was happy in Dresden, living with a German family and studying music and
the language. She had no idea that music and the language were mere
blinds, and that she had been sent to the German family to keep her out
of Nicky's way.
They would have them all back again at Christmas. Frances counted the
days. From to-night, the seventh of June, to December the twentieth was
not much more than six months.
To-night, the seventh of June, was Nicky's wedding-night. But they did
not know that. Nicky had kept the knowledge from them, in his mercy, to
save them the agony of deciding whether they would recognize the
marriage or not. And as neither Frances nor Anthony had ever faced
squarely the prospect of disaster to their children, they had turned
their backs on Nicky's marriage and supported each other in the hope
that at the last minute something would happen to prevent it.
* * * * *
The ten o'clock post, and two letters from Germany. Not from Michael,
not from Veronica. One from Frau Schäfer, the mother of the German
family. It was all in German, and neither Anthony nor Frances could make
out more than a word here and there. "Das süsse, liebe Mädchen" meant
Veronica. But certain phrases: "traurige Nachrichten" ... "furchtbare
Schwächheit" ... "... eine entsetzliche Blutleere ..." terrified them,
and they sent for Dorothy to translate.
Dorothy was a good German scholar, but somehow she was not very fluent.
She scowled over the letter.
"What does it mean?" said Frances. "Hæmorhage?"
"No. No. Anæmia. Severe anæmia. Heart and stomach trouble."
"But 'traurige Nachrichten' is 'bad news.' They're breaking it to us
that she's dying."
(It was unbearable to think of Nicky marrying Ronny; but it was more
unbearable to think of Ronny dying.)
"They don't say they're sending _us_ bad news; they say they think
Ronny must have had some. To account for her illness. Because they say
she's been so happy with them."
"But what bad news could she have had?"
"Perhaps she knows about Nicky."
"But nobody's told her, unless Vera has."
"She hasn't. I know she hasn't. She didn't want her to know."
"Well, then--"
"Mummy, you don't _have_ to tell Ronny things. She always knows them."
"How on earth could she know a thing like that?"
"She might. She sort of sees things--like Ferdie. She may have seen him
with Desmond. You can't tell."
"Do they say what the doctor thinks?"
"Yes. He thinks it's worry and Heimweh--homesickness. They want us to
send for her and take her back. Not let her have another term."
Though Frances loved Veronica she was afraid of her coming back. For she
was more than ever convinced that something would happen and that Nicky
would not marry Desmond.
* * * * *
The other letter was even more difficult to translate or to understand
when translated.
The authorities at Aschaffenburg requested Herr Harrison to remove his
son Michael from the School of Forestry. Michael after his first few
weeks had done no good at the school. In view of the expense to Herr
Harrison involved in his fees and maintenance, they could not honestly
advise his entering upon another term. It would only be a deplorable
throwing away of money on a useless scheme. His son Michael had no
thoroughness, no practical ability, and no grasp whatever of theoretic
detail. From Herr Harrison's point of view this was the more regrettable
inasmuch as the young man had colossal decision and persistence and
energy of his own. He was an indefatigable dreamer. Very likely--when
his dreams had crystallized--a poet. But the idea Herr Harrison had had
that his son Michael would make a man of business, or an expert in
Forestry, was altogether fantastic and absurd. And from the desperate
involutions of the final sentence Dorothy disentangled the clear fact
that Michael's personal charm, combined with his hostility to
discipline, his complete indifference to the aims of the authorities,
and his utter lack of any sense of responsibility, made him a dangerous
influence in any school.
That was the end of Anthony's plans for Michael.
The next morning Nicky wired from some village in Sussex: "Married
yesterday.--NICKY."
After that nothing seemed to matter. With Nicky gone from them they were
glad to have Michael back again. Frances said they might be thankful for
one thing--that there wasn't any German Peggy or any German Desmond in
Michael's problem.
And since both Michael and Veronica were to be removed at once, the
simplest arrangement was that he should return to Dresden and bring her
back with him.
Frances had never been afraid for Michael.
Michael knew that he had made havoc of his father's plans. He couldn't
help that. His affair was far too desperate. And any other man but his
father would have foreseen that the havoc was inevitable and would have
made no plans. He knew he had been turned into the tree-travelling
scheme that had been meant for Nicky, because, though Nicky had slipped
out of it, his father simply couldn't bear to give up his idea. And no
wonder, when the dear old thing had so few of them.
He had been honest with his father about it; every bit as honest as
Nicky had been. He had wanted to travel if he could go to China and
Japan, just as Nicky had wanted to travel if he could go to places like
the West Indies and the Himalaya. And he didn't mind trying to get the
trees in when he was there. He was even prepared to accept Germany and
the School for Forestry if Germany was the only way to China and Japan.
But he had told his father not to mind if nothing came of it at the end
of all the travelling. And his father had said he would take the risk.
He preferred taking the risk to giving up his idea.
And Michael had been honest with himself. He had told himself that he
too must take some risks, and the chances were that a year or two in
Germany wouldn't really hurt him. Things never did hurt you as much as
you thought they would. He had thought that Cambridge would do all sorts
of things to him, and Cambridge had not done anything to him at all. As
for Oxford, it had given him nearly all the solitude and liberty he
wanted, and more companionship than he was ever likely to want. At
twenty-two Michael was no longer afraid of dying before he had finished
his best work. In spite of both Universities he had done more or less
what he had meant to do before he went to Germany. His work had not yet
stood the test of time, but to make up for that he himself, in his
uneasy passion for perfection, like Time, destroyed almost as much as he
created. Still, after some pitiless eliminations, enough of his verse
remained for one fine, thin book.
It would be published if Lawrence Stephen approved of the selection.
So, Michael argued, even if he died to-morrow there was no reason why he
should not go to Germany to-day.
He was too young to know that he acquiesced so calmly because his soul
was for a moment appeased by accomplishment.
He was too young to know that his soul had a delicate, profound and
hidden life of its own, and that in secret it approached the crisis of
transition. It was passing over from youth to maturity, like a
sleep-walker, unconscious, enchanted, seeing its way without seeing it,
safe only from the dangers of the passage if nobody touched it, and if
it went alone.
Michael had no idea of what Germany could and would do to his soul.
Otherwise he might have listened to what Paris had to say by way of
warning.
For his father had given him a fortnight in Paris on his way to Germany,
as the reward of acquiescence. That (from Herr Harrison's point of view)
was a disastrous blunder. How could the dear old Pater be expected to
know that Paris is, spiritually speaking, no sort of way even to South
Germany? He should have gone to Brussels, if he was ever, spiritually
speaking, to get there at all.
And neither Anthony nor Frances knew that Lawrence Stephen had plans for
Michael.
Michael went to Paris with his unpublished poems in his pocket and a
letter of introduction from Stephen to Jules Réveillaud. He left it with
revolution in his soul and the published poems of Réveillaud and his
followers in his suit-case, straining and distending it so that it burst
open of its own accord at the frontier.
Lawrence Stephen had said to him: "Before you write another line read
Réveillaud and show him what you've written."
Jules Réveillaud was ten years older than Michael, and he recognized the
symptoms of the crisis. He could see what was happening and what had
happened and would happen in Michael's soul. He said: "One third of each
of your poems is good. And there are a few--the three last--which are
all good."
"Those," said Michael, "are only experiments."
"Precisely. They are experiments that have succeeded. That is why they
are good. Art is always experiment, or it is nothing. Do not publish
these poems yet. Wait and see what happens. Make more experiments. And
whatever you do, do not go to Germany. That School of Forestry would be
very bad for you. Why not," said Réveillaud, "stay where you are?"
Michael would have liked to stay for ever where he was, in Paris with
Jules Réveillaud, in the Rue Servandoni. And because his conscience
kept on telling him that he would be a coward and a blackguard if he
stayed in Paris, he wrenched himself away.
In the train, going into Germany, he read Réveillaud's "Poèmes" and the
"Poèmes" of the young men who followed him. He had read in Paris
Réveillaud's "Critique de la Poésie Anglaise Contemporaine." And as he
read his poems, he saw that, though he, Michael Harrison, had split with
"la poésie anglaise contemporaine," he was not, as he had supposed,
alone. His idea of being by himself of finding new forms, doing new
things by himself to the disgust and annoyance of other people, in a
world where only one person, Lawrence Stephen, understood or cared for
what he did, it was pure illusion. These young Frenchmen, with Jules
Réveillaud at their head, were doing the same thing, making the same
experiment, believing in the experiment, caring for nothing but the
experiment, and carrying it farther than he had dreamed of carrying it.
They were not so far ahead of him in time; Réveillaud himself had only
two years' start; but they were all going the same way, and he saw that
he must either go with them or collapse in the soft heap of rottenness,
"la poésie anglaise contemporaine."
He had made his own experiments in what he called "live verse" before he
left England, after he had said he would go to Germany, even after the
final arrangements had been made. His father had given him a month to
"turn round in," as he put it. And Michael had turned completely round.
He had not shown his experiments to Stephen. He didn't know what to
think of them himself. But he could see, when once Réveillaud had
pointed it out to him, that they were the stuff that counted.
In the train going into Germany he thought of certain things that
Réveillaud had said: "Nous avons trempé la poésie dans la peinture et la
musique. Il faut la délivrer par la sculpture. Chaque ligne, chaque
vers, chaque poème taillé en bloc, sans couleur, sans decor, sans
rime."... "La sainte pauvresse du style dépouillé."... "Il faut de la
dureté, toujours de la dureté."
He thought of Réveillaud's criticism, and his sudden startled spurt of
admiration: "Mais! Vous l'avez trouvée, la beauté de la ligne droite."
And Réveillaud's question: "Vraiment? Vous n'avez jamais lu un seul vers
de mes poèmes? Alors, c'est étonnant." And then: "C'est que la réalité
est plus forte que nous."
The revolting irony of it! After stumbling and fumbling for years by
himself, like an idiot, trying to get it, the clear hard Reality; trying
not to collapse into the soft heap of contemporary rottenness; and,
suddenly, to get it without knowing that he had got it, so that, but for
Réveillaud, he might easily have died in his ignorance; and then, in the
incredible moment of realization, to have to let go, to turn his back on
Paris, where he wanted to live, and on Réveillaud whom he wanted to
know, and to be packed in a damnable train, like a parcel, and sent off
to Germany, a country which he did not even wish to see.
He wondered if he could have done it if he had not loved his father? He
wondered if his father would ever understand that it was the hardest
thing he had ever yet done or could do?
