It must make good drinking, that after-battle wine! We only play
football, I sometimes think, for the sake of that hour of indolence and
exhaustion, when we lie back in comfort after a hot bath, stiff and
tired, to fight the afternoon’s struggle over again. It is good to get
our innings over early and sit in the pavilion with a pint pot at the
elbow while we watch our successors battle in the sunlight, and if we
happen to have made a few, the world is a very companionable spot. It is
worth while taking trouble out there in the open if only for that
after-sense of security and content. There is no temptation then to
grumble and feel jealous of those whose wickets are still intact and
whose innings is in front of them. And it is worth our while for the
sake of those fifteen years or so, when we shall stand above the battle,
to make the most of our youth while it is with us. If we realise
ourselves, if we live fully now, we shall be more sociable, more
generous, more kindhearted when the arteries begin to thicken. We shall
be able to look the younger generation in the face. We shall welcome it
as a host should, courteously. If we are wise now, or rather if we make
a wisdom of our indifference, we will come to find our last ten years
the happiest of all.
There are indeed times when we are inclined to welcome the infirmities
and immunities of age.
During the coal strike of 1921 my platoon was protecting the property of
the Shell Motor Spirit Company in Newcastle. It was a dismal enough
spot, beside the river. There was a long row of miners’ cottages between
my billet and the guard-room, and after tea the women would sit upon
their doorsteps and talk to one another, while the children played on a
strip of grass that ran dingily to the waterside. Beyond a more or less
mechanical supervision I had very little work to do, and in the evenings
I would stand in the roadway and watch the dusk rise slowly from the
river, to soften the harsh outline of chimney stack and factory. I grew
lonely and a little wistful as the twilight settled caressingly on the
poor houses that the sunlight had made so drab. Evening is always
beautiful. And I used to indulge the hour of sentiment with romantic
reveries concerning a young and charming girl who would sit evening
after evening knitting beside her mother.
I can recall now not a single feature of her; whether she was dark or
fair or tall: but I seem to recollect vaguely that she was plump and
that the light in her eyes was roguish. I used to think how pleasantly a
love affair would enliven the tedium of military routine. I had not, let
it be clearly understood, the slightest intention of embarking on such
an enterprise. On the lowest grounds, it would have been unsoldierlike
behaviour. The preliminaries, at any rate, would have been staged in
full view of my platoon. And an officer should not encourage in the
private soldier a suspicion that he is a creature of the same clay and
of the same instincts. There is much to be said for the Ouida convention
of beer in the canteen and champagne in the mess.
But dreams are agreeable things, and my fancy created a number of
romantic situations in which that girl and myself might at some later
day find ourselves. I never came out of my billet without a slight
quickening of the pulses. “Will she be there?” I asked myself. “Will she
be as pretty as she was yesterday?” Once she smiled at me, and my vanity
began to wonder whether she too was not regretting that there lay
between us the barrier of military rank. Perhaps she, too, was musing
wistfully in the twilight on the inequalities of time and place. Perhaps
she, too, was dreaming of some romantic encounter in a lane in
spring-time on the Cornish cliffs.
“You!” I should gasp. And we should stand still, gazing at one another.
And then we should both begin to talk eagerly at once. “I so wanted to
speak to you,” I should say.
“I, too,” she would reply. And we should walk together arm-in-arm along
the lane by the tall cliffs, standing perhaps silent for a while
saddened by the permanence of these high cliffs. So were they yesterday,
so would they be to-morrow; their silence might well seem a criticism of
our enchantment.
But it would pass quickly enough, that fleeting sorrow, in the bright
sunlight of an April day. And she would tell me that she was not really
the daughter of a Tyneside miner, but of an impoverished country
Squire, married to a rich cad, in part settlement of an overdue account.
“I could not stand it,” she would say, “I ran away. But he found me, he
dragged me back. He is with me now in the hotel at Boscastle.”
But she should never go back to him. We should rush to Padstow and catch
the next train to town. I should hurry round to Grant Richards.
