaps, too, somebody will read the things I've written, and in his
mind I shall survive, feebly and partially. But in your mind I shall
survive intact and whole."
"But I'm sure we shall go on living after death. It can't be the end."
Marjorie was conscious that she had heard those words before. Where?
Oh yes, it was earnest Evangeline who had spoken them at the school
debating society.
"I wouldn't count on it," Guy replied, with a little laugh. "You may
get such a disappointment when you die." Then in an altered voice, "I
don't want to die. I hate and fear death. But probably I shan't be
killed after all. All the same . . ." His voice faded out. They
stepped into a tunnel of impenetrable darkness between two tall
hornbeam hedges. He had become nothing but a voice, and now that had
ceased; he had disappeared. The voice began again, low, quick,
monotonous, a little breathless. "I remember once reading a poem by
one of the old Provençal troubadours, telling how God had once granted
him supreme happiness; for the night before he was to set out for the
Crusade, it had been granted him to hold his lady in his arms--all the
short eternal night through. Ains que j'aille oltre mer: when I was
going beyond sea." The voice stopped again. They were standing at the
very mouth of the hornbeam alley, looking out from that close-pent
river of shadow upon an ocean of pale moonlight.
"How still it is." They did not speak; they hardly breathed. They
became saturated with the quiet.
Marjorie broke the silence. "Do you want me as much as all that, Guy?"
All through that long, speechless minute she had been trying to say
the words, repeating them over to herself, longing to say them aloud,
but paralysed, unable to. And at last she had spoken them,
impersonally, as though through the mouth of someone else. She heard
them very distinctly, and was amazed at the matter-of-factness of the
tone.
Guy's answer took the form of a question. "Well, suppose I were killed
now," he said, "should I ever have really lived?"
They had stepped out of the cavernous alley into the moonlight. She
could see him clearly now, and there was something so drooping and
dejected and pathetic about him, he seemed so much of a great,
overgrown child that a wave of passionate pitifulness rushed through
her, reinforcing other emotions less maternal. She longed to take him
in her arms, stroke his hair, lullaby him, baby-fashion, to sleep upon
her breast. And Guy, on his side, desired nothing better than to give
his fatigues and sensibilities to her maternal care, to have his eyes
kissed fast, and sleep to her soothing. In his relations with
women--but his experience in this direction was deplorably small--he
had, unconsciously at first but afterwards with a realization of what
he was doing, played this child part. In moments of self-analysis he
laughed at himself for acting the "child stunt," as he called it. Here
he was--he hadn't noticed it yet--doing it again, drooping, dejected,
wholly pathetic, feeble . . .
Marjorie was carried away by her emotion. She would give herself to
her lover, would take possession of her helpless, pitiable child. She
put her arms round his neck, lifted her face to his kisses, whispered
something tender and inaudible.
Guy drew her towards him and began kissing the soft, warm mouth. He
touched the bare arm that encircled his neck; the flesh was resilient
under his fingers; he felt a desire to pinch it and tear it.
It had been just like this with that little slut Minnie. Just the
same--all horrible lust. He remembered a curious physiological fact
out of Havelock Ellis. He shuddered as though he had touched something
disgusting, and pushed her away.
"No, no, no. It's horrible; it's odious. Drunk with moonlight and
sentimentalizing about death. . . . Why not just say with Biblical
frankness, Lie with me--Lie with me?"
That this love, which was to have been so marvellous and new and
beautiful, should end libidinously and bestially like the affair,
never remembered without a shiver of shame, with Minnie (the vulgarity
of her!)--filled him with horror.
Marjorie burst into tears and ran away, wounded and trembling, into
the solitude of the hornbeam shadow. "Go away, go away," she sobbed,
with such intensity of command that Guy, moved by an immediate remorse
and the sight of tears to stop her and ask forgiveness, was
constrained to let her go her ways.
A cool, impersonal calm had succeeded almost immediately to his
outburst. Critically, he examined what he had done, and judged it, not
without a certain feeling of satisfaction, to be the greatest
"floater" of his life. But at least the thing was done and couldn't be
undone. He took the weak-willed man's delight in the irrevocability of
action. He walked up and down the lawn smoking a cigarette and
thinking, clearly and quietly--remembering the past, questioning the
future. When the cigarette was finished he went into the house.
He entered the smoking-room to hear Roger saying, ". . . It's the poor
who are having the good time now. Plenty to eat, plenty of money, and
no taxes to pay. No taxes--that's the sickening thing. Look at
Alfred's gardener, for instance. He gets twenty-five or thirty bob a
week and an uncommon good house. He's married, but only has one child.
A man like that is uncommonly well off. He ought to be paying
income-tax; he can perfectly well afford it."
Mr. Petherton was listening somnolently, Jacobsen with his usual keen,
intelligent politeness; George was playing with the blue Persian
kitten.
It had been arranged that George should stay the night, because it was
such a bore having to walk that mile and a bit home again in the dark.
Guy took him up to his room and sat down on the bed for a final
cigarette, while George was undressing. It was the hour of
confidence--that rather perilous moment when fatigue has relaxed the
fibres of the mind, making it ready and ripe for sentiment.
"It depresses me so much," said Guy, "to think that you're only twenty
and that I'm just on twenty-four. You will be young and sprightly when
the war ends; I shall be an old antique man."
"Not so old as all that," George answered, pulling off his shirt. His
skin was very white, face, neck, and hands seeming dark brown by
comparison; there was a sharply demarcated high-water mark of sunburn
at throat and wrist.
"It horrifies me to think of the time one is wasting in this bloody
war, growing stupider and grosser every day, achieving nothing at all.
It will be five, six--God knows how many--years cut clean out of one's
life. You'll have the world before you when it's all over, but I shall
have spent my best time."