But the trees would be beautiful. He would rather like seeing the trees.
Trees--
He wondered whether he would ever care about a tree again.
Trees--
He wondered whether he would ever see a tree again, ever smell tree-sap,
or hear the wind sounding in the ash-trees like a river and in the firs
like a sea.
Trees--
He wondered whether any tree would ever come to life for him again.
He looked on at the tree-felling. He saw slaughtered trees, trees that
tottered, trees that staggered in each other's branches. He heard the
scream and the shriek of wounded boughs, the creaking and crashing of
the trunk, and the long hiss of branches falling, trailing through
branches to the ground. He smelt the raw juice of broken leaves and the
sharp tree dust in the saw pits. The trees died horrible deaths, in the
forests under the axes of the woodmen, and in the schools under the
tongues of the Professors, and in Michael's soul. The German Government
was determined that he should know all about trees. Its officials, the
Professors and instructors, were sorry if he didn't like it, but they
were ordered by their Government and paid by their Government to impart
this information; they had contracted with Herr Harrison to impart it to
his son Michael for so long as he could endure it, and they imparted it
with all their might.
Michael rather liked the Germans of Aschaffenburg. Instead of despising
him because he would never make a timber-merchant or a tree expert, they
admired and respected him because he was a poet. The family he lived
with, Herr Henschel and Frau Henschel, and his fellow-boarders, Carl and
Otto Kraus, and young Ludwig Henschel, and Hedwig and Löttchen admired
and respected him because he was a poet. When he walked with Ludwig in
the great forests Michael chanted his poems, both in English and in
German, till Ludwig's soul was full of yearning and a delicious sorrow,
so that Ludwig actually shed tears in the forest. He said that if he had
not done so he would have burst. Ludwig's emotions had nothing whatever
to do with the forest or with Michael's poems, but he thought they had.
Michael knew that his only chance of getting out of Germany was to show
an unsurpassable incompetence. He showed it. He flourished his
incompetence in the faces of all the officials, until some superofficial
wrote a letter to his father that gave him his liberty.
The Henschels were sorry when he left. The students, Otto and Carl and
Ludwig, implored him not to forget them. Hedwig and Löttchen cried.
* * * * *
Michael was not pleased when he found that he was to go home by Dresden
to bring Veronica back. He wanted to be alone on the journey. He wanted
to stop in Paris and see Jules Réveillaud. He was afraid that Ronny had
grown into a tiresome flapper and that he would have to talk to her.
And he found that Ronny had skipped the tiresome stage and had grown up.
Only her school clothes and her girlish door-knocker plait tied up with
broad black ribbon reminded him that she was not yet seventeen.
Ronny was tired. She did not want to talk. When he had tucked her up
with railway rugs in her corner of the carriage she sat still with her
hands in her muff.
"I shall not disturb your thoughts, Michael," she said.
She knew what he had been thinking. Her clear eyes gazed at him out of
her dead white face with an awful look of spiritual maturity.
"What can have happened to her?" he wondered.
But she did not disturb his thoughts.
Up till then Michael's thoughts had not done him any good. They had been
bitter thoughts of the months he had been compelled to waste in Bavaria
when every minute had an incomparable value; worrying, irritating
thoughts of the scenes he would have to have with his father, who must
be made to understand, once for all, that in future he meant to have
every minute of his own life for his own work. He wondered how on earth
he was to make his people see that his work justified his giving every
minute to it. He had asked Réveillaud to give him a letter that he could
show to his father. He was angry with his father beforehand, he was so
certain that he wouldn't see.
He had other thoughts now. Thoughts of an almond tree flowering in a
white town; of pink blossoms, fragile, without leaves, casting a thin
shadow on white stones; the smell of almond flowers and the sting of
white dust in an east wind; a drift of white dust against the wall.
Thoughts of pine-trees falling in the forest, glad to fall. He thought:
The pine forest makes itself a sea for the land wind, and the young pine
tree is mad for the open sea. She gives her slender trunk with passion
to the ax; for she thinks that she will be stripped naked, and that she
will be planted in the ship's hold, and that she will carry the great
main-sail. She thinks that she will rock and strain in the grip of the
sea-wind, and that she will be whitened with the salt and the foam
of the sea.
She does not know that she will be sawn into planks and made into a
coffin for the wife of the sexton and grave-digger of Aschaffenburg.
Thoughts of Veronica in her incredible maturity, and of her eyes,
shining in her dead white face, far back through deep crystal, and of
the sense he got of her soul poised, steady and still, with wings
vibrating.
He wondered where it would come down.
He thought: "Of course, Veronica's soul will come down like a wild
pigeon into the ash-tree in our garden, and she will think that our
ash-tree is a tree of Heaven."
* * * * *
Presently he roused himself to talk to her.
"How is your singing getting on, Ronny?"
"My singing voice has gone."
"It'll come back again."
"Not unless-"
But he couldn't make her tell him what would bring it back.
* * * * *
When Michael came to his father and mother to have it out with them his
face had a hard, stubborn look. He was ready to fight them. He was so
certain that he would have to fight. He had shown them Jules
Réveillaud's letter.
He said, "Look here, we've got to get it straight. It isn't any use
going on like this. I'm afraid I wasn't very honest about Germany."
"Weren't you?" said Anthony. "Let me see, I think you said you'd take it
on your way to China and Japan."
"Did I? I tried to be straight about it. I thought I was giving it a
fair chance. But that was before I'd seen Réveillaud."
"Well," said Anthony, "now that you have seen him, what is it exactly
that you want to do?"
Michael told him.
"You can make it easy for me. Or you can make it hard. But you can't
stop me."
"What makes you think I want to stop you?"
"Well--you want me to go into the business, though I told you years ago
there was only one thing I should ever be any good at. And I see your
point. I can't earn my living at it. That's where I'm had. Still, I
think Lawrence Stephen will give me work, and I can rub along somehow."
"Without my help, you mean?"
"Well, yes. Why _should_ you help me? You've wasted tons of money on me
as it is. Nicky's earning his own living, and he's got a wife, too.
Why not me?"
"Because you can't do it, Michael."
"I can. I don't mind roughing it. I could live on a hundred a year--or
less, if I don't marry."
"Well, I don't mean you to try. You needn't bother about what you can
live on and what you can't live on. It was all settled last night. Your
mother and I talked it over. We don't want you to go into the business.
We don't want you to take work from Mr. Stephen. We want you to be
absolutely free to do your own work, under the best possible conditions,
whether it pays or not. Nothing in the world matters to us but your
happiness. You're to have a hundred and fifty a year when you're living
at home and two hundred and fifty when you're living abroad. I suppose
you'll want to go abroad sometimes. I can't give you a bigger allowance,
because I have to help Nicky--"
Michael covered his face with his hands.
"Oh--don't, Daddy. You do make me feel a rotten beast."
"We should feel rottener beasts," said Frances, "if we stood in your
way."
"Then," said Michael (he was still incredulous), "you do care?"
"Of course we care," said Anthony.
"I don't mean for me--for _it_?"
"My dear Mick," said Frances, "we care for It almost as much as we care
for you. We're sorry about Germany though. Germany was one of your
father's bad jokes."
"Germany--a joke?"
"Did you take it seriously? Oh, you silly Michael!"
"But," said Michael, "how about Daddy's idea? He loved it."
"I loved it," said Anthony, "but I've given it up."
They knew that this was defeat, for Michael was top-dog. And it was also
victory.
They had lost Nicholas, or thought they had lost Nicholas, by opposing
him. But Michael and Michael's affection they would have always.
Besides, Anthony hadn't given up his idea. He had only transferred
it--to his youngest son, John.
XV
It was five weeks since Nicholas's wedding-day and Desmond had
quarrelled with him three times.
First, because he had taken a flat in Aubrey Walk, with a studio inside
it, instead of a house in Campden Hill Square with a studio outside it
in the garden.
Then, because he had refused to go into his father's business.
Last of all, because of Captain Drayton and the Moving Fortress.
Nicky had said that his father, who was paying his rent, couldn't afford
the house with the studio in the garden; and Desmond said Nicky's father
could afford it perfectly well if he liked. He said he had refused to go
into his father's business for reasons which didn't concern her. Desmond
pointed out that the consequences of his refusal were likely to concern
her very much indeed. As for Captain Drayton and the Moving Fortress,
nobody but a supreme idiot would have done what Nicky did.
But Nicky absolutely refused to discuss what he had done. Nobody but a
cad and a rotter would have done anything else.
In the matter of the Moving Fortress what had happened was this.
The last of the drawings was not finished until Desmond had settled down
in the flat in Aubrey Walk. You couldn't hurry Desmond. Nicky hadn't
even waited to sign his name in the margins before he had packed the
plans in his dispatch box and taken them to the works, and thence,
hidden under a pile of Morss estimates, to Eltham. He couldn't rest till
he had shown them to Frank Drayton. He could hardly wait till they had
dined, and till Drayton, who thought he was on the track of a new and
horrible explosive, had told him as much as he could about it.
Nicky gave his whole mind to Drayton's new explosive in the hope that,
when his turn came, Drayton would do as much for him.
"You know," he said at last, "the old idea of the _forteresse mobile_?
"Yes."
He couldn't tell whether Drayton was going to be interested or not. He
rather thought he wasn't.
"It hasn't come to anything, _has_ it?"
Drayton smiled and his eyes glittered. He knew what that excited gleam
in Drayton's eyes meant.
"No," he said. "Not yet."
And Nicky had an awful premonition of his doom.
"Well," he said, "I believe there's something in it."
"So do I, Nicky."
Drayton went on. "I believe there's so much in it that--Look here, I
don't know what put it into your head, and I'm not asking, but that
idea's a dead secret. For God's sake don't talk about it. You mustn't
breathe it, or it'll get into the air. And if it does my five years'
work goes for nothing. Besides we don't want Germany to collar it."
And then: "Don't look so scared, old chap. I was going to tell you
about it when I'd got the plans drawn."
He told him about it then and there.
"Low on the ground like a racing-car--"
"Yes," said Nicky.
"Revolving turret for the guns--no higher than _that_--"
"Yes," said Nicky.
"Sort of armoured train. Only it mustn't run on rails. It's got to go
everywhere, through anything, over anything, if it goes at all. It must
turn in its own length. It must wade and burrow and climb, Nicky. It
must have caterpillar wheels--"
"By Jove, of course it must," said Nicky, as if the idea had struck him
for the first time.