“Trouble,” I should say, “I’m going to Austria to-morrow. I must have a
hundred pounds at once. My address to no one.” A terrific story, I felt,
ending perhaps with a duel on the steps of a Viennese hotel. I had
indeed already begun to wonder what editor I should approach with its
scenario when the dream was broken.
I detected her, shortly before lights out, leaning in the dark corner of
a wall against the beating breast of a junior lance-sergeant.
If I had been sixty instead of twenty-two, I should have been doubtless
highly thrilled by the discovery. I should not, indeed, have even
included myself in my romantic reverie. I should have selected an
attractive member of my platoon and ordaining that he should fall in
love with her, I should have watched their love-making with that mixture
of subjective and objective interest with which we watch the love-making
of the cinema and the stage, I should have identified myself, through my
imagination, with their rapture. It would have been a focussing of
myself, like the writing of a love-story is when, for a while, one
ceases to be oneself, or perhaps becomes oneself more truly in the
persons of one’s hero and one’s heroine.
There must be rough sea, though, before the calm waters of harbourage
are reached. Many stories of first love have been written, but I cannot
at the moment remember a single story about last love. I do not mean the
“Père Goriot,” or “Poor Folk”; the “gaga” love affairs. I mean a story
of purposeful, commanding love; a love that is at its dawn fine and
fresh and vigorous; but that comes too late in life, that pilfers the
last years of manhood, that wastes and exhausts itself; but to which its
object clings desperately, knowing it is for the last time, knowing that
he will not have the faith, the strength, the confidence to begin again.
And it must come very often, such a love; must be, as often as not, an
inevitable stage in the natural development of man; must mark the
passage of the borderland between middle-age and age.
Take, as an example, a prosperous man in the middle fifties, a
politician shall we say, grey-haired, grey-bearded, with a strong,
massive, heavily-lined face. His second daughter has been married for
two years. He is emotionally unattached. His wife has been to him for
many years little more than a companion. He can no longer live as he had
lived for the ten or twelve years previously, in his daughters. He has
begun to weary somewhat of the evasion, the deceit, the insincerity of
party politics. He meets at a friend’s house a young girl who has ideas
of going on the stage. It is not difficult to understand their
attraction for one another. She is small, dainty, with light flaxen hair
bobbed low at the neck, and drawn back tightly from her forehead, so
that it may bunch widely like clustering flowers about her ears. Her
eyes are blue, a pale, cornflower blue; she is not pretty, perhaps; she
is the sort of girl who would look very ordinary in a photograph, for
the charm of her features lies in their mobility. She is never still.
She is listening eagerly, or talking eagerly, and her laughs are quick
and short, like commas in her conversation. There is a gulf of over
thirty years between them. But her innocence responds to his experience.
He can teach her so much. And for him the greed of life, the curiosity,
the freshness, the enthusiasm of those dancing eyes and laughing lips
speak of a country in which he will never again travel.
He wins her as she would be won. There is no diffidence, no hesitation
in his wooing. They lunch together; there is no word of love between
them. He talks of himself and not of her; of the men he has known, the
places he has visited, of his early days in politics; his first
campaign, that reversal of a two-thousand vote majority. He mentions
casually as men of his acquaintance the great men of the hour. And, as
he talks, the spell of his domination is falling over her. She does not
analyse the sensation, does not ask herself whether or not she is in
love with him. But she knows that here is a man to whom she could trust
herself, in whose arms she would find surely, and to its full, the
relief of self-surrender.
Two days later they dine together. It is the first time she has ever
been to the Savoy. She is thrilled and frightened by the glare of
lights, and is measurably grateful for the guiding hand at her elbow. In
this new atmosphere of luxury and display she feels more than ever the
need of his experience. She notices with pride and pleasure the
assurance with which he follows the bowing waiter to their table at the
far end of the room, and he does not embarrass her by handing her a menu
and asking her what she will choose. He decides what they shall have. “A
savoury dinner, I think,” he says, “caviare; turtle soup and _truite au
bleu_ and a pheasant, and perhaps--yes, I think we’ll have an anchovy
savoury to finish up with. And a bottle of that 103.” Ninety seconds and
it is over. It is she this time who does the talking. She is happy and
excited, and she tells him of her ambitions, of her hopes to get an
engagement in a touring company. “It won’t be much fun,” she said, “but
I shall get to know people and I shall get experience.” He smiles. “We
must see what we can do for you,” he says.
