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.