"What have you got there?" said Drayton finally as Nicky rose and picked
up his dispatch-box. "Anything interesting?
"No," said Nicky. "Mostly estimates."
For a long time afterwards he loathed the fields between Eltham and
Kidbrooke, and the Mid-Kent line, and Charing Cross Station. He felt as
a man feels when the woman he loves goes from him to another man. His
idea had gone from him to Drayton.
And that, he said to himself, was just like his luck, just like the
jolly sells that happened to him when he was a kid.
To be sure, there was such a thing as sharing. He had only to produce
his plans and his finished model, and he and Drayton would go partners
in the Moving Fortress. There was no reason why he shouldn't do it.
Drayton had not even drawn his plans yet; he hadn't thought out the
mechanical details.
He thought, "I could go back now and tell him."
But he did not go back. He knew that he would never tell him. If Drayton
asked him to help him with the details he would work them out all over
again with him; but he would never show his own finished plans or his
own model.
He didn't know whether it had been hard or easy for him to give up the
Moving Fortress. He did it instinctively. There was--unless he had
chosen to be a blackguard--nothing else for him to do.
Besides, the Moving Fortress wasn't his idea. Drayton had had it first.
Anybody might have had it. He hadn't spoken of it first; but that was
nothing. The point was that he had had it first, and Nicky wasn't going
to take it from him.
It meant more to Drayton, who was in the Service, than it could possibly
mean to him. He hadn't even got a profession.
As he walked back through the fields to the station, he said to himself
that he didn't really care. It was only one more jolly sell. He didn't
like giving up his Moving Fortress; but it wouldn't end him. There was
something in him that would go on.
He would make another engine.
He didn't care. There was something in him that would go on.
"I can't see," Desmond had said, "why Captain Drayton should be allowed
to walk off with your idea."
"He's worked five years on it."
"He hasn't worked it _out_ yet, and you have. Can't you see "--her face
was dark and hard with anger--"there's money in it?"
"If there is, all the more reason why I shouldn't bag it."
"And where do I come in?"
"Not just here, I'm afraid. It isn't your business."
"Not my business? When I did the drawings? You couldn't possibly have
done them yourself."
At that point Nicky refused to discuss the matter farther.
And still Desmond brooded on her grievance. And still at intervals
Desmond brought it up again.
"There's stacks of money in your father's business--"
"There's stacks of money in that Moving Fortress--"
"You are a fool, Nicky, to throw it all away."
He never answered her. He said to himself that Desmond was hysterical
and had a morbid fancy.
* * * * *
But it didn't end there.
He had taken the drawings and the box that had the model of the Moving
Fortress in it and buried them in the locker under the big north window
in Desmond's studio.
And there, three weeks later, Desmond found them. And she packed the
model of the Moving Fortress and marked it "Urgent with Care," and sent
it to the War Office with a letter. She packed the drawings in a
portfolio--having signed her own and Nicky's name on the margins--and
sent them to Captain Drayton with a letter. She said she had no doubt
she was doing an immoral thing; but she did it in fairness to Captain
Drayton, for she was sure he would not like Nicky to make so great a
sacrifice. Nicky, she said, was wrapped up in his Moving Fortress. It
was his sweetheart, his baby. "He will never forgive me," she said, "as
long as he lives. But I simply had to let you know. It means so much
to him."
For she thought, "Because Nicky's a fool, I needn't be one."
Drayton came over the same evening after he had got the letter. He
shouted with laughter.
"Nicky," he said, "you filthy rotter, why on earth didn't you tell
me?... It _was_ Nickyish of you.... What if I did think of it first? I
should have had to come to you for the details. It would have been jolly
to have worked it out together.... Not a bit of it! Your wife's
absolutely right. Good thing, after all, you married her.
"By the way, she says there's a model. I want to see that model. Have
you got it here?"
Nicky went up into the studio to look for it. He couldn't find it in the
locker where he'd left it. "Wherever is the damned thing?" he said.
"The damned thing," said Desmond, "is where you should have sent it
first of all--at the War Office. You're clever, Nicky, but you aren't
quite clever enough."
"I'm afraid," he said, "_you've_ been a bit too clever, this time."
Drayton agreed with him. It was, he said, about the worst thing that
could possibly have happened.
"She shouldn't have done that, Nicky. What on earth could have made her
do it?"
"Don't ask me," said Nicky, "what makes her do things."
"It looks," Drayton meditated, "as if she didn't trust me. I'm afraid
she's dished us. God knows whether we can ever get it back!"
Desmond had a fit of hysterics when she realized how clever she had
been.
* * * * *
Desmond's baby was born late in November of that year, and it died when
it was two weeks old. It was as if she had not wanted it enough to give
it life for long outside her body.
For though Desmond had been determined to have a child, and had declared
that she had a perfect right to have one if she chose, she did not care
for it when it came. And when it died Nicky was sorrier than Desmond.
He had not wanted to be a father to Headley Richards' child. And yet it
was the baby and nothing but the baby that had let him in for marrying
Desmond. So that, when it died, he felt that somehow things had tricked
and sold him. As they had turned out he need not have married Desmond
after all.
She herself had pointed out the extreme futility of his behaviour, lest
he should miss the peculiar irony of it. For when her fright and the
cause of her fright were gone Desmond resented Nicky's having married
her. She didn't really want anybody to marry her, and nobody but Nicky
would have dreamed of doing it.
She lay weak and pathetic in her bed for about a fortnight; and for a
little while after she was content to lie stretched out among her
cushions on the studio floor, while Nicky waited on her. But, when she
got well and came downstairs for good, Nicky saw that Desmond's weakness
and pathos had come with the baby and had gone with it. The real Desmond
was not weak, she was not pathetic. She was strong and hard and clever
with a brutal cleverness. She didn't care how much he saw. He could see
to the bottom of her nature, if he liked, and feel how hard it was. She
had no more interest in deceiving him.
She had no more interest in him at all.
She was interested in her painting again. She worked in long fits, after
long intervals of idleness. She worked with a hard, passionless
efficiency. Nicky thought her paintings were hideous and repulsive; but
he did not say so. He was not aware of the extent to which Desmond
imitated her master, Alfred Orde-Jones. He knew nothing about painting
and he had got used to the things. He had got used to Desmond, slouching
about the flat, in her sloping, slovenly grace, dressed in her queer
square jacket and straight short skirt, showing her long delicate
ankles, and her slender feet in their grey stockings and black slippers.
He was used to Desmond when she was lazy; when she sat hunched up on her
cushions and smoked one cigarette after another without a word, and
watched him sullenly. Her long, slippered feet, thrust out, pointed at
him, watching. Her long face watched him between the sleek bands of hair
and the big black bosses plaited over her ears.
The beauty of Desmond's face had gone to sleep again, stilled into
hardness by the passing of her passion. A sort of ugliness was awake
there, and it watched him.
In putting weakness and pathos away from her Desmond had parted with
two-thirds of her power. Yet the third part still served to hold him,
used with knowledge and a cold and competent economy. He resented it,
resisted it over and over again; and over and over again it conquered
resentment and resistance. It had something to do with her subtle,
sloping lines, with her blackness and her sallow whiteness, with the
delicate scent and the smoothness of her skin under the sliding hand. He
couldn't touch her without still feeling a sort of pity, a sort of
affection.
But she could take and give caresses while she removed her soul from him
in stubborn rancour.
He couldn't understand that. It amazed him every time. He thought it
horrible. For Nicky's memory was faithful. It still kept the impression
of the Desmond he had married, the tender, frightened, helpless Desmond
he had thought he loved. The Desmond he remembered reminded him
of Veronica.
And Desmond said to herself, "He's impossible. You can't make any
impression on him. I might as well be married to a Moving Fortress."
* * * * *
Months passed. The War Office had not yet given up Nicky's model of the
Moving Fortress. In the first month it was not aware of any letter or of
any parcel or of any Mr. Nicholas Harrison. In the second month
inquiries would be made and the results communicated to Captain Drayton.
In the third month the War Office knew nothing of the matter referred to
by Captain Drayton.
Drayton hadn't a hope. "We can't get it back, Nicky," he said.
"I can," said Nicky, "I can get it back out of my head."
All through the winter of nineteen-eleven and the spring of
nineteen-twelve they worked at it together. They owned that they were
thus getting better results than either of them could have got alone.
There were impossibilities about Nicky's model that a gunner would have
seen at once, and there were faults in Drayton's plans that an engineer
would not have made. Nicky couldn't draw the plans and Drayton couldn't
build the models. They said it was fifty times better fun to work at
it together.
Nicky was happy.
* * * * *
Desmond watched them sombrely. She and Alfred Orde-Jones, the painter,
laughed at them behind their backs. She said "How funny they are! Frank
wouldn't hurt a fly and Nicky wouldn't say 'Bo!' to a goose if he
thought it would frighten the goose, and yet they're only happy when
they're inventing some horrible machine that'll kill thousands of people
who never did them any harm." He said, "That's because they haven't any
imagination."
Nicky got up early and went to bed late to work at the Moving Fortress.
The time between had to be given to the Works. The Company had paid him
fairly well for all his patents in the hope of getting more of his
ideas, and when they found that no ideas were forthcoming they took it
out of him in labour. He was too busy and too happy to notice what
Desmond was doing.
One day Vera said to him, "Nicky, do you know that Desmond is going
about a good deal with Alfred Orde-Jones?"
"Is she? Is there any reason why she shouldn't?"
"Not unless you call Orde-Jones a reason."
"You mean I've got to stop it? How can I?"
"You can't. Nothing can stop Desmond."
"What do you think I ought to do about it?"
"Nothing. She goes about with scores of people. It doesn't follow that
there's anything in it."
"Oh, Lord, I should hope not! That beastly bounder. What _could_ there
be in it?"
"He's a clever painter, Nicky. So's Desmond. There's that in it."
"I've hardly a right to object to that, have I? It's not as if I were a
clever painter myself."
But as he walked home between the white-walled gardens of St. John's
Wood, and through Regent's Park and Baker Street, and down the north
side of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, he worried the thing
to shreds.
There couldn't be anything in it.
He could see Alfred Orde-Jones--the raking swagger of the tall lean body
in the loose trousers, the slouch hat and the flowing tie. He could see
his flowing black hair and his haggard, eccentric face with its seven
fantastic accents, the black eyebrows, the black moustache, the high,
close-clipped side whiskers, the two forks of the black beard.