They dance afterwards, and she finds, as she had expected, that he
dances well, if conventionally, following closely the pattern of the
music. She is lulled by the rhythm of the dance, upheld by the pressure
of his hand upon her shoulder. She misses her step once, and his toe
strikes against her instep. He apologises, but in a tone that reminds
her that the fault is hers, not his. And for the first time in her life
she is content to be corrected. He makes no avowal of love to her as
they drive home in the taxi, but just before the car slows down before
her door his hand closes firmly over hers. “Wednesday, then, at one
o’clock,” he says. She nods her head, weak, happy and submissive.
There is never any talk of marriage. He has his political career. There
are his daughters. For their sake he must keep his name free of scandal.
And even if he were free it is doubtful if she would want to marry him.
Over thirty years between them. She will not want to spend some of the
best years of her life nursing an old man. But she is content that as
long as their love lasts he should give her his protection. For a while
they are wonderfully happy. In his arms and against his lips she comes
into the rich kingdom of her womanhood. Through her he wins back to the
lost countries of his youth.
They are happy days. He takes her to restaurants of which she only knows
the name, places over which her imagination has spread the high colour
of romance. They go to theatres and dances and music-halls, and they
know always there is waiting for them the little flat that he has
furnished for her so prettily, and where their love makes the hours pass
on such swiftly sandalled feet.
She abandons naturally her scheme of joining a touring company. For a
few months, indeed, she forgets her ambition in her happiness, and by
the time she has begun again to feel the lure of grease-paint and the
footlights, the influence and affluence of her protector has found her a
leading part in a forthcoming West-end production. Marvellously grateful
she is, marvellously happy. The days of excitement as the first night
draws near are almost more than she can bear, and it means much to her
to have at such a time a strong arm about her shoulders, and in her ears
the sound of a firm voice.
She need, though, have had no fears of failure. It is a good play, and
she has talent. But it is at the very moment of her triumph that her
lover is, for the first time, frightened. He stands in the shadow of the
box and watches her in the front of the stage bending, over a bank of
bouquets, to an audience hoarse with shouting. He sees suddenly into the
heart of their relationship. He sees her a young woman at the start of
her career--fresh, radiant, intoxicated with the sensation of a first
success. And he is an ageing man, with the best of life behind him. How
can he hope to keep her? She will find herself now the centre of a
circle of brilliant and charming persons. She will be invited to houses
where, for his good name’s sake, he can hardly accompany her. Now that
she is a public figure he must be careful of her reputation and of his.
He will not be able to go about with her so much. She will make her own
friends. She will forget him. He will have been a stepping-stone in her
life; nothing more.
For him there is in their love-making no longer a solid, satisfying
comfort, only an occasional moment in which he may forget. Life catches
her up. She has luncheon engagements and week-end parties. And, as soon
as the curtain falls, she is being rushed away to dances at Murray’s or
at Ciro’s. The names of her new friends, Christian names for the most
part, trip from her tongue at every turn of her conversation. He knows
none of them; they are strangers to him. And he realises that now she
has found her feet in the world he has lost his hold over her. She needs
his help no longer. He cannot exert the dominating influence of
experience and success. Probably she has begun to think of him already
as an old man.
Is she still faithful to him, he wonders. He knows what are the morals
of the green-room--one intrigue after another. “And the people
concerned,” he reminds himself, “are always the very last to hear
anything.” He makes enquiries furtively about her especial friends. He
finds himself listening in his club to the tedious reminiscences of
obsolete tragedians. He asks chance acquaintances in the train whether
they have ever heard of her. “That’s a wonderful discovery,” he says,
“that new star at the Adelphi.” And he waits anxiously, in case the
stranger may have some scandal to tell of her. He sees very little of
her now. “But you cannot think how one thing comes on the top of
another,” she explains. “All these people; its business half of it, and
I am so happy. And you want me to be happy, don’t you, darling?” And
every day he grows more jealous; every day the strain grows greater.
