AFTERNOON OUT
1
Alix sat on the bus and rushed through the shining summer morning down
Upper Clapton Road, Lower Clapton Road, Mare Street, Hackney Road,
Shoreditch, Bishopsgate, and so into the city. The noon war news leaped
from placards, in black and red and green. A mile of trenches taken near
Festubert--a mile of trenches lost again. Alix did not care and would
not look. Anyhow it wasn't Paul's part of the line. London was damp and
shining under a windy blue sky. They had cleared away the bodies of
those struck down last night by motor buses in the dark. What a
sacrifice of life! Was it worth while?
The traffic was held up every now and then by companies of recruits
swinging along, in khaki and mufti, jolly, absorbed, resolute,
self-conscious, or amused. There went down Threadneedle Street the
Artists' Rifles. Some looked like studio artists, pale, intelligent,
sometimes spectacled, others more like pavement artists, others again
suggested sign-painters. But this last was probably an illusion, as
sign-painters since last August had been mostly too busy painting out
and repainting names on signs to have time for soldiering. Many classes
have lost heavily by this war, such as publicans, milliners, writers,
Belgians, domestic servants, university lecturers, publishers, artists,
actors, and newspapers. But some have gained; among these are
sheep-growers, house-agents, sugar-merchants, munition-makers, colliers,
coal-owners, and sign-painters. An unequal world.
The bus waited, held up opposite a recruiting station. Alix, looking
down, met the hypnotic stare of the Great Man pictured on the walls, and
turned away, checking a startled giggle. Anyhow she was lame, and not
the sex which goes either, worse luck. (On that desperate root of
bitterness she never dwelt: that way madness lay.) Her swerving eyes
fell next on one of the pictures of domestic life designed and executed
(so common report had it) by the same Great Man; the picture in which an
innocent and reproachful infant inquires of a desperately embarrassed
but apparently not irate parent, 'Daddy, what did _you_ do to help when
Britain fought for freedom in 1915?' Alix giggled again, and looked up
at the white clouds racing across the summer sky, where was no war nor
rumours of war.
2
At Bond Street she left the bus and went to Grafton Street, where there
was a small exhibition of pictures by two young artists known to Alix.
Here she met by appointment three friends, her fellow-students at the
art school. Their names were Nonie Maclure, Oliver Banister, and Thomas
Ashe. Miss Maclure and Mr. Banister were there before her. They greeted
her with 'What cheer, Joanna?'--Joanna, because in a play composed and
produced recently by their combined talent, Alix had taken this part.
Alix went to speak to the exhibitors, who were standing about and
failing to look detached, and began to look round, murmuring to her
friends, 'What's the show like?... Oh, she's got that yellow thing
in...' and so forth. Presently Mr. Thomas Ashe joined them. (It may here
be mentioned, lest readers should be unfairly prejudiced against Mr.
Ashe and Mr. Banister, that one of them had a frozen lung and the other
a distended aorta. They were quite good young men really, and would have
preferred to go.)
They criticised and appreciated the pictures for an hour, with the
interested criticism and over-appreciation usually poured forth by young
persons on the works of their fellow-students and contemporaries, often
at the expense of the older and staler and less in the only movement
that really matters.
'That's like some of Doye's things,' said one of the young men, and the
other said, 'Doye's wounded, isn't he? I saw it in the paper to-day. I
hope it's not much.'
Alix said it wasn't.
'He's on his way home. I hope they send him to a hospital in town, so we
can all go and see him.'
Nonie Maclure shot her a curious glance. She had never known quite how
deep the intimacy between these two had gone. She sometimes wondered.
She had thought just before the war that it went very deep indeed. But
in these present days Alix seemed prepared to play round at large with
so many young men, and to flirt, when that was the game, with a
light-handed recklessness only exceeded by Nonie herself; and Nonie, of
course, was notorious.
3
They went out to lunch. The world is divided into those who have lunch
in their own homes, those who have lunch in some one else's, those who
have lunch in hotel restaurants, those who have lunch in nice
eating-shops, those who have lunch in less nice eating-shops, such as
A.B.C.'s, those who have lunch in eating-shops very far from nice, those
who have lunch in handkerchiefs, and those who do not have lunch at all.