There couldn't be anything in it.
Orde-Jones's mouth was full of rotten teeth.
And yet he never came home rather later than usual without saying to
himself, "Supposing I was to find him there with her?"
He left off coming home late so that he shouldn't have to ask himself
that question.
He wondered what--if it really did happen--he would do. He wondered what
other men did. It never occurred to him that at twenty-two he was young
to be considering this problem.
He rehearsed scenes that were only less fantastic than Orde-Jones's face
and figure, or that owed their element of fantasy to Orde-Jones's face
and figure. He saw himself assaulting Orde-Jones with violence, dragging
him out of Desmond's studio, and throwing him downstairs. He wondered
what shapes that body and those legs and arms would take when they got
to the bottom. Perhaps they wouldn't get to the bottom all at once. He
would hang on to the banisters. He saw himself simply opening the door
of the studio and ordering Orde-Jones to walk out of it. Really, there
would be nothing else for him to do but to walk out, and he would look
an awful ass doing it. He saw himself standing in the room and looking
at them, and saying, "I've no intention of interrupting you." Perhaps
Desmond would answer, "You're not interrupting us. We've finished all
we had to say." And _he_ would walk out and leave them there.
Not caring.
He wondered if _he_ would look an awful ass doing it.
In the end, when it came, he hadn't to do any of these things. It
happened very quietly and simply, early on a Sunday evening after he had
got back from Eltham. He had dined with Drayton and his people on
Saturday, and stayed, for once, over-night, risking it.
Desmond was sitting on a cushion, on the floor, with her thin legs in
their grey stockings slanting out in front of her. She propped her chin
on her hands. Her thin, long face, between the great black ear-bosses,
looked at him thoughtfully, without rancour.
"Nicky," she said, "Alfred Orde-Jones slept with me last night."
And he said, simply and quietly, "Very well, Desmond; then I shall leave
you. You can keep the flat, and I or my father will make you an
allowance. I shan't divorce you, but I won't live with you."
"Why won't you divorce me?" she said.
"Because I don't want to drag you through the dirt."
She laughed quietly. "Dear Nicky," she said, "how sweet and like you.
But don't let's have any more chivalrous idiocy. I don't want it. I
never did." (She had forgotten that she had wanted it very badly once.
But Nicky did not remind her of that time. No matter. She didn't want it
now). "Let's look at the thing sensibly, without any rotten sentiment.
We've had some good times together, and we've had some bad times. I'll
admit that when you married me you saved me from a very bad time.
That's no reason why we should go on giving each other worse times
indefinitely. You seem to think I don't want you to divorce me. What
else do you imagine Alfred came for last night? Why we've been trying
for it for the last three months.
"Of course, if you'll let _me_ divorce _you_ for desertion, it would be
very nice of you. That," said Desmond, "is what decent people do."
He went out and telephoned to his father. Then he left her and went back
to his father's house.
Desmond asked the servant to remember particularly that it was the
fifteenth of June and that the master was going away and would not come
back again.
* * * * *
As Nicky walked up the hill and across the Heath, he wondered why it had
happened, and why, now that it had happened, he cared so little. He
could have understood it if he hadn't cared at all for Desmond. But he
had cared in a sort of way. If she had cared at all for him he thought
they might have made something of it, something enduring, perhaps, if
they had had children of their own.
He still couldn't think why it had happened. But he knew that, even if
he had loved Desmond with passion, it wouldn't have been the end of him.
The part of him that didn't care, that hadn't cared much when he lost
his Moving Fortress, was the part that Desmond never would have
cared for.
He didn't know whether it was outside him and beyond him, bigger and
stronger than he was, or whether it was deep inside, the most real part
of him. Whatever happened or didn't happen it would go on.
How could he have ended _here_, with poor little Desmond? There was
something ahead of him, something that he felt to be tremendous and
holy. He had always known it waited for him. He was going out to meet
it; and because of it he didn't care.
And after a year of Desmond he was glad to go back to his father's
house; even though he knew that the thing that waited for him was
not there.
Frances and Anthony were happy again. After all, Heaven had manipulated
their happiness with exquisite art and wisdom, letting Michael and
Nicholas go from them for a little while that they might have them again
more completely, and teaching them the art and wisdom that would
keep them.
Some day the children would marry; even Nicky might marry again. They
would prepare now, by small daily self-denials, for the big renunciation
that must come.
Yet in secret they thought that Michael would never marry; that Nicky,
made prudent by disaster, wasn't really likely to marry again. John
would marry; and they would be happy in John's happiness and in
John's children.
And Nicky had not been home before he offered to his parents the
spectacle of an outrageous gaiety. You would have said that life to
Nicholas was an amusing game where you might win or lose, but either way
it didn't matter. It was a rag, a sell. Even the preceedings, the
involved and ridiculous proceedings of his divorce, amused him.
It was undeniably funny that he should be supposed to have deserted
Desmond.
Frances wondered, again, whether Nicky really had any feelings, and
whether things really made any impression on him.
XVI
It was a quarter past five on a fine morning, early in July. On the
stroke of the quarter Captain Frank Drayton's motor-car, after exceeding
the speed limit along the forlorn highway of the Caledonian Road, drew
up outside the main entrance of Holloway Gaol. Captain Frank Drayton was
alone in his motor-car.
He had the street all to himself till twenty past five, when he was
joined by another motorist, also conspicuously alone in his car. Drayton
tried hard to look as if the other man were not there.
The other man tried even harder to look as if he were not there himself.
He was the first to be aware of the absurdity of their competitive
pretences. He looked at his watch and spoke.
"I hope they'll be punctual with those doors. I was up at four o'clock."
"I," said Drayton, "was up at three."
"I'm waiting for my wife," said the other man.
"I am _not_," said Drayton, and felt that he had scored.
The other man's smile allowed him the point he made.
"Yes, but my wife happens to be Lady Victoria Threlfall."
The other man laughed as if he had made by far the better joke.
Drayton recognized Mr. Augustin Threlfall, that Cabinet Minister made
notorious by his encounters with the Women's Franchise Union. Last year
Miss Maud Blackadder had stalked him in the Green Park and lamed him by
a blow from her hunting-crop. This year his wife, Lady Victoria
Threlfall, had headed the June raid on the House of Commons.
And here he was at twenty minutes past five in the morning waiting to
take her out of prison.
And here was Drayton, waiting for Dorothea, who was not his wife yet.
"Anyhow," said the Cabinet Minister, "we've done them out of their
Procession."
"What Procession?"
All that Drayton knew about it was that, late last night, a friend he
had in the Home Office had telephoned to him that the hour of Miss
Dorothea Harrison's release would be five-thirty, not six-thirty as the
papers had it.
"The Procession," said the Cabinet Minister, "that was to have met 'em
at six-thirty. A Car of Victory for Mrs. Blathwaite, and a bodyguard of
thirteen young women on thirteen white horses. The girl who smashed my
knee-cap is to be Joan of Arc and ride at the head of 'em. In armour.
Fact. There's to be a banquet for 'em at the Imperial at nine. We can't
stop _that_. And they'll process down the Embankment and down Pall Mall
and Piccadilly at eleven; but they won't process here. We've let 'em out
an hour too soon."
A policeman came from the prison-yard. He blew a whistle. Four taxi-cabs
crept round the corner furtively, driven by visibly hilarious
chauffeurs.
"The triumphant procession from Holloway," said the Cabinet Minister,
"is you and me, sir, and those taxi-cabs."
On the other side of the gates a woman laughed. The released prisoners
were coming down the prison-yard.
The Cabinet Minister cranked up his engine with an unctuous glee. He was
boyishly happy because he and the Home Secretary had done them out of
the Car of Victory and the thirteen white horses.
The prison-gates opened. The Cabinet Minister and Drayton raised their
caps.
The leaders, Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela Blathwaite and Mrs.
Palmerston-Swete came first. Then Lady Victoria Threlfall. Then
Dorothea. Then sixteen other women.
Drayton did not look at them. He did not see what happened when the
Cabinet Minister met his wife. He did not see the sixteen other women.
He saw nothing but Dorothea walking by herself.
She had no hat on. Her clothes were as the great raid had left them, a
month ago. Her serge coat was torn at the breast pocket, the
three-cornered flap hung, showing the white lining. Another
three-cornered flap hung from her right knee. She carried her small,
hawk-like head alert and high. Her face had the incomparable bloom of
youth. Her eyes shone. They and her face showed no memory of the
prison-cell, the plank-bed, and the prison walls; they showed no sense
of Drayton's decency in coming to meet her, no sense of anything at all
but of the queerness, the greatness and the glory of the world--of him,
perhaps, as a part of it. She stepped into the car as if they had met by
appointment for a run into the country. "I shan't hurt your car. I'm
quite clean, though you mightn't think it. The cells were all right
this time."
He disapproved of her, yet he adored her.
"Dorothy," he said, "do you want to go to that banquet?"
"No, but I've got to. I must go through with it. I swore I'd do the
thing completely or not at all."
"It isn't till nine. We've three whole hours before we need start."
"What are you going to do with me?"
"I'm going to take you home first. Then I suppose I shall have to drive
you down to that beastly banquet."
"That won't take three and a half hours. It's a heavenly morning. Can't
we do something with it?"
"What would you like to do?"
"I'd like to stop at the nearest coffee-stall. I'm hungry. Then--Are you
frightfully sleepy?"
"Me? Oh, Lord, no."
"Then let's go off somewhere into the country." They went.
* * * * *
They pulled up in a green lane near Totteridge to finish the buns they
had brought with them from the coffee-stall.
"Did you ever smell anything like this lane? Did you ever eat anything
like these buns? Did you ever drink anything like that divine coffee? If
epicures had any imagination they'd go out and obstruct policemen and
get put in prison for the sake of the sensations they'd have
afterwards."
"That reminds me," he said, "that I want to talk to you. No--but
seriously."
"I don't mind how seriously you talk if I may go on eating."
"That's what I brought the buns for. So that I mayn't be interrupted.
First of all I want to tell you that you haven't taken me in. Other
people may be impressed with this Holloway business, but not me. I'm not
moved, or touched, or even interested."
"Still," she murmured, "you did get up at three o'clock in the morning."
"If you think I got up at three o'clock in the morning to show my
sympathy, you're mistaken."
"Sympathy? I don't need your sympathy. It was worth it, Frank. There
isn't anything on earth like coming out of prison. Unless it is
going in."