Night after night she is supping and dancing, at other people’s expense;
and in this world people don’t give anything for nothing, especially
that type of person. There are times when he thinks he would give
anything to be certain, to know one way or another. But there are others
when he knows that that knowledge is the one thing which he would avoid.
He is almost certain that there is something between her and that young
barrister he saw her dining with last Sunday at the Berkeley. But he
dare not make sure. He dare not be forced to break with her.
For he knows that if he once broke with her he would have to say
good-bye to love for ever. He knows that he has not the faith, nor the
strength, to begin again. He has lived ten years in the last eighteen
months, and ten years bring him very close to the prescribed limits of a
life’s endurance. He can no longer say, as he could in the early
forties, what is one love affair, is not the world companionably full of
freehearted ladies? This is the last time, the very last. He has not the
courage to say good-bye to pleasure.
And then one evening the crested wave of jealousy is at its height.
There is an all-night sitting at the House, and he is walking from his
club to Westminster. It is just after eleven. The theatres are emptying
into Piccadilly. The pavements are crowded. Along the streets cars and
taxis are hurrying their occupants in search of further entertainment.
He follows enviously the momentary view of bright interiors. He regrets
the long hours that await him, on a hard bench, listening to dull
speeches. He could wish that he were young again, forgetting in the
evening’s intoxication the morning’s bills and overdrafts. And suddenly
he catches in the corner of a taxi, lit suddenly by the glare of a
street lamp, a glimpse of flaxen hair drawn back tight from a forehead,
of hair bunching like clustering flowers about the ears, of pale blue
cornflower eyes, and of lips so close against a man’s that they have
just been kissed, or are about to kiss. A second and the taxi is again
in shadow.
Slowly, an old man, he turns and walks back westward to Piccadilly. He
could not, after such a sight, endure the superficial oratory, the
unreal antagonism of the House. He must be alone on such an evening
with his thoughts. Backwards and forwards he paces up and down his long,
book-lined study. Was it she, he wonders. It was for only the merest
fraction of a second that the glare of the lamp had revealed the dark
interior. And there must be so many girls with flaxen hair and pale
cornflower blue eyes.
Not like hers, though, not quite like hers: never anywhere had he seen
such eyes, such hair. And he had learnt during the last year to know by
heart every changing light and shadow of those loved features. Surely he
could not make a mistake about her now. But even if it were she, what
then? What was a kiss after all? To some girls it meant everything.
There were some girls whose lips once yielded would be ready to
surrender all. There were others to whom a kiss was no more than the
casual brushing of a hand; who kissed out of kindliness, out of
affection. And surely she would be one of them, she who was kissed every
night before a thousand people, with the limelight on her upturned face,
by a man for whom she had on the whole almost a physical dislike. What
could kisses mean to her?
And yet how shy she had been when he had first kissed her, nearly two
years ago. She had trembled and had sat on the edge of the sofa in that
private room, her fingers plucking at her skirt, afraid to look at him.
It had passed swiftly enough, that nervousness. But she had not been
then the girl to exchange kisses lightly with any man. And if she had
become so since, the change had not been of his making.
The heavy alabaster clock on the mantelpiece strikes one. She should be
back by now. They have agreed so often that if an actress is to be fresh
for her work next day, she cannot dance away her energy, night after
night, till morning. They have talked so often of the wisdom of cutting
one’s supper parties short. “A couple of hours, darling, that’s all one
needs.” And there is a matinée next day. Surely she will be home by now.
He walks across to his desk and lifts the receiver of the telephone.
“Hammerton 5769,” he calls. The operator repeats the number. He sits
there, the receiver against his ear, waiting, waiting for the sound of
the quick, breathless voice that will put all his anxieties to sleep.
