Sometimes I would see Gerald in the Café Royal. I would be dining, with
Hilary maybe, and in the distance, cut as with a sharp knife in the
tapestry of smoke and grubby faces, would be Gerald, darkly alone, a
glass of whisky on the marble-top before him. One wouldn’t attempt to
join him, for it made Gerald shy, desperate, if any one sat with him
while drinking. He hated being “messed about,” did Gerald; and if you
joined him he would presently mutter something about an appointment
(Gerald with an appointment!), leave his drink unfinished and go and
order one somewhere else; and as I understood he hadn’t much money I did
not like to drive him to that. Maybe, though, he was less shy with me
than with any one. “I like you,” he once said--oh, darkly!
One never knew, as he sat there or as he strode about the streets,
careless as a fakir impelled always towards a terrible and nameless
penance, what he could be thinking of. Maybe he was thinking of nothing.
Once I saw him come out of a Cinema Theatre with a look on his face as
though he had been tortured. He always looked, you know, like
something. You noticed him.
He had a grey suit. It was thin as paper, but still defiantly retained a
little of that casual elegance which not even Gerald could wholly
divorce from the combination of a good tailor and a lean Englishman. He
never had but one other suit that I ever saw, a brown affair, but he
bartered that with a boot-mender in Shepherd’s Market in exchange for
mending his shoes. And he had a hat. That was a hat. And never was
Gerald seen wearing an overcoat, no matter whether it blew, rained,
snowed or froze. See him any winter evening striding down Half-Moon
Street in the biting rain, his thin grey suit blackening with it, the
jacket held by one button with deep creases into his waist, the shapes
of his knuckles stuck through his trouser pockets, that hat--there, but
for the grace of God, went the most lovable man I ever met.
“Gerald--I say, Gerald! Why don’t you wear a coat on a day like this?
Gerald, aren’t you an ass!”
“Coat?” Thoughtful he was always, and his dark, sunk eyes would pierce
the pavement or the sky with unutterable contempt. “Coat!” And he would
repeat the word softly until, you understand, he had grasped the
enormous idea, when he would say softly, savagely: “What the hell d’you
mean, ‘coat’?” and away he would go, towards that terrible and nameless
penance of his.
Well, the flourish goes, the gesture is gone, to the limbo that yawns
for all such vanities in the very second of their birth. The Cavalier
of Low Creatures was never, to be sure, hailed as more than a zero. But,
even as the ground is not the limit of a man’s fall, as you may see in
the picture with the trail of flame, so zero is not the limit of a man’s
nothingness; for what is that which is nothing but so completely nothing
that it may not have even the mark of nothing? It is, to be sure, zero
without the formative circle round it.
That solitary drunkard, that soiled ascetic! Those nightmare women, soft
as the grass of Parnassus, marvellously acquiescent, possible.
Aphrodite, Ariadne, Anaïtis, white as marble, silent as marble, silent
and acquiescent, possible, as only goddesses could be, the goddesses of
soiled dreams, as no woman born of woman could ever be....
And yet one might have been wrong in imagining the malcontents of the
solitary drunkard’s mind. God only knows, of course, with what nightmare
fancies the man plagued himself. Boys have them, and grow out of them;
men, at least, do not admit even to themselves that they have not grown
out of them, men do not admit even to themselves that while they indulge
in continence they may suddenly find themselves stumbling in the burning
darkness among the vile rubbish-heaps of desire.
That women walked in all the delicious beauty of the unattainable
through Gerald’s tortured mind, I know now. But I did not know it then,
for never was a man so secret with another man as Gerald, never was a
man so little given to discussing with another those inevitable matters
of desire and concupiscence which only by being discussed can be seen in
a proper and proportionate light. They should be aired, those secret
silly things, that they may be seen for what they are. In the old days
there was a god in a garden, and people would do their best to make
pretty fancies out of their lusts, naming them to gods, satyrs, fawns,
nymphs, sirens, sylphs; they, at least, got rid of them somehow. But now
that we see them plainly for what they are, the nasty little enemies of
our assault on nobility, a conspiracy founded by Saint Paul has smashed
the god in the garden and hidden the pieces under the bed.
Gerald, who never spoke but he swore, was the cleanest-mouthed man I
ever met with; while from his book one had gathered that there was one
main idea in Gerald’s mind; this was purity. It was to do with that one
brilliant-childish romance of his that, about seven years before the
coming of the green hat, I had first met Gerald. Then, for more than
five years, I had not seen nor heard of him, had forgotten him, when one
day a lean, dangerous hawk of a young man coming out of the Hammam Baths
in Jermyn Street suddenly stopped me. I knew later that he must have
been in an agony of shyness, but at the time he merely looked intensely
furious. I, not recognising him, thought he was going to hit me, and
gaped at him.