The classes are, of course, not rigid; many people alternate from day to
day between one and another of them. Alix and her friends were, most
days, either in class four or class five. To-day they were in class
four, being out for a happy day, and they had lunch in a little place in
Soho, full of orange-trees in green tubs, and sunshine, and maccaroni.
They found one another interesting, entertaining, and attractive. Nonie
Maclure was dark and good-looking, a fitfully brilliant worker, and a
consistently lively companion. Oliver Banister was gentle and fair and
delicate, and indifferent to most things, only not to art or to Nonie
Maclure. He had tried to get passed for the army, but, as he was
rejected, he settled down tranquilly and without the bitterness that
eats the souls of so many of the medically and sexually unfit. He
recognised the compensations of his lot. Tommy Ashe, on the other hand,
was bitter and angry like Alix; like her he would have hated the war
anyhow, even if he had been fighting, being a sensitive and intelligent
youth, but as it was he loathed it so much that he would never mention
it unless he had to, and then only with a sneer. It was partly this that
drew him to Alix and her to him. They were in the same case. So they
found they could trust one another not to talk of the indecent monster.
Also he admired her unusual, delicate, ironic type. Anyhow it was the
fashion to have some special friend among the girls at the school, and
it helped one to forget. So he and Alix plunged into a flirtation not
normally natural to either.
The four of them flirted and ragged and joked and were funny all the
afternoon, which they spent in Richmond Park. Alix and Tommy Ashe went
off together and lost the other two, and lay on the grass, and became
rather more intimate than they had ever been before. When soldiers
strolled by they looked the other way and pretended not to see, and
talked very fast about anything that came into their heads. Sometimes
the soldiers were wounded; once a party of them, in hospital blues, sat
down quite near them, with two girls in V.A.D. uniform, who called the
soldiers by their surnames and chaffed them. They were all being merry
and funny and having a good time. One was a boy of eighteen,
pink-cheeked and hilarious, with his right leg cut short just below the
thigh.
'Look here, it's time we found those two people,' said Alix, sitting up.
'We must really set about it in earnest.'
So they went away, but presently they felt more like tea than finding
the others, so they had some. When finally the party joined itself
together, it went to Earl's Court and had a hilarious hour
flip-flapping, wiggle-woggling, and joy-wheeling. It desisted at
half-past six, dishevelled, battered and bruised, and separated to
fulfil its respective evening engagements.
4
Alix went to see her brother Nicholas. Nicholas was a journalist, on the
staff of a weekly paper which cost sixpence and with whose politics he
was not in agreement. As there was no paper, weekly, sixpenny or
otherwise, with whose politics he was in agreement, this was not
strange. It may further be premised of Nicholas that he was twenty-seven
years old, of good abilities, thought war too ridiculous a business for
him to take part or lot in, was probably medically unfit to do so but
would not for the world have had it proved, was completely lacking in
any sense of veneration for anything, negligently put aside as absurd
all forms of supernatural religion, shared rooms with a curate friend in
Clifford's Inn, and had from an infant reacted so violently against the
hereditary enthusiasm which nevertheless looked irrepressibly out of his
eyes that he had landed himself in an unintelligent degree of cynicism
in all matters.
Hither Alix went, when the evening sunshine lay mellow on Chancery Lane.
Alix had a curious and quite unaccountable feeling for Chancery Lane. It
seemed to her romantic beyond all reason. Just now it was as some wild
lane on the battle front, or like a trench which has been shelled, for
the most recent airship raid had ploughed it up. A week ago it had been
the scene of that wild terror and shrieking confusion which is
characterised by a euphemistic press as 'no panic.'
Alix limped past the chaos quickly. An old man tried to sell her a
paper. '_Star_, lady? _Globe_, _Pall Mall_, _Evening News_? British fail
to hold conquered trenches....' Alix hurried by; the newsvendor turned
his attention to some one else. Evening papers, of course, are
interesting, and should not really be missed; they often contain so much
news that is ephemeral and fades away before the morning into the light
of common day; they are as perishable and never-to-be-repeated as some
frail and lovely flower.