But it does not come. Perhaps she is asleep. It was selfish of him to
ring her up. She was tired and has returned straight to the flat after
the theatre. The vision in the taxi was the trick of a disordered fancy.
He will have woken her up. She will be angry with him. He will send her
some flowers in the morning and she will forgive him. But no answer
comes. And after a long delay a sleepy, masculine voice informs him that
he can “get no answer, sir.” But he is sure he has the right number?
“Yes, sir, Hammerton 5769.”
He restores the receiver to its place. She is not there. She is a light
sleeper; she would have been sure to wake. Comes to him the memory of an
evening fourteen months ago, the evening of his big speech in the House
on Ireland. He had returned, eager and elated, and he had felt that he
must tell her of his triumph. A sleepy voice had answered him, a voice
that had instantly lost its sleepiness when it had realised who was
speaking. “Oh, you, darling,” she had said. “Yes, what is it?”
And she had listened intently to his account of the night’s debate.
“But I’m a selfish pig,” he had said, “waking you up like this.”
And in his whole life he had never known anything more intense than the
thrill with which he had heard her quick, breathless answer.
“But, my darling, you know, surely, I want you to, always, always. It’s
the next best thing to seeing you.”
Those were the days when she had been never too busy, too late, too
pre-occupied to talk to him, or see him. He had often come to the flat
after a long, night’s sitting, and she had rekindled the fire for him,
and had sat before it leaning back against his knees. That had passed,
of course, inevitably, in the nature of things. But something surely
should have come to take its place. Surely they should have built for
themselves some abiding mansion. Had they squandered their capital? Was
there nothing left for them?
Backwards and forwards he paces up and down his study. She is not home
yet, and he knows that till she is home, sleep is impossible for him. He
would lie tossing in bed at the mercy of his fevered fancy. He must know
one way or another. It is a quarter of an hour since he rang up. She is
back by now perhaps. Again he raises the receiver. Again he calls her
number. Again there is the long delay. Again the sleepy, “Sorry, I can
get no answer, sir.”
This time he does not rise from the chair. He takes the watch from his
pocket and leans it in front of him against the pedestal of the
telephone. “Every ten minutes,” he says, “I will ring her up. I will
know the exact minute at which she returns. I will see that she does not
lie to me. I shall know whether she is telling me the truth or not.”
And every ten minutes from half past one to two, and from two to three,
he raises the receiver and calls in the same steady voice, “Hammerton
5769.” And every time there is the same delay and then the same answer.
He does not move from the chair. The fire has become a dull glow among
charred ashes; the room is cold. But he sits there, his eyes fixed on
the second hand of his watch as it eats into the minutes.
Then suddenly a new fear comes to him. She has been home all the time.
She has brought her lover with her and refuses to be disturbed. He can
see them in the warm dusk of her room, the small table lamp casting
through its silk covering a pale rose radiance upon the white linen of
the lace-fringed pillows, heightening the beauty of her face, as she
turns it to meet his kisses. There is the ring of the telephone in the
other room.
“Your silly old man,” he says, and they laugh together. And he places
his hands over her ears that she shall not hear it, and his lips wander
over her face and neck. The bell stops ringing, and once more his hands
are about her and his mouth is against her ear whispering: “Now I can
tell you again how much I love you.”
He sees it with the hard clarity of jealousy and foiled desire. He rises
quickly, pushing his chair sideways as he does so, and strides backwards
and forwards across the room. There is the sound of an opening door upon
the landing, the patter of slippered feet upon the staircase, the rap of
a knuckle in the passage. “Come in,” he says. And his wife is standing
in the doorway.
Old and shrivelled and pathetic she looks, with her sparse hair falling
over the black and gold of her long silk dressing-gown. And yet she is
younger than he is; he remembers they are both old stuff, and there
rises in him the suffocating need for sympathy, for maternal kindliness,
for someone to whom he can say in his loneliness: “I’m tired; I’m an old
man: be good to me.”
“But, my dear,” she says, “I thought you would be at the House all
night.”
“I know, I know,” he says, on his guard instantly against surrender. “It
wasn’t very interesting, and I thought--well, I just came back and I’ve
been reading for a few minutes before going up.”