"That won't work, Dorothy, when I know why you went in. It wasn't to
prove your principles. Your principles were against that sort of thing.
It wasn't to get votes for women. You know as well as I do that you'll
never get them that way. It wasn't to annoy Mr. Asquith. You knew Mr.
Asquith wouldn't care a hang. It was to annoy me."
"I wonder," she said dreamily, "if I shall _ever_ be able to stop
eating."
"You can't take me in. I know too much about it. You said you were going
to keep out of rows. You weren't going on that deputation because it
meant a row. You went because I asked you not to go."
"I did; and I should go again tomorrow for the same reason."
"But it isn't a reason. It's not as if I'd asked you to go against your
conscience. Your conscience hadn't anything to do with it."
"Oh, hadn't it! I went because you'd no right to ask me not to."
"If I'd had the right you'd have gone just the same."
"What do you mean by the right?"
"You know perfectly well what I mean."
"Of course I do. You mean, and you meant that if I'd married you you'd
have had the right, not just to ask me not to, but to prevent me. That
was what I was out against. I'd be out against it tomorrow and the next
day, and for as long as you keep up that attitude."
"And yet--you said you loved me."
"So I did. So I do. But I'm out against that too."
"Good Lord, against what?"
"Against your exploiting my love for your purposes."
"My poor dear child, what do you suppose I wanted?"
She had reached the uttermost limit of absurdity, and in that moment she
became to him helpless and pathetic.
"I knew there was going to be the most infernal row and I wanted to keep
you out of it. Look here, you'd have thought me a rotter if I hadn't,
wouldn't you?
"Of course you would. And there's another thing. You weren't straight
about it. You never told me you were going."
"I never told you I wasn't."
"I don't care, Dorothy; you weren't straight. You ought to have told
me."
"How could I tell you when I knew you'd only go trying to stop me and
getting yourself arrested."
"Not me. They wouldn't have touched me."
"How was I to know that? If they had I should have dished you. And I'd
have stayed away rather than do that. I didn't tell Michael or Nicky or
Father for the same reason."
"You'd have stayed at home rather than have dished me? Do you really
mean that?"
"Of course I mean it. And I meant it. It's you," she said, "who don't
care."
"How do you make that out?"
He really wanted to know. He really wanted, if it were possible, to
understand her.
"I make it out this way. Here have I been through the adventure and the
experience of my life. I was in the thick of the big raid; I was four
weeks shut up in a prison cell; and you don't care; you're not
interested. You never said to yourself, 'Dorothy was in the big raid, I
wonder what happened to her?' or 'Dorothy's in prison, I wonder how
she's feeling?' You didn't care; you weren't interested.
"If it had happened to you, I couldn't have thought of anything else, I
couldn't have got it out of my head. I should have been wondering all
the time what you were feeling; I couldn't have rested till I knew. It
would have been as if I was in prison myself. And now, when I've come
out, all you think of is how you can rag and score off me."
She was sitting beside him on the green bank of the lane. Her hands were
clasped round her knees. One knickerbockered knee protruded through the
three-cornered rent in her skirt; she stared across the road, a long,
straight stare that took no heed of what she saw, the grey road, and
the green bank on the other side, topped by its hedge of trees.
Her voice sounded quiet in the quiet lane; it had no accent of self-pity
or reproach. It was as if she were making statements that had no
emotional significance whatever.
She did not mean to hurt him, yet every word cut where he was sorest.
"I wanted to tell you about it. I counted the days, the minutes till I
could tell you; but you wouldn't listen. You don't want to hear."
"I won't listen if it's about women's suffrage. And I don't want to hear
if it's anything awful about you."
"It is about me, but it isn't awful.
"That's what I want to tell you.
"But, first of all--about the raid. I didn't mean to be in it at all, as
it happens. I meant to go with the deputation because you told me not
to. You're right about that. But I meant to turn back as soon as the
police stopped us, because I hate rows with the police, and because I
don't believe in them, and because I told Angela Blathwaite I wasn't
going in with her crowd any way. You see, she called me a coward before
a lot of people and said I funked it. So I did. But I should have been a
bigger coward if I'd gone against my own will, just because of what she
said. That's how she collars heaps of women. They adore her and they're
afraid of her. Sometimes they lie and tell her they're going in when
their moment comes, knowing perfectly well that they're not going in at
all. I don't adore her, and I'm not afraid of her, and I didn't lie.
"So I went at the tail of the deputation where I could slip out when the
row began. I swear I didn't mean to be in it. I funked it far too much.
I didn't mind the police and I didn't mind the crowd. But I funked being
with the women. When I saw their faces. You world have funked it.
"And anyhow I don't like doing things in a beastly body. Ugh!
"And then they began moving.
"The police tried to stop them. And the crowd tried. The crowd began
jeering at them. And still they moved. And the mounted police horses got
excited, and danced about and reared a bit, and the crowd was in a funk
then and barged into the women. That was rather awful.
"I could have got away then if I'd chosen. There was a man close to me
all the time who kept making spaces for me and telling me to slip
through. I was just going to when a woman fell. Somewhere in the front
of the deputation where the police were getting nasty.
"Then I had to stay. I had to go on with them. I swear I wasn't excited
or carried away in the least. Two women near me were yelling at the
police. I hated them. But I felt I'd be an utter brute if I left them
and got off safe. You see, it was an ugly crowd, and things were
beginning to be jolly dangerous, and I'd funked it badly. Only the first
minute. It went--the funk I mean--when I saw the woman go down. She fell
sort of slanting through the crowd, and it was horrible. I couldn't have
left them then any more than I could have left children in a
burning house.
"I thought of you."
"You thought of me?"
"Yes. I thought of you--how you'd have hated it. But I didn't care. I
was sort of boosted up above caring. The funk had all gone and I was
absolutely happy. Not insanely happy like some of the other women, but
quietly, comfily happy.
"After all, I didn't do anything you _need_ have minded."
"What _did_ you do?" he said.
"I just went on and stood still and refused to go back. I stuck my hands
in my pockets so that I shouldn't let out at a policeman or anything (I
knew you wouldn't like _that_). I may have pushed a bit now and then
with my shoulders and my elbows; I can't remember. But I didn't make one
sound. I was perfectly lady-like and perfectly dignified."
"I suppose you _know_ you haven't got a hat on?"
"It didn't _come_ off. I _took_ it off and threw it to the crowd when
the row began. It doesn't matter about your hair coming down if you
haven't got a hat on, but if your hair's down and your hat's bashed in
and all crooked you look a perfect idiot.
"It wasn't a bad fight, you know, twenty-one women to I don't know how
many policemen, and the front ones got right into the doorway of St.
Stephen's. That was where they copped me.
"But that, isn't the end of it.
"The fight was only the first part of the adventure. The wonderful thing
was what happened afterwards. In prison.
"I didn't think I'd really _like_ prison. That was another thing I
funked. I'd heard such awful things about it, about the dirt, you know.
And there wasn't any dirt in my cell, anyhow. And after the crowds of
women, after the meetings and the speeches, the endless talking and the
boredom, that cell was like heaven.
"Thank God, it's always solitary confinement. The Government doesn't
know that if they want to make prison a deterrent they'll shut us up
together. You won't give the Home Secretary the tip, will you?
"But that isn't what I wanted to tell you about.
"It was something bigger, something tremendous. You'll not believe this
part of it, but I was absolutely happy in that cell. It was a sort of
deep-down unexcited happiness. I'm not a bit religious, but I _know_ how
the nuns feel in their cells when they've given up everything and shut
themselves up with God. The cell was like a convent cell, you know, as
narrow as that bit of shadow there is, and it had nice white-washed
walls, and a planked-bed in the corner, and a window high, high up.
There ought to have been a crucifix on the wall above the plank-bed, but
there wasn't a crucifix. There was only a shiny black Bible on
the chair.
"Really Frank, if you're to be shut up for a month with just one book,
it had better be the Bible. Isaiah's ripping. I can remember heaps of
it: 'in the habitation of jackals, where they lay, shall be grass with
reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall
walk there: and the ransomed of the Lord shall return with singing into
Zion' ... 'They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they
shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary;
they shall walk, and not faint.' I used to read like anything; and I
thought of things. They sort of came to me.
"That's what I wanted to tell you about. The things that came to me were
so much bigger than the thing I went in for. I could see all along we
weren't going to get it that way. And I knew we _were_ going to get it
some other way. I don't in the least know how, but it'll be some big,
tremendous way that'll make all this fighting and fussing seem the
rottenest game. That was one of the things I used to think about."
"Then," he said, "you've given it up? You're corning out of it?"
She looked at him keenly. "Are those still your conditions?"
He hesitated one second before he answered firmly. "Yes, those are still
my conditions. You still won't agree to them?"
"I still won't agree. It's no use talking about it. You don't believe in
freedom. We're incompatible. We don't stand for the same ideals."
"Oh, Lord, what _does_ that matter?"
"It matters most awfully."
"I should have thought," said Drayton, "it would have mattered more if
I'd had revolting manners or an impediment in my speech or something."
"It wouldn't, _really_."
"Well, you seem to have thought about a lot of things. Did you ever once
think about me, Dorothy?"
"Yes, I did. Have you ever read the Psalms? There's a jolly one that
begins: 'Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to
war and my fingers to fight.' I used to think of you when I read that. I
thought of you a lot.
"That's what I was coming to. It was the queerest thing of all.
Everything seemed ended when I went to prison. I knew you wouldn't care
for me after what I'd done--you must really listen to this, Frank--I
knew you couldn't and wouldn't marry me; and it somehow didn't matter.
What I'd got hold of was bigger than that. I knew that all this Women's
Suffrage business was only a part of it, a small, ridiculous part.
"I sort of saw the redeemed of the Lord. They were men, as well as
women, Frank. And they were all free. They were all free because they
were redeemed. And the funny thing was that you were part of it. You
were mixed up in the whole queer, tremendous business. Everything was
ended. And everything was begun; so that I knew you understood even when
you didn't understand. It was really as if I'd got you tight, somehow;
and I knew you couldn't go, even when you'd gone."
"And yet you don't see that it's a crime to force me to go."
"I see that it would be a worse crime to force you to stay if you mean
going.
"What time is it?"
"A quarter to eight."
"And I've got to go home and have a bath. Whatever you do, don't make me
late for that infernal banquet. You _are_ going to drive me there?"