Bitterly and darkly he told me that some one had told him there was a
flat to be let above me in Shepherd’s Market. “I’m staying here at the
moment,” he muttered, looking indignantly at the Hammam Baths. Several
minutes passed before I could place him, for he had been in uniform that
first time, in that transfiguring long-waisted grey coat of the Brigade
of Guards.
Gerald appeared suddenly, in the winter of 1915, at the office of
Horton’s _New Voice_. Now that Horton has left England on his adventure
in un-individualism one does not hear much of _The New Voice_, but at
that time and for long before _The New Voice_ was, of course, a power,
and Horton was a Power. Quite apart from Horton’s personal quality, you
knew he was a Power because several of the greatest of the intelligent
writers of our time kept on bitterly pointing out to their million
readers what a futile man Horton was. Quite a number of the men whose
names you can “conjure with” now--it would be fun to meet that man who
is always in the street conjuring with names!--had begun by writing for
Horton’s paper; but they had always gotten on his nerves by the time
they had become the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time,
and, since Horton was an honest man, he told them so, and he told them
why, and he told them off, and they were furious. But the most inspired
among the greatest of the intelligent writers of our time revenged
themselves by republishing their _New Voice_ stuff in book-form and
omitting to mention _The New Voice_ as the first medium of publication.
That was discourteous of them.
We were correcting proofs when Gerald appeared. It was a Monday
afternoon, and on Monday afternoons any of Horton’s writers who wished
could turn up and correct either his own or some one else’s proofs and
then go and have tea at the A.B.C. And Talk.
“Hello!” said Horton. “Hel_lo_!”
“Defence of the Realm,” murmured Home.
We were not prepared for Gerald. We had, of course, seen soldiers
before; indeed, there was one in the room at the moment, the philosopher
Home, who was to be killed a year or so later. But Gerald was a Figure,
he was martial. The herald of the dominion of hell upon earth, that was
Gerald. Take one small, frowsty room, the staff (Miss Veale) addressing
wrappers at a desk by the window, Horton blue-pencilling at the other
desk by the door, four of us sitting cramped round correcting proofs on
bound annuals of _The New Voice_ on our knees, smoking, muttering--enter
six-foot-two of the Brigade of Guards with a face as dark as night and
the nose of a hawk and the eyes of one who has seen Christ crucified in
vain. The panoply of war sat superbly on Gerald. He looked a soldier in
the real rather than in the technical sense of the word: he looked, you
know, as though he had accepted death and was just living anyhow in the
meanwhile. Ah, see him then! Not even Gerald’s malevolent slackness in
attire could make that long-waisted grey coat with the red-silk lining
sit on him but imperially. Not Gerald’s the common-or-garden chubby face
of a Guard’s subaltern. Gerald was no chap. He glowered at us.
“Eh,” he stammered. “I say ... I’ve been told you people....”
“He’s heard about us,” said Home sympathetically. “Sit down, boy. On the
floor, I’m afraid.”
Gerald began a fierce scowl at him--then grinned. Dear Gerald!
“Well?” smiled Horton. Always courteous was Horton, in manner.
“Heard,” muttered Gerald, “that you didn’t care what you published....”
“Oh!” said Horton. “Well, we don’t care how good it is, if that’s what
you mean.”
You couldn’t guess that Gerald was so shy that he could scarcely speak.
You thought he stammered just because he stammered, not because he was
so shy that he could scarcely get a word out. A man had no right to look
like Gerald, an ensign of the fallen Prince of Light, and be shy; but
that was always Gerald’s trouble, he never was given the credit for
being shy, he put himself between you and any sympathy with him, he made
it clear that he didn’t want your infernal sympathy. Just then, for
instance, he looked as though he had strayed into _The New Voice_ to
send us all to blazes on general principles. And Horton looked as though
he was quite prepared to go. Horton preferred bad-tempered men.
“There’s this,” Gerald muttered, and lugged out an enormous typescript
from the deep pocket of his grey coat. “Novel,” he scowled at Horton.
“Thought perhaps....” and he planted the thing with a thump on Horton’s
desk. Horton grinned. Horton had had much too much to do with
professional novelists to think that a novel by a subaltern of
Grenadiers was necessarily unreadable. “Bit long, isn’t it?” he smiled.
“Long?” Gerald stammered. “Of course it’s long! Been writing it for four
whole months.”