But the moment he has said it he realises that she does not believe him.
She has heard the crash of his chair beside the telephone: that is what
has awakened her; and she has heard him striding up and down the room,
and there is no book lying open on the table; there is no chair drawn
before the fire, and in the grate only a few dull coals; no whisky on
the small table; no cigar smoke; no feature of the usual setting for an
evening’s reading, and, after thirty years of marriage, a wife knows her
husband’s habits.
“My dear,” she begins. But he will not let her finish. At all events he
must protect himself against discovery and against this fatal weakness
in himself that would fling him before her on his knees and on her pity.
“It’s quite all right,” he says; “I shall be going up in a minute. I
just want to settle my mind a bit first. I can’t sleep if I’m at all
excited. And you’ll be catching cold, dear, here. You mustn’t stay,
really, in that dressing-gown.”
They look each other in the face. She knows that he is lying, and he
knows she knows. But she has a dignity that will not descend to the
vulgarity of cross-examination. “Very well,” she says, and again turns,
leaving him to the sting of his jealousy.
And it is not till nearly four that he hears, at last, the quick,
breathless voice; hears its answering “Hullo!” in the casual tone of one
who is happy and tired, and cannot be bothered at this late hour.
“What, you!” it says, “at this time. Where have you been gadding round?”
He keeps his dignity; he would not betray to her the secret of his long
night’s vigil. The tone of his voice as he replies to her is equally
casual, equally pre-occupied. “A long sitting at the House,” he says.
“I’ve only just got back. I thought I’d ring up and say good-night.”
“And I’ve only just got in, too.”
“Really!”
“Yes; dancing at Jack’s, a studio affair, a jolly party. Everyone there,
Sybil and Ernest, and Marjorie Cooper and Arthur Winston. Oh, and do you
know I believe that Forster ménage is coming to an end. She was dancing
with another man the whole evening; rather funny, isn’t it, after all
we’ve said?”
He agrees that it is funny, and listens for a few moments to the eager
flow of talk. “Well, I expect you’re tired,” he says at last. “You’ve
got a matinée to-morrow. I mustn’t keep you up. _A bientot._” And he
hears the click of the receiver at the other end.
And next day they lunch together, and the wretched business begins again
at the beginning. He daren’t bring things to a head; he daren’t part
with her. He daren’t make sure, and it was with a strong man’s love he
won her.
How does it end? If I were to attempt the conventional magazine short
story I should have to contrive, I suppose, a dramatic climax. But
things rarely happen like that, really. There is a working up to a point
and a falling away from it. As spring passes into summer, so as one
enthusiasm wanes another comes to take its place. We are never rid of
our desires; we change them, that is all.
The life of all mortals in kissing should pass,
Lip to lip while we’re young, then the lip to the glass.
And of last love, as of second love and first love; it passes calmly
enough probably in the end. There will be an American tour, perhaps. And
when she returns they will meet as friends. There will be no abrupt
severing, “_coupé net en plein ardeur_.” There will be a pause, and
during it he will decide that the time has come for him to grow old
decently. But anyway the end is unimportant. The emotional climax is
reached on that night of jealousy, in the weakness of a strong man, in
his desperate clinging to a waning ecstasy, his cowardice, his
determination to know the truth, his pitiful desire to be deceived; and
in the rallying of his dignity at the last moment, his refusal to be
“gaga,” to play “Père Goriot.”
And it is because the climax of such a relationship comes then, that I
have preferred to write of it in the form of an essay, rather than of a
story; a short story must close on a dramatic curtain. And if a
situation does not offer a dramatic curtain, it is wrong to make a story
of it: it would be either a bad story because it would have no climax,
or it would be an untrue story with the high light flung on a climax
that was manufactured and incidental, instead of the significant, the
universal moment, the hour of jealousy and self-contempt, the hour when
a strong man sits before a telephone watching the second hand eat away
the minutes.