"I'm going to drive you there, but I'm not going in with you."
"Poor darling! Did I ask you to go in?"
He drove her back to her father's house. She came out of it burnished
and beautiful, dressed in clean white linen, with the broad red, white
and blue tricolour of the Women's Franchise Union slanting across
her breast.
He drove her to the Banquet of the Prisoners, to the Imperial Hotel,
Kingsway. They went in silence; for their hearts ached too much for
speaking. But in Dorothy's heart, above the aching, there was that queer
exaltation that had sustained her in prison.
He left her at the entrance of the hotel, where Michael and Nicholas
waited to receive her.
Michael and Nicholas went in with her to the Banquet. They hated it, but
they went in.
Veronica was with them. She too wore a white frock, with red, white and
blue ribbons.
"Drayton's a bit of a rotter," Michael said, "not to see you through."
"How can he when he feels like that about it?"
"As if we didn't feel!"
* * * * *
Three hundred and thirty women and twenty men waited in the Banquet Hall
to receive the prisoners.
The high galleries were festooned with the red, white and blue of the
Women's Franchise Union, and hung with flags and blazoned banners. The
silk standards and the emblems of the Women's Suffrage Leagues and
Societies, supported by their tall poles, stood ranged along three
walls. They covered the sham porphyry with gorgeous and heroic colours,
purple and blue, sky-blue and sapphire blue and royal blue, black, white
and gold, vivid green, pure gold, pure white, dead-black, orange and
scarlet and magenta.
From the high table under the windows streamed seven dependent tables
decorated with nosegays of red, white and blue flowers. In the centre of
the high table three arm-chairs, draped with the tricolour, were set
like three thrones for the three leaders. They were flanked by nine
other chairs on the right and nine on the left for the eighteen other
prisoners.
There was a slight rustling sound at the side door leading to the high
table. It was followed by a thicker and more prolonged sound of rustling
as the three hundred and fifty turned in their places.
The twenty-one prisoners came in.
A great surge of white, spotted with red and blue, heaved itself up in
the hall to meet them as the three hundred and fifty rose to their feet.
And from the three hundred and fifty there went up a strange, a savage
and a piercing collective sound, where a clear tinkling as of glass or
thin metal, and a tearing as of silk, and a crying as of children and of
small, slender-throated animals were held together by ringing,
vibrating, overtopping tones as of violins playing in the treble. And
now a woman's voice started off on its own note and tore the delicate
tissue of this sound with a solitary scream; and now a man's voice
filled up a pause in the shrill hurrahing with a solitary boom.
To Dorothea, in her triumphal seat at Angela Blathwaite's right hand, to
Michael and Nicholas and Veronica in their places among the crowd, that
collective sound was frightful.
From her high place Dorothea could see Michael and Nicholas, one on each
side of Veronica, just below her. At the same table, facing them, she
saw her three aunts, Louie, Emmeline and Edith.
It was from Emmeline that those lacerating screams arose.
* * * * *
The breakfast and the speeches of the prisoners were over. The crowd was
on its feet again, and the prisoners had risen in their high places.
Out of the three hundred and seventy-one, two hundred and seventy-nine
women and seven men were singing the Marching Song of the
Militant Women.
Shoulder to shoulder, breast to breast,
Our army moves from east to west.
Follow on! Follow on!
With flag and sword from south and north,
The sounding, shining hosts go forth.
Follow on! Follow on!
Do you not bear our marching feet,
From door to door, from street to street?
Follow on! Follow on!
Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by the singing, swaying, excited
crowd.
Her three aunts fascinated her. They were all singing at the top of
their voices. Aunt Louie stood up straight and rigid. She sang from the
back of her throat, through a mouth not quite sufficiently open; she
sang with a grim, heroic determination to sing, whatever it might cost
her and other people.
Aunt Edie sang inaudibly, her thin shallow voice, doing its utmost, was
overpowered by the collective song. Aunt Emmeline sang shrill and loud;
her body rocked slightly to the rhythm of a fantastic march. With one
large, long hand raised she beat the measure of the music. Her head was
thrown back; and on her face there was a look of ecstasy, of a holy
rapture, exalted, half savage, not quite sane.
Dorothea was fascinated and horrified by Aunt Emmeline.
The singing had threatened her when it began; so that she felt again her
old terror of the collective soul. Its massed emotion threatened her.
She longed for her white-washed prison-cell, for its hardness, its
nakedness, its quiet, its visionary peace. She tried to remember. Her
soul, in its danger, tried to get back there. But the soul of the crowd
in the hail below her swelled and heaved itself towards her, drawn by
the Vortex. She felt the rushing of the whirlwind; it sucked at her
breath: the Vortex was drawing her, too; the powerful, abominable thing
almost got her. The sight of Emmeline saved her.
She might have been singing and swaying too, carried away in the same
awful ecstasy, if she had not seen Emmeline. By looking at Emmeline she
saved her soul; it stood firm again; she was clear and hard and sane.
She could look away from Emmeline now. She saw her brothers, Michael and
Nicholas. Michael's soul was the prey of its terror of the herd-soul.
The shrill voices, fine as whipcord and sharp as needles, tortured him.
Michael looked beautiful in his martyrdom. His fair, handsome face was
set clear and hard. His yellow hair, with its hard edges, fitted his
head like a cap of solid, polished metal. Weariness and disgust made a
sort of cloud over his light green eyes. When Nicky looked at him
Nicky's face twitched and twinkled. But he hated it almost as much as
Michael hated it.
She thought of Michael and Nicholas. They hated it, and yet they stuck
it out. They wouldn't go back on her. She and Lady Victoria Threlfall
were to march on foot before the Car of Victory from Blackfriars Bridge
along the Embankment, through Trafalgar Square and Pall Mall and
Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner. And Michael and Nicholas would march
beside them to hold up the poles of the standard which, after all, they
were not strong enough to carry.
She thought of Drayton who had not stuck it out. And at the same time
she thought of the things that had come to her in her prison cell. She
had told him the most real thing that had ever happened to her, and he
had not listened. He had not cared. Michael would have listened. Michael
would have cared intensely.
She thought, "'I am not come to bring peace, but a sword.'" The sword
was between her and her lover.
She had given him up. She had chosen, not between him and the Vortex,
but between him and her vision which was more than either of them or
than all this.
She looked at Rosalind and Maud Blackadder who sang violently in the
hall below her. She had chosen freedom. She had given up her lover. She
wondered whether Rosalind or the Blackadder girl could have done as
much, supposing they had had a choice?
Then she looked at Veronica.
Veronica was standing between Michael and Nicholas. She was slender and
beautiful and pure, like some sacrificial virgin. Presently she would be
marching in the Procession. She would carry a thin, tall pole, with a
round olive wreath on the top of it, and a white dove sitting in the
ring of the olive wreath. And she would look as if she was not in the
Procession but in another place.
When Dorothea looked at her she was lifted up above the insane ecstasy
and the tumult of the herd-soul. Her soul and the soul of Veronica went
alone in utter freedom.
Follow on! Follow on!
For Faith's our spear and Hope's our sword,
And Love's our mighty battle-lord.
Follow on! Follow on!
And Justice is our flag unfurled,
The flaming flag that sweeps the world.
Follow on! Follow on!
And "Freedom!" is our battle-cry;
For Freedom we will fight and die.
Follow on! Follow on!
The Procession was over a mile long.
It stretched all along the Embankment from Blackfriar's Bridge to
Westminster. The Car of Victory, covered with the tricolour, and the
Bodyguard on thirteen white horses were drawn up beside Cleopatra's
Needle and the Sphinxes.
Before the Car of Victory, from the western Sphinx to Northumberland
Avenue, were the long regiments of the Unions and Societies and Leagues,
of the trades and the professions and the arts, carrying their banners,
the purple and the blue, the black, white and gold, the green, the
orange and the scarlet and magenta.
Behind the Car of Victory came the eighteen prisoners with Lady Victoria
Threlfall and Dorothea at their head, under the immense tricolour
standard that Michael and Nicholas carried for them. Behind the
prisoners, closing the Procession, was a double line of young girls
dressed in white with tricolour ribbons, each carrying a pole with the
olive wreath and dove, symbolizing, with the obviousness of extreme
innocence, the peace that follows victory. They were led by Veronica.
She did not know that she had been chosen to lead them because of her
youth and her processional, hieratic beauty; she thought that the Union
had bestowed this honour on her because she belonged to Dorothea.
From her place at the head of the Procession she could see the big red,
white and blue standard held high above Dorothea and Lady Victoria
Threlfall. She knew how they would look; Lady Victoria, white and tense,
would go like a saint and a martyr, in exaltation, hardly knowing where
she was, or what she did; and Dorothea would go in pride, and in disdain
for the proceedings in which her honour forced her to take part; she
would have an awful knowledge of what she was doing and of where she
was; she would drink every drop of the dreadful cup she had poured out
for herself, hating it.
Last night Veronica had thought that she too would hate it; she thought
that she would rather die than march in the Procession. But she did not
hate it or her part in it. The thing was too beautiful and too big to
hate, and her part in it was too little.
She was not afraid of the Procession or of the soul of the Procession.
She was not afraid of the thick crowd on the pavements, pressing closer
and closer, pushed back continually by the police. Her soul was by
itself. Like Dorothea's soul it went apart from the soul of the crowd
and the soul of the Procession; only it was not proud; it was
simply happy.
The band had not yet begun to play; but already she heard the music
sounding in her brain; her feet felt the rhythm of the march.
Somewhere on in front the policemen made gestures of release, and the
whole Procession began to move. It marched to an unheard music, to the
rhythm that was in Veronica's brain.
They went through what were once streets between walls of houses, and
were now broad lanes between thick walls of people. The visible aspect
of things was slightly changed, slightly distorted. The houses stood
farther back behind the walls of people; they were hung with people; a
swarm of people clung like bees to the house walls.
All these people were fixed where they stood or hung. In a still and
stationary world the Procession was the only thing that moved.
She had a vague, far-off perception that the crowd was friendly.
A mounted policeman rode at her side. When they halted at the
cross-streets he looked down at Veronica with an amused and benign
expression. She had a vague, far-off perception that the policeman was
friendly. Everything seemed to her vague and far off.
Only now and then it struck her as odd that a revolutionary Procession
should be allowed to fill the streets of a great capital, and that a
body of the same police that arrested the insurgents should go with it
to protect them, to clear their triumphal way before them, holding up
the entire traffic of great thoroughfares that their bands and their
banners and their regiments should go through. She said to herself "What
a country! It couldn't happen in Germany; it couldn't happen in France,
or anywhere in Europe or America. It could only happen in England."
