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.