It could be done, though, in a novel; it would make an admirable opening
chapter to the story of a woman’s life: it would have to be told
probably through the woman’s eyes; its early _motif_ would be the
arrogance of youth as it strides contemptuously over age. There would be
the middle years of turmoil and success, and then the story would turn
back upon itself. The woman would fall in love with a younger man and
would find herself, in her turn, being used as a stepping-stone for
youth. And as she stands watching youth ride past her, she would know
all that her early lover had known and suffered.
The love of a mature woman for a boy is a theme that has been used often
enough, especially in French fiction, but never quite in this way,
perhaps, never as a key to unlock the heart of a man’s last love. But
then it is a woman’s theme perhaps rather than a man’s; and we must
remember always that, with the exception of some dozen books, the
masterpieces of prose literature, and indeed of all literature and all
art, are the work of a masculine intelligence. It may be that the
contemporary women novelists are better than the contemporary men
novelists. It may be that to the nineteen-eighties the great writers of
the post-war period will be May Sinclair and Clemence Dane, and Rebecca
West and Sheila Kaye-Smith. It may be, I do not know. I should myself
doubt whether there is to-day a single woman writer, with the possible
exception of Edith Wharton, who can begin to stand comparison with
Thomas Hardy and George Moore, with Cavell, with Conrad, with Max
Beerbohm, with Galsworthy, and with de la Mare. But one hesitates to
dogmatise on living writers. This, at least, is sure. For many hundreds
of years there have been pictures painted, and poetry written, and
stories told. There have been a few writers of genius, and many
painters, and poets, and musicians of great talent. There have been one
or two minor poetesses, and there have been Jane Austen, and George
Eliot, and George Sand. Women have inspired books, but men have written
them, written them, perhaps, I sometimes think, chiefly with the object
of giving pleasure to woman, of making themselves attractive to her. The
monkey and the West Indian savage woes its mate with dancing, and
ornament, and display. The mediæval baron instituted tournaments and
exhibitions of strength and courage. Art is the fine raiment in which
the civilised man arrays himself before a woman. And it is, perhaps,
because women have need of no such artifice that their contributions to
the museum of the world’s art have been so casual and so imponderable.
I believe that some such apologia has been made before, and I am
half-inclined to feel that it was George Moore who made it. Certainly he
has said somewhere that the most precious service that art has done to
life is its exalting of an instinct into a revelation, its gorgeous
apparelling of love. And whether or no he stressed the fact that it was
a masculine achievement, it is a point certainly not to be disregarded
by the critic of prose literature. For this is what it comes to, that
the themes of the world’s great stories are masculine. And it is only
youth that can write honestly and convincingly of age.
We are under the spell always of what is distant from us. From the
bondage of marriage we survey the raptures of free love. And from the
deceit, the evasions, the premeditation of an intrigue we turn our eyes
towards the decent pasturage of matrimony. Riot is as real to the
virtuous, as virtue to the riotous. It is experience that attracts
innocence. And if a young man would write of last love, he has, in the
love for him of a mature woman, the situation ready to his hand. There
is no need for him to search further; it is thus that the story of youth
and middle age is told to him. If he would write of a man’s old age,
would go beyond maturity, he would select some Père Goriot, some aspect
of wronged senility, some Fouan or King Lear. And by the time that he
has come himself to middle age, by the time that he has reached that
borderland, the theme of age is, because he is no longer remote from it,
unattractive. The ageing novelist returns to youth, and first love, and
the raptures of spring. In “The Man of Property” Galsworthy told the
story of mature, devastating passion; he was then at that point of
balance of which Shakespeare wrote. But mature love, and the love of
middle age for youth had, when he came to complete the Saga, ceased to
appeal to him. The love of Jolyon for Irene is never actual to us; but
of first love, of Val and Holly, of Jon and Fleur; of the hesitations,
the blindness, the enrapturement of dawning love, he writes as few save
Turgenev have ever written.