Now they were going up St. James's Street towards Piccadilly. The band
was playing the Marseillaise.
And with the first beat of the drum Veronica's soul came down from its
place, and took part in the Procession. As long as they played the
Marseillaise she felt that she could march with the Procession to the
ends of the world; she could march into battle to the Marseillaise; she
could fight to that music and die.
The women behind her were singing under their breath. They sang the
words of the Women's Marseillaise.
And Veronica, marching in front of them by herself, sang another song.
She sang the Marseillaise of Heine and of Schumann.
"'Daun reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab,
Viel' Schwerter klirren und blitzen;
Dann steig' ich gewaffnet hervor aus mein Grab,--
Den Kaiser, den Kaiser zu schützen!'"
The front of the Procession lifted as it went up Tyburn Hill.
Veronica could not see Michael and Nicholas, but she knew that they were
there. She knew it by the unusual steadiness of the standard that they
carried. Far away westwards, in the middle and front of the Procession,
the purple and the blue, the gold and white, the green, the scarlet and
orange and magenta standards rocked and staggered; they bent forwards;
they were flung backwards as the west wind took them. But the red, white
and blue standard that Michael and Nicholas carried went before her,
steady and straight and high.
And Veronica followed, carrying her thin, tall pole with the olive
wreath on the top of it, and the white dove sitting in the ring of the
wreath. She went with the music of Schumann and Heine sounding in
her soul.
XVII
Another year passed.
Frances was afraid for Michael now. Michael was being drawn in. Because
of his strange thoughts he was the one of all her children who had most
hidden himself from her; who would perhaps hide himself from her to
the very end.
Nicholas had settled down. He had left the Morss Company and gone into
his father's business for a while, to see whether he could stand it.
John was going into the business too when he left Oxford. John was even
looking forward to his partnership in what he called "the Pater's old
tree-game." He said, "You wait till I get my hand well in. Won't we
make it rip!"
John was safe. You could depend on him to keep out of trouble. He had no
genius for adventure. He would never strike out for himself any strange
or dangerous line. He had settled down at Cheltenham; he had settled
down at Oxford.
And Dorothea had settled down.
The Women's Franchise Union was now in the full whirl of its revolution.
Under the inspiring leadership of the Blathwaites it ran riot up and
down the country. It smashed windows; it hurled stone ginger-beer
bottles into the motor cars of Cabinet Ministers; it poured treacle into
pillar-boxes; it invaded the House of Commons by the water-way, in
barges, from which women, armed with megaphones, demanded the vote from
infamous legislators drinking tea on the Terrace; it went up in balloons
and showered down propaganda on the City; now and then, just to show
what violence it could accomplish if it liked, it burned down a house or
two in a pure and consecrated ecstasy of Feminism. It was bringing to
perfection its last great tactical manoeuvre, the massed raid followed
by the hunger-strike in prison. And it was considering seriously the
very painful but possible necessity of interfering with British
sport--say the Eton and Harrow Match at Lord's--in some drastic and
terrifying way that would bring the men of England to their senses.
And Dorothea's soul had swung away from the sweep of the whirlwind. It
would never suck her in. She worked now in the office of the Social
Reform Union, and wrote reconstructive articles for _The New
Commonwealth_ on Economics and the Marriage Laws.
Frances was not afraid for her daughter. She knew that the revolution
was all in Dorothea's brain.
When she said that Michael was being drawn in she meant that he was
being drawn into the vortex of revolutionary Art. And since Frances
confused this movement with the movements of Phyllis Desmond she judged
it to be terrible. She understood from Michael that it was _the_ Vortex,
the only one that really mattered, and the only one that would ever
do anything.
And Michael was not only in it, he was in it with Lawrence Stephen.
Though Frances knew now that Lawrence Stephen had plans for Michael, she
did not realize that they depended much more on Michael himself than on
him. Stephen had said that if Michael was good enough he meant to help
him. If his poems amounted to anything he would publish them in his
_Review_. If any book of Michael's poems amounted to anything he would
give a whole article to that book in his _Review_. If Michael's prose
should ever amount to anything he would give him regular work on
the _Review_.
In nineteen-thirteen Michael Harrison was the most promising of the
revolutionary young men who surrounded Lawrence Stephen, and his poems
were beginning to appear, one after another, in the _Green Review_. He
had brought out a volume of his experiments in the spring of that year;
they were better than those that Réveillaud had approved of two years
ago; and Lawrence Stephen had praised them in the _Green Review_.
Lawrence Stephen was the only editor "out of Ireland," as he said, who
would have had the courage either to publish them or to praise them.
And when Frances realized Michael's dependence on Lawrence Stephen she
was afraid.
"You wouldn't be, my dear, if you knew Larry," Vera said.
For Frances still refused to recognize the man who had taken Ferdinand
Cameron's place.
Lawrence Stephen was one of those Nationalist Irishmen who love Ireland
with a passion that satisfies neither the lover nor the beloved. It was
a pure and holy passion, a passion so entirely of the spirit as to be
compatible with permanent bodily absence from its object. Stephen's
body had lived at ease in England (a country that he declared his spirit
hated) ever since he had been old enough to choose a habitation
for himself.
He justified his predilection on three grounds: Ireland had been taken
from him; Ireland had been so ruined and raped by the Scotch and the
English that nothing but the soul of Ireland was left for Irishmen to
love. He could work and fight for Ireland better in London than in
Dublin. And again, the Irishman in England can make havoc in his turn;
he can harry the English, he can spite, and irritate and triumph and get
his own back in a thousand ways. Living in England he would be a thorn
in England's side.
And all this meant that there was no place in Ireland for a man of his
talents and his temperament. His enemies called him an opportunist: but
he was a opportunist gone wrong, abandoned to an obstinate idealism, one
of those damned and solitary souls that only the north of Ireland
produces in perfection. For the Protestantism of Ulster breeds rebels
like no other rebels on earth, rebels as strong and obstinate and canny
as itself. Before he was twenty-one Stephen had revolted against the
material comfort and the spiritual tyranny of his father's house.
He was the great-grandson of an immigrant Lancashire cotton spinner
settled in Belfast. His western Irish blood was steeled with this
mixture, and braced and embittered with the Scottish blood of Antrim
where his people married.
Therefore, if he had chosen one career and stuck to it he would have
been formidable. But one career alone did not suffice for his
inexhaustible energies. As a fisher of opportunities he drew with too
wide a net and in too many waters. He had tried parliamentary politics
and failed because no party trusted him, least of all his own. And yet
few men were more trustworthy. He turned his back on the House of
Commons and took to journalism. As a journalistic politician he ran
Nationalism for Ireland and Socialism for England. Neither Nationalists
nor Socialists believed in him; yet few men were more worthy of belief.
In literature he had distinguished himself as a poet, a playwright, a
novelist and an essayist. He did everything so well that he was supposed
not to do anything quite well enough. Because of his politics other men
of letters suspected his artistic sincerity; yet few artists were more
sincere. His very distinction was unsatisfying. Without any of the
qualities that make even a minor statesman, he was so far contaminated
by politics as to be spoiled for the highest purposes of art; yet there
was no sense in which he had achieved popularity.
Everywhere he went he was an alien and suspected. Do what he would, he
fell between two countries and two courses. Ireland had cast him out and
England would none of him. He hated Catholicism and Protestantism alike,
and Protestants and Catholics alike disowned him. To every Church and
every sect he was a free thinker, destitute of all religion. Yet few men
were more religious. His enemies called him a turner and a twister; yet
on any one of his lines no man ever steered a straighter course.
A capacity for turning and twisting might have saved him. It would at
any rate have made him more intelligible. As it was, he presented to two
countries the disconcerting spectacle of a many-sided object moving with
violence in a dead straight line. He moved so fast that to a stationary
on-looker he was gone before one angle of him had been apprehended. It
was for other people to turn and twist if any one of them was to get a
complete all-round view of the amazing man.
But taken all round he passed for a man of hard wit and suspicious
brilliance.
And he belonged to no generation. In nineteen-thirteen he was not yet
forty, too old to count among the young men, and yet too young for men
of his own age. So that in all Ireland and all England you could not
have found a lonelier man.
The same queer doom pursued him in the most private and sacred relations
of his life. To all intents and purposes he was married to Vera Harrison
and yet he was not married. He was neither bound nor free.
All this had made him sorrowful and bitter.
And to add to his sorrowfulness and bitterness he had something of the
Celt's spiritual abhorrence of the flesh; and though he loved Vera,
after his manner, there were moments when Vera's capacity for
everlasting passion left him tired and bored and cold.
All his life _his_ passions had been at the service of ideas. All his
life he had looked for some great experience, some great satisfaction
and consummation; and he had not found it.
In nineteen-thirteen, with half his life behind him, the opportunist was
still waiting for his supreme opportunity.
Meanwhile his enemies said of him that he snatched.
But he did not snatch. The eyes of his idealism were fixed too steadily
on a visionary future. He merely tried, with a bored and weary gesture,
to waylay the passing moment while he waited. He had put his political
failure behind him and said, "I will be judged as an artist or not at
all." They judged him accordingly and their judgment was wrong.
There was not the least resemblance between Lawrence Stephen as he was
in himself and Lawrence Stephen as he appeared to the generation just
behind him. To conservatives he passed for the leader of the revolution
in contemporary art, and yet the revolution in contemporary art was
happening without him. He was not the primal energy in the movement of
the Vortex. In nineteen-thirteen his primal energies were spent, and he
was trusting to the movement of the Vortex to carry him a little farther
than he could have gone by his own impetus. He was attracted to the
young men of the Vortex because they were not of the generation that had
rejected him, and because he hoped thus to prolong indefinitely his own
youth. They were attracted to him because of his solitary distinction,
his comparative poverty, and his unpopularity. A prosperous,
well-established Stephen would have revolted them. He gave the
revolutionaries the shelter of his _Review_, the support of his name,
and the benefit of his bored and wearied criticism. They brought him in
return a certain homage founded on his admirable appreciation of their
merits and tempered by their sense of his dealings with the past they
abominated.
"Stephen is a bigot," said young Morton Ellis; "he believes in
Swinburne."
Stephen smiled at him in bored and weary tolerance.
