Fortune and I met also in a crowd, but indoors. Brand and Eileen
O’Connor were both to be at one of the evening parties which assembled
every now and then in a flat at Chelsea belonging to Susy Whincop,
designer of stained-glass, driver of ambulances for the Scottish
Women’s Convoy, and sympathetic friend, before the war, of any ardent
soul who grew long hair if a man, short hair if a woman, and had some
special scheme, philosophy, or inspiration for the welfare of humanity.
I had known Susy and her set in the old days. They were the minor
intellectuals of London, and I had portrayed some of them in a novel
called “Intellectual Mansions,” which they did not like, though I
loved them all. They wrote little poems, painted little pictures,
produced little plays, and talked about all subjects under heaven, with
light-hearted humour, an arrogance towards popular ideas, and a quick
acceptance of the new, the unusual and the revolutionary, in art and
thought. Into their way of life war crashed suddenly with its thunder
notes of terror. All that they had lived for seemed to be destroyed,
and all their ideals overthrown. They had believed in beauty, and it
was flung into the mud and bespattered with blood, and buried beneath
the ugly monsters of war’s idolatry. They had been devotees of liberty,
and were made slaves of the drill-sergeant and other instruments of
martial law. They had been enemies of brutality, cruelty, violence, but
all human effort now was for the slaughter of men, and the hero was he
who killed most, with bayonet or bomb. Their pretty verses were made
of no account. Their impressionistic paintings were not so useful as
the camouflage of tin huts. Their little plays were but feeble drama
to that which now was played out on the world’s stage to the roar of
guns and the march of armies. They went into the tumult and fury of
it all, and were lost. I met some of them, like Fortune and Brand, in
odd places. Many of them died in the dirty ditches. Some of them wrote
poems before they died, stronger than their work before the war, with
a noble despair, or the exaltation of sacrifice. Others gave no sign
of their previous life, and were just absorbed into the ranks--ants
in these legions of soldier-ants. Now those who had escaped with life
were coming back to their old haunts, trying to pick up old threads,
getting back, if they could, to the old ways of work, hoping for a new
inspiration out of immense experience, but not yet finding it.
In Susy Whincop’s flat some of them had gathered when I went there, and
when I looked round upon them, seeing here and there vaguely-remembered
faces, I was conscious of a change that had overtaken them, and, with
a shock, wondered whether I too had altered so much in those five
years. I recognised Peter Hallam, whom I had known as a boy just down
from Oxford, with a genius (in a small way) for satirical verse, and a
talent for passionate lyrics of a morbid and erotic type. Yes, it was
certainly Peter, though his face had hardened and he had cropped his
hair short and walked with one leg stiff.
He was talking to a girl with bobbed hair--it was Jennie Southcombe,
who had been one of the heroines of the Serbian retreat, according to
accounts of newspaper-correspondents.
“My battery,” said Peter, “plugged into old Fritz with open sights for
four hours. We just mowed ’em down.”
Another face rang a little bell in my memory. Surely that was Alfred
Lyon, the Futurist painter? No, it could not be, for Lyon had dressed
like an apache and this man was in conventional evening clothes and
looked like a Brigadier in mufti. Alfred Lyon?... Yes, there he was,
though he had lost his pose--cribbed from Mürger’s _Vie de Bohème_--and
his half-starved look, and the wildness in his eyes. As he passed Susy
Whincop he spoke a few words, which I overheard.
“I’ve abandoned Futurism. The Present knocked that silly. Our little
violence, which shocked Suburbia, was made ridiculous by the enormous
Thing that smashed every convention into a cocked hat. I’m just going
to put down some war-scenes--I made notes in the trenches--with that
simplicity of the primitive soul to which we went back in that way of
life. The soldier’s point of view, his vision, is what I shall try for.”
“Splendid!” said Susy. “Only, don’t shrink from the abomination. We’ve
got to make the world understand--and remember.”