“Ought to be good,” said Home gravely.
“It’s _awful_,” grinned Gerald, “but, you see....”
“Quite,” said Horton busily. “Now, I’ll....”
“Hello!” said Horton, for Gerald was not. Horton threw the typescript to
me to read. Of course, it was mad. _The New Voice_ published most of it,
and then Heinemann’s published it in the autumn of 1916 and ran it into
three editions while people were still disentangling their eyes from the
paper wrapper, which showed a woman with purple eyes crucifying a
pleasant young man.
_The Savage Device_ is open before me as I write, and its opening lines
are: “The history of Felix Burton is the history of an ideal and a
vision. They had nothing to do with one another except that the pursuit
of the vision hardened him and blooded him for the attainment of the
ideal. The ideal was aristocratic, in the sense that it was a striving
after nobility in life: the vision was a contradiction, as scientific as
it was mystic. The ideal was, of course, defeated: the vision, of
course, defeated him. The ideal was purity: the vision had something to
do with pain....”
The “vision,” so far as one could see, had everything to do with pain;
in fact it was pain, and the vision might or might not come afterwards.
(And I detest that word “mystic.”) The book was exciting and interesting
because of a strange mixture of high romance, desperate villainy and an
abysmal bitterness. The war came in, naturally. Gerald’s hero had
minority ideas about the war--letting the landed gentry down again! As
for the pain ... Young Burton’s idea of it had not to do with pain as a
fact, but as the most sublime among drugs. You know? “In fact,” Gerald
wrote, “it is the only drug that cannot debase a man. It can kill him,
but there are worse ways of dying than being killed.” It was full of
quotations like that, but Gerald threw them at you with a dash sadly
lacking in the originals. Young Burton was, of course, going to die in
the war.
Young Burton, it appeared, had studied the major and minor tortures of
crime and martyrdom. There was a long description of tortures, if you
liked that kind of thing. I have seen Gerald’s books on them, with
illustrations ... very interesting. Then young Burton had come across
the old, old idea that after a certain limit of pain there is a definite
state of bliss and definite and glorious visions of a real reality which
men by ordinary are too sodden or too timorous to see. But poor old
Gerald, try as he would, couldn’t make _The Savage Device_ a novel of
ideas: it remained a novel of adventure, with an inhuman interest. Young
Burton went everywhere in the world, having adventures, getting
magnificently hurt--South Sea stuff--studying the effect of pain on
men’s minds. A Chinese bandit helped him to quite a number of visions.
Then he plucked Ava Foe from a “dive” in San Francisco, she became Mrs.
Burton, and then he had every opportunity for judging the visionary
qualities of mental pain. That part was fiendishly well written, the
hell that Ava Burton gave him. But young Burton’s ideal of purity was,
naturally enough, schoolboy stuff: fine in parts, but stuff. The only
part of it that was good was that it was, somehow, purity. On the sexual
side young Burton deserved almost all he got from his, one thought,
unnecessarily callous young wife. In Ava Foe, I couldn’t help thinking
after the coming of the green hat, Gerald had let himself go about Iris.
I realised then how he must first have worshipped and then hated his
twin sister. What on earth, one wondered, could she have done to him to
make him hate her like that? Ava wasn’t in the least like her, of
course, but Ava might quite well have been like any sister to any
brother who hated her. But this fierce, devilish, mediæval passion--why?
Yet I should have guessed something of the reason after Iris had told me
that young Burton was “Boy,” Gerald’s hero of before the war. But it
never occurred to me to connect Iris’s casually dropped “Boy” with the
legendary Boy Fenwick of Careless-Days-Before-the-War fame. He will have
his place, that dead Boy Fenwick. A deep place.
“Felix Burton’s” idea of what a man should be to live nobly--he was full
of those large strivings of Young Men which were in vogue in the
Careless-Days-Before-the-War--seemed to take the form of wanting to
found a new race of something like potent eunuchs. Young Burton was, of
course, without the lusts of the body. Ava Foe wasn’t. Nor did young
Burton want any of your waste of time in graceful love-making; he
wanted a sort of ruthless companionship, with occasional patches of
mating; he did _not_ want to procreate gracefully, but with a sort of
furious absent-mindedness. Imagine Ava--Iris! Imagine Gerald himself
drawing the woman of his nightmares, that soft possible woman of lonely
dreams, detesting her for destroying him ... and for destroying Boy! One
wondered, in reading, if Gerald had ever known a woman. The dark knight
of purity ... the fallen knight of purity, but how fallen!