He believed in too many things for his peace of mind. He knew that the
young men distrusted him because of his beliefs, and because of his
dealings with the past; because he refused to destroy the old gods when
he made place for the new.
* * * * *
Young Morton Ellis lay stretched out at his ease on the couch in
Stephen's study.
He blinked and twitched as he looked up at his host with half irritated,
half affable affection.
The young men came and went at their ease in and out of that house in
St. John's Wood which Lawrence Stephen shared with Vera Harrison. They
were at home there. Their books stood in his bookcase; they laid their
manuscripts on his writing table and left them there; they claimed his
empty spaces for the hanging of their pictures yet unsold.
Every Friday evening they met together in the long, low room at the top
of the house, and they talked.
Every Friday evening Michael left his father's house to meet them there,
and to listen and to talk.
To-night, round and about Morton Ellis, the young poet, were Austen
Mitchell, the young painter, and Paul Monier-Owen, the young sculptor,
and George Wadham, the last and youngest of Morton Ellis's disciples.
Lawrence Stephen stood among them like an austere guest in some
rendezvous of violent youth, or like the priest of some romantic
religion that he has blasphemed yet not quite abjured. He was lean and
dark and shaven; his black hair hung forward in two masses, smooth and
straight and square; he had sorrowful, bitter eyes, and a bitter,
sorrowful mouth, the long Irish upper lip fine and hard drawn, while the
lower lip quivered incongruously, pouted and protested and recanted, was
sceptical and sensitive and tender. His short, high nose had wide yet
fastidious nostrils.
It was at this figure that Morton Ellis continued to gaze with
affability and irritation. It was this figure that Vera's eyes followed
with anxious, restless passion, as if she felt that at any moment he
might escape her, might be off, God knew where.
Lawrence Stephen was ill at ease in that house and in the presence of
his mistress and his friends.
"I believe in the past," he said, "because I believe in the future. I
want continuity. Therefore I believe in Swinburne; and I believe in
Browning and in Tennyson and Wordsworth; I believe in Keats and Shelley
and in Milton. But I do not believe, any more than you do, in their
imitators. I believe in destroying their imitators. I do not believe in
destroying them."
"You can't destroy their imitators unless you destroy them. They breed
the disgusting parasites. Their memories harbour them like a stinking
suit of old clothes. They must be scrapped and burned if we're to get
rid of the stink. Art has got to be made young and new and clean. There
isn't any disinfectant that'll do the trick. So long as old masters are
kow-towed to as masters people will go on imitating them. When a poet
ceases to be a poet and becomes a centre of corruption, he must go."
Michael said, "How about _us_ when people imitate us? Have we got to
go?"
Morton Ellis looked at him and blinked. "No," he said. "No. We haven't
got to go."
"I don't see how you get out of it."
"I get out of it by doing things that can't be imitated."
There was a silence in which everybody thought of Mr. George Wadham. It
made Mr. Wadham so uncomfortable that he had to break it.
"I say, how about Shakespeare?" he said.
"Nobody, so far, _has_ imitated Shakespeare, any more than they have
_succeeded_ in imitating me."
There was another silence while everybody thought of Morton Ellis as the
imitator of every poetic form under the sun except the forms adopted by
his contemporaries.
"That's all very well, Ellis," said Stephen, "but you aren't the Holy
Ghost coming down out of heaven. We can trace your sources."
"My dear Stephen, I never said I was the Holy Ghost. Nobody ever does
come down out of heaven. You _can_ trace my sources, thank God, because
they're clean. I haven't gone into every stream that swine
like--and--and--and--and--" (he named five contemporary distinctions)
"have made filthy with their paddling."
He went on. "The very damnable question that you've raised, Harrison, is
absurd. You believe in the revolution. Well then, supposing the
revolution's coming--you needn't suppose it, because it's come. We
_are_ the revolution--the revolution means that we've made a clean sweep
of the past. In the future no artist will want to imitate anybody. No
artist will be allowed to exist unless he's prepared to be buried alive
or burned alive rather than corrupt the younger generation with the
processes and the products of his own beastly dissolution.
"That's why violence is right.
"'O Violenza, sorgi, balena in questo cielo
Sanguigno, stupra le albe,
irrompi come incendio nei vesperi,
fa di tutto il sereno una tempesta,
fa di tutta la vita una bataglia,
fa con tutte le anime un odio solo!'
"There's no special holiness in violence. Violence is right because it's
necessary."
"You mean it's necessary because it's right."
Austen Mitchell spoke. He was a sallow youth with a broad,
flat-featured, British face, but he had achieved an appearance of great
strangeness and distinction by letting his hay-coloured hair grow long
and cultivating two beards instead of one.
"Violence," he continued, "is not a means; it's an end! Energy must be
got for its own sake, if you want to generate more energy instead of
standing still. The difference between Pastism and Futurism is the
difference between statics and dynamics. Futurist art is simply art that
has gone on, that, has left off being static and become dynamic. It
expresses movement. Owen will tell you better than I can why it
expresses movement."
A light darted from the corner of the room where Paul Monier-Owen had
curled himself up. His eyes flashed like the eyes of a young wild animal
roused in its lair.
Paul Monier-Owen was dark and soft and supple. At a little distance he
had the clumsy grace and velvet innocence of a black panther, half cub,
half grown. The tips of his ears, the corners of his prominent eyes, his
eyebrows and his long nostrils tilted slightly upwards and backwards.
Under his slender, mournful nose his restless smile showed the white
teeth of a young animal.
Above this primitive, savage base of features that responded incessantly
to any childish provocation, the intelligence of Monier-Owen watched in
his calm and beautiful forehead and in his eyes.
He said, "It expresses movement, because it presents objects directly as
cutting across many planes. To do this you have to break up objects into
the lines and masses that compose them, and project those lines and
masses into space on any curve, at any angle, according to the planes
you mean them to cross, otherwise the movements you mean them to
express. The more planes intersected the more movement you get. By
decomposing figures you compose movements. By decomposing groups of
figures you compose groups of movement. Nothing but a cinema can
represent objects as intact and as at the same time moving; and even the
cinema only does this by a series of decompositions so minute as to
escape the eye.
"You want to draw a battle-piece or the traffic at Hyde Park Corner. It
can't be done unless you break up your objects as Mitchell breaks them
up. You want to carve figures in the round, wrestling or dancing. It
can't be done unless you dislocate their lines and masses as I dislocate
them, so as to throw them all at once into those planes that the intact
body could only have traversed one after another in a given time.
"By taking time into account as well as space we produce rhythm.
"I know what you're going to say, Stephen. The Dancing Faun and the
Frieze of the Parthenon express movements. But they do nothing of the
sort. They express movements arrested at a certain point. They are
supposed to represent nature, but they do not even do that, because
arrested motion is a contradiction in terms, and because the point of
arrest is an artificial and arbitrary thing.
"Your medium limits you. You have to choose between the intact body
which is stationary and the broken and projected bodies which are in
movement. That is why we destroy or suppress symmetry in the figure and
in design. Because symmetry is perfect balance which is immobility. If I
wanted to present perfect rest I should do it by an absolute symmetry."
"And there's more in it than that," said Austen Mitchell. "We're out
against the damnable affectations of naturalism and humanism. If I draw
a perfect likeness of a fat, pink woman I've got a fat, pink woman and
nothing else but a fat pink woman. And a fat, pink woman is a work of
Nature, not a work of art. And I'm lying. I'm presenting as a reality
what is only an appearance. The better the likeness the bigger the lie.
But movement and rhythm are realities, not appearances. When I present
rhythm and movement I've done something. I've made reality appear."
He went on to unfold a scheme for restoring vigour to the exhausted
language by destroying its articulations. These he declared to be purely
arbitrary, therefore fatal to the development of a spontaneous and
individual style. By breaking up the rigid ties of syntax, you do more
than create new forms of prose moving in perfect freedom, you deliver
the creative spirit itself from the abominable contact with dead ideas.
Association, fixed and eternalized by the structure of the language, is
the tyranny that keeps down the live idea.
"We've got to restore the innocence of memory, as Gauguin restored the
innocence of the eye."
* * * * *
Michael noticed that the talk was not always sustained at this
constructive level. And to-night, towards twelve o'clock, it dropped and
broke in a welter of vituperation. It was, first, a frenzied assault on
the Old Masters, a storming of immortal strongholds, a tearing and
scattering of the wing feathers of archangels; then, from this high
adventure it sank to a perfunctory skirmishing among living eminences
over forty, judged, by reason of their age, to be too contemptible for
an attack in force. It rallied again to a bombing and blasting of minute
ineptitudes, the slaughter of "swine like ---- and ---- and ---- and
---- and ----"; and ended in a furious pursuit of a volatile young poet,
Edward Rivers, who had escaped by sheer levity from the tug of the
Vortex, and was setting up a small swirl of his own.
Michael was with the revolutionaries heart and soul; he believed in
Morton Ellis and Austen Mitchell and Monier-Owen even more than he
believed in Lawrence Stephen, and almost as much as he believed in Jules
Réveillaud. They stood for all the realities and all the ideas and all
the accomplishments to which he himself was devoted. He had no sort of
qualms about the wholesale slaughter of the inefficient.
But to-night, as he listened to these voices, he felt again his old
horror of the collective soul. The voices spoke with a terrible
unanimity. The vortex--_the_ Vortex--was like the little vortex of
school. The young men, Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen belonged to a
herd like the school-herd, hunting together, crying together, saying the
same thing. Their very revolt against the Old Masters was a collective
and not an individual revolt. Their chase was hottest when their quarry
was one of the pack who had broken through and got away. They hated the
fugitive, solitary private soul.
And yet it was only as private souls that Ellis and Mitchell and
Monier-Owen counted. Each by himself did good things; each, if he had
the courage to break loose and go by himself, might do a great thing
some day. Even George Wadham might do something if he could get away
from Ellis and the rest. Edward Rivers had had courage.
Michael thought: "It's Rivers now. It'll be my turn next" But he had a
great longing to break loose and get away.
He thought: "I don't know where they're all going to end. They think
they're beginning something tremendous; but I can't see what's to come
of it. And I don't see how they can go on like that for ever. I can't
see what's coming. Yet something must come. _They_ can't be the end."
He thought: "Their movement is only a small swirl in an immense Vortex.
It may suck them all down. But it will clear the air. They will have
helped to clear it."
He thought of himself going on, free from the whirl of the Vortex, and
of his work as enduring; standing clear and hard in the clean air.