But Alix, ignoring them, reached Clifford's Inn, and climbed the narrow
oak stairway to the rooms inscribed:
MR. N. I. SANDOMIR,
REV. C. M. V. WEST.
Both these gentlemen were in their sitting-room. The Rev. C. M. V. West
reposed on a wicker couch, reading alternately two weekly church papers
and the _Cambridge Magazine_. One of these papers was High Church,
another Broad Church, the third did not hold with churches. The Rev. C.
M. V. West was a refined-looking young man, very neatly cassocked, with
a nice face and a sense of humour. In justice to him we must say that he
worked very hard as a rule, but had been enjoying a deserved rest before
evensong. To Alix he stood for a queer force that was at work in the
world and which she had been brought up to consider retrograde.
Nicholas Sandomir lay in an easy-chair, surrounded by review copies of
books. He was too broad-shouldered for his height; he was pale and
prominent-jawed, with something of the Slav cast of feature; his mouth,
like Alix's, was the mouth of a cynic; his eyes, small, overhung, and
deep blue, were the eyes of an idealist. This paradox of his face was
only one among many paradoxes in him; he was unreliable; he disbelieved
in all churches, and lived, unaccountably, with a High Church curate
(this, probably, was because he liked him personally and also liked to
have an intelligent person constantly at hand to disagree with; also he
came, on his father's side, of a race of devout and mystic Catholics).
He despised war, and looked with contempt on peace societies (this was
perhaps because, so far as he worshipped anything, he worshipped
efficiency, and found both peace societies and war singularly lacking in
this quality). He detested Germany as a power, and loathed Russia who
was combating her (this, doubtless, was because he was half a Pole).
Anyhow, this evening, when Alix came in, he was sulkily, even viciously,
turning the pages of a little book he had to review, called (it was one
of a series) _The Effects of the War on Literature_. He waved his
disengaged hand at Alix, and left it to West, who had much better
manners, to get up and put a chair for her and pass and light her a
cigarette.
'Did you meet Belgians on the stairs?' inquired West. 'They've put some
in the rooms above us--the rooms that used to be Hans Bauer's. Five of
them, isn't it, Sandomir?'
'Five to rise,' Nicholas replied. 'A baby due next week, I'm told.'
(Unarrived babies were among the things not alluded to at Violette in
mixed company: no wonder Violette found Nicholas peculiar.)
'It's awkward,' West added, lowering his voice and glancing at one of
the shut bedroom doors, 'because we keep a German, and they can't meet.'
'What do you do that for?' asked Alix unsympathetically.
'Awkward, isn't it?' said West. 'Because they keep coming to see us--the
Belgians, I mean (they like us rather), and he'--he nodded at the
bedroom--'has to scoot in there till they're gone. It's like dogs and
cats; they simply can't be let to meet.'
'Well, I don't know what you want with a German, anyhow.'
'He's a friend of ours,' explained Nicholas. 'He was living in the
Golders Green Garden City, and it became so disagreeable for him
(they're all so exposed there, you know--nothing hid) that we asked him
here instead. If they find him he's afraid they may put him in a
concentration camp, and of course if the Belgians sighted him they'd
complain. He means no harm, but unfortunately he had a concrete lawn in
his garden, about ten feet square, where he used to bounce a ball for
exercise. Also he had made a level place on his roof, among Mr. Raymond
Unwin's sloping tiles, where he used to sit and admire the distant view
through a spyglass. It's all very black against him, but he's a studious
and innocent little person really, and he'd hate to be concentrated.'
('It would make one feel so like essence of beef, wouldn't it?' West
murmured absently.) 'He's not a true patriot,' went on Nicholas. 'He
wants the Hohenzollerns to be guillotined and a disruptive country of
small waning states to be re-established. He writes articles on German
internal reform for the monthly reviews. He calls them "Kill or Cure,"
or, "A short way with Imperialism," or some such bloody title. I don't
care for his English literary style, but his intentions are
excellent.... Well, and how's life?' Nicholas turned his small keen blue
eyes on his sister. 'You look as if you'd been out for a joy-day. You
want some more hairpins, but we don't keep any here.'
'I've been wiggle-woggling,' Alix admitted, and added frankly, 'I feel
jolly sick after it.'
'Our family constitution,' said her brother, 'is quite unfit for the
strains we habitually subject it to. Mine is. I feel jolly sick too. But
my indisposition is incurred in the path of duty. I've got to review the
things, so I have to read them--a little here and there, anyhow. And
then, just as one feels one has reached one's limit, one gets a handbook
of wisdom like this, to finish one off.'
He read a page at random from _The Effects of the War on Literature_.
'The war is putting an end to sordidness and littleness, in literature
as in other spheres of human life. The second-rate, the unheroic, the
earthy, the petty, the trivial--how does it look now, seen in the light
of the guns that blaze over Flanders? The guns, shattering so much, have
at least shattered falsity in art. We were degenerate, a little, in our
literature and in our lives: we have been made great. We are come,
surely, to the heroic, the epic pitch of living; if we cannot express it
with a voice worthy of it, then indeed it has failed in its deepest
lesson to us. We may expect a renascence of beauty worthy to rank with
the Romantic Revival born of the French wars....'
'Who _is_ the liar?' asked Alix.
Nicholas named him. 'I am thinking,' he added, 'of starting an Effects
of the War series of my own. I shall call it _Some Further Effects_. It
will be designed to damp the spirits of the sanguine. I shall do the one
on Literature myself. I shall take revenge in it for all the mush I've
had to review lately. It's extraordinary, the stream of--of the heroic
and the epic, isn't that it--that pours forth daily. The war seems to
have given an unhealthy stimulus to hundreds of minds and thousands of
pens. One knew it would, of course. No doubt it was the same during the
siege of Troy, and all the great wars. Though, thank heaven, we shall
never know, as that sort of froth is blown away pretty quick and lost to
posterity. It's only the unhappy contemporaries who get it splashed all
over them. And this war is beastlier than any other, so the rubbish is
less counteracted by the decent writers. The first-rate people, both the
combatants and non-combatants, are too much disgusted, too upset, to do
first-rate work. The war's going on, and means to go on, too long. Wells
or some one said months ago that people don't so much think about it as
get mentally scarred. It's quite true. Lots of people have got to the
stage when they can only feel, not think. And the best people hate the
whole business much too much to get any 'renascence of beauty' out of
it. Who was it who said the other day that the writers to whom war is
glamorous aren't as a rule the ones who produce anything fit to call
literature. War's an insanity; and insane things, purely destructive,
wasteful, hideous, brutal, ridiculous things, aren't what makes art. The
war's produced a little fine poetry, among a sea of tosh--a thing here
and there; but mostly--oh, good Lord! The flood of cheap heroics and
commonplace patriotic claptrap--it's swept slobbering all over us; there
seems no stemming it. Literary revival be hanged. All we had before--and
precious little it was--of decent work, clear and alive and sane and
close to reality, is being trampled to bits by this--this imbecile
brute. And when the time comes to collect the bits and try to begin
again, we shan't be able to; there'll be no more spirit in us; we shall
be too battered and beaten....' Nicholas, wound up to excitement, was
talking too long at a stretch. He often did, being an egoist, and having
in his veins the blood of many eloquent and excited revolutionary Poles,
who had stood in market-places and talked and talked, gesticulating,
pouring forth blood and fire. Nicholas, reacting against this fervour,
repudiating gesticulation, blood and fire, still talked.... But on
'battered and beaten' he paused, in disgusted emphasis, and West came
in, half absently, still turning the pages of the _Challenge_, talking
in his high, clear voice, monotonous and fast (Nicholas was guttural and
harsh). 'You underrate the power of human recovery. You always do. It's
immense, as a matter of fact. Give us fifty years--twenty--ten....
Besides, look at the compensations. If the good are battered and beaten,
the bad are too. It's a well-known fact that many of the futurist poets,
in all the nations, have gone mad, through trying to get too many battle
noises into their heads at once. So they, at least, are silenced. I
suppose they still write, in their asylums--in fact I've heard they do
(my uncle is an asylum doctor)--but it gets no further....' He subsided
into the _Cambridge Magazine_.
'Well, I'd rather have the futurists than the slops poured out by the
people who unfortunately haven't brain enough even to go mad,' Nicholas
grumbled. ('And anyhow, I don't believe in any of your uncles--you've
too many.) The futurists at least were trying to keep close to facts,
even if they couldn't digest them but brought them up with strident
noises. But these imbeciles--the war seems to be a sort of tonic to
their syrupy little souls; it's filled them up with vim and banal joy.
Not that the rot that has always been rot particularly matters; it
merely means that the people who used to express themselves in one inane
way now choose another, no worse; but it's the silencing or the
unmanning of the good people that matters. Here's Cathcart's new book.
I've just read it. It's the work of a shaken, broken man. It's weak,
irrational, drifting, with no constructive purpose, no coherence. You
can almost hear the guns crashing into it as he tried to write, and the
atrocity reports shrieking in his ears, and the poison gas stifling him,
and the militarists and pacificists raving round him. His whole world's
run off its rails and upset and broken to bits, and he can't put it
right side up again; he's lost his faith in it. He can only fumble and
stammer at it helplessly, weak and maundering and incoherent. He ought
to be helping to build it up again, but he 's lost his constructive
power. Hundreds of people have. Constructive force will be the one thing
needed when the war is over; any one with a programme, and the brain and
will to carry it out; but where's it to come from? Those who aren't
killed or cut to bits will be too adrift and demoralised and dazed to do
anything intelligent. We're fast losing even such mental coherence and
concentration as we had. Look, for instance, at you two, while I'm
talking (quite interestingly, too); are you listening? Certainly not.
West is reading a Church newspaper, and Alix drawing cats on the margins
of my proofs.... I'm not blaming you; you can't help it; you are
mentally, and probably morally, shattered. I am too. People are more
than ever like segregated imbeciles, each absorbed in his or her own
ploy. Effects of the War on Human Intelligence: that shall be one of my
series. I've spent an idiotic day. So have both of you, I should guess.
Yet we all three have natural glimmerings of intelligence.'
'I've not spent an idiotic day,' said West placidly.
Nicholas looked at him sardonically. 'Well, let's hear about it.'
'By all means.' West drew a long breath and began, even faster than
usual. 'I'll skip my before-breakfast proceedings, which you wouldn't
understand. But they weren't in the least idiotic. After breakfast I
spent an hour talking to a friend of mine on leave from France. The
conversation was very interesting and instructive; for me, anyhow. We
talked about how rotten the grub in the trenches is, how shameless the
A.S.C. are, how unreliable time-fuse bombs, and so on. Then, since I am
a parson, he kindly talked my shop for a change, and naturally very soon
Jonah pushed his head in, and Noah, and a few more of the gentlemen who
seem to keep the church doors shut against the British working-man. I
kicked them outside the Church on to the dust-heap and left them there,
I hope to his satisfaction, and came home and wrote a sermon advocating
the disuse of the custom of perusing early Hebrew history or reading it
in churches. It's quite a good sermon, as my sermons go. (By the way,
that may, I'm hoping, be one of the Effects of the War on the Church.
We've all of us become so anxious to bring the working-man into it--and
it's very certain he won't come in with the Old Testament legends
barring the way. I'll write that one of your series for you, if I may.)
Well, then I had lunch with a lady who's interested in factory-girls'
trade unions, and we discussed the ways and means of them. That was
jolly useful.'
'He's one of the clergymen, you know,' Nicholas explained aside to
Alix, 'who have been said by an eminent Dean to be tumbling over one
another in their anxiety to become court chaplains to King Demos.
He's hopelessly behind the times, of course, because Demos is in
fetters now. West's an Edwardian churchman, though he fancies he is
Neo-Post-Georgian.'
'Oh, I'm as early as you like,' West said amiably.
'Pre-Edwardian--Victorian--or even Pauline; _I_ don't mind.... Well,
then I attended a meeting of my parish branch of the U.D.C. The meeting
was broken up by rioters. So I addressed them from a window on freedom
of speech. My vicar came along as I was doing so, and came in and
lectured me on taking part in political movements. So I stopped, and did
some parish visiting instead, and had a good deal of interesting
conversation, and incidentally was given very strong tea at three
different houses. Then I came home and read the _Church Times_, the
_Challenge_, and the _Cambridge Magazine_. All interesting in their way,
and quite different. No, I know you don't like any of them. People write
to the _Challenge_ every week asking 'Are Christianity and War
compatible?' and come to the conclusion that they are not, but that
Christians may often have to fight. People write to the _Church Times_
saying that they have found a clergyman who won't wear a chasuble, and
what shall they do to him? People write to the _Cambridge Magazine_
saying that every one over forty should be disenfranchised and interned,
if not shot. Jolly good papers, all the same. How can they help being
written to? None of us can. I get written to myself.... Well, next I'm
going to church to read evensong, and for an hour after evensong--but
you wouldn't understand about that. Anyhow, eventually I have supper
with the vicar.' He ran down with a jerk, and turned to Alix, who had
been following him with some interest. 'That's not an idiotic day; not
from my point of view,' he informed her.
'Sounds all right,' she said. 'But it's not the sort of day Nicholas and
I were brought up to understand, you know. We know nothing about the
Church. From not going, I suppose.'
'You should go,' he assured her. 'You'd find it interesting.... Of
course it's been largely a failure so far, and dull in lots of ways,
because we've not yet fulfilled its original intention; it hasn't so far
succeeded in preventing (though it's fought them and largely lessened
them) any of the things it's out to prevent--commercialism and cant and
cruelty and classes and lies and hate and war. It's got to break the
world to bits and put it together again, and before it can do that it's
got to break itself to bits and put itself together. It's got to become
like dynamite, and blow up the rubbish--its own rubbish first, then the
world's....' He consulted his wrist-watch, said, 'I must go,' shook
hands with Alix, and went quickly, trim and alert and neat, to blow up
the world.
'He talks too much,' said Nicholas, in his hearing. 'Who doesn't, in
these days? I do myself. It's better than to talk too little. If we say
a great deal, we may say a word of sense sometimes. If we say very
little, the odds are that all we do say is rubbish, from lack of
practice.' He yawned. 'You'd better stay to dinner. I've got
Andreiovitch Romevsky coming, to meet Adolf Kopfer, our German friend,
so talk on the European situation will be hampered and constrained.'
'Funny things he stands for,' Alix commented, still thinking of Mr.
West. 'The Church.... I suppose it really _is_ out to stop war.'
'Presumably. But, as its representatives say, its endeavours so far have
been a frost. It's been as unsuccessful as the peace conferences mother
attends. But apparently the members of both are obliged, by their faith,
to be incurable optimists. West's always full of life and hope; nothing
daunts him.'
'Funny,' Alix mused still. The thought glanced through her, 'Clergymen
can't fight either, they're like me. Perhaps religion helps them to
forget; takes their minds off. Like painting. Like Richmond Park and
Tommy Ashe. Like wiggle-woggling. I wonder.'
On that wonder she left the Church, and said, 'Cousin Emily asked me to
bring you back to supper with me. You'd meet the Vinneys, from the
Nutshell, who are coming in afterwards, so we should be a nice party,
she says. But Evie says you and the Vinneys wouldn't get on. I don't
think Evie thinks you're fit for respectable society at all. So you'd
better not come.'
'Shouldn't dream of it,' Nicholas grunted. 'Even if I hadn't got
Russians and Germans coming here. You and your Violettes and your
Nutshells! It beats me what you think you're up to there.'
Alix gave her faint, enigmatic smile. 'It's nice and peaceful,' she
said. 'Like cotton-wool.... Well, good-night, Nicky. No, I won't stay to
dinner, thanks. You can tackle your own awkward social situations for
yourself. I'm for Violette.'
5
She limped down the wooden stairs, and the court was golden in the
evening light, a haven beyond which the wild river of Fleet Street
surged.
'Special. War Extra. British driven back....' The cries, the placards,
were like lost ships tossed lightly on the top of wild waters. They
would soon sink, if one did not listen or look....