Youth means nothing to us when we are young. It is gold that we spend
freely. We push past it towards the future. To-day is as indifferent to
us as yesterday. We set out to write a book and we do not find out till
we have finished it what we meant to say. We have lost interest in our
book long before we have corrected the final proof. We are at work
already on some new thing. We hardly pause to read the reviews of the
book that we handed to our publisher with such excitement six months
earlier. What does it matter what they say about that book. We have got
beyond it. It is a part of our dead self. We are living in to-morrow.
People come up and say: “We like your last book,” or “We don’t think
that your heroine would have fallen in love with that sort of man,” or,
“Do you think that he would really have behaved quite like that?” And we
smile and we say, “Perhaps.” But we are thinking of the new story that
is shaping itself in our brain, the new story for which we have already
prepared a series of brand-new note-books. I am always surprised when I
find a writer of under forty genuinely depressed by his reviews. Surely
he must know, I think, that all this is only his apprenticeship, that he
is learning how to write, and that a generous public is financing his
education. He has not begun yet.
And this book of which I am now writing the last pages: I have come down
to the Albany, at Hastings, for a week to finish it. For five days I
have scarcely spoken to a soul except to the waiter and the girl who
brings me my shaving water and prepares my bath for me in the morning. I
have shut myself up in my room all day, writing. I have enjoyed the
writing of it more, I think, than that of any of my other books. But
already, even before it is finished, it has begun to become a parcel of
the past. Already I am living in to-morrow. I am thinking of the relief
I shall feel on Saturday as I catch the 8.30 for Charing Cross: I am
playing football against the Exiles. There will be nothing on my mind
as there was last week to mar the enjoyment of the match. I shall not
afterwards have to rush away to catch an early train. I shall go with
the rest of the team to de Hem’s, and we shall dance our dance in Dansey
Yard, and we shall toast our victory in pints of lukewarm ale, and by
eleven o’clock we shall feel the world to be a very companionable spot.
And on Monday morning I shall go back to the office, and at about eleven
Douglas Goldring will drop in with the latest 1917 club scandal, and an
enquiry about the sales of his new novel; but I shall be for once
indifferent to 1917 club scandal. I shall tell him that since he saw me
last I have written 20,000 words, and that for another month I do not
propose to put pen to paper, and we shall discuss with what wines we are
to heighten our enjoyment on Friday of _Polly_ at the Kingsway. And in
the evening, as I walk homewards up the North End Road, I shall notice
the first signs of budding leaves, heralds of spring and sunshine, and
the long June days. “Cricket is coming,” I shall tell myself. The last
Test Match in South Africa is over; only another month of football. It
is high time that I was thinking of putting some oil on those old bats
of mine. And now that my book is finished, my season’s cricket, I shall
remind myself, will be unharassed by financial worries. I shall play
three times a week, and on the fourth sit at Lord’s in the top gallery
of the pavilion and watch Hearne and Hendren pile another double century
on to their list of third-wicket partnerships.
And when summer is over and once again in mid-September I take down
from its shelf my red-and-white jersey and my studded boots; when these
pages are with the booksellers and the critics, I shall be hard at work
on another and, it is to be hoped, less unworthy book. To-day will be as
dead then as yesterday is now. I shall be disappointed, naturally, if
people do not like my book; but I shall not be broken-hearted. There is
time in plenty.
But I also know that forty years from now, when the corner has been
reached, when I have definitely turned my back upon the future,--the
dull, uninteresting, unromantic future; the future that can bring me no
new thing--when I have set out upon my second journey into the unknown,
my journey “_à la recherche du temps perdu_”; when I shall try to
recreate the past through an endless series of associations; the smell
of wet stone that will recall to me the cloisters and high garden walls
of Sherborne; the taste of cocoa that will recapture for me the
depression of Sunday nights in the autumn of 1915 and the spring of
1916, when after an early dinner and a cup of cocoa I set out with my
father to catch the last train from Euston back to camp; the sound of
dance music, of “The Sheik” and “Honolulu Eyes”; the chance glimpses
through a carriage window of a square-towered church, of the sudden
aspect of sunlight on old stone; when, through the associated memory of
taste and sight and smell and sense, I shall recompose that picture of
all that my life has been and is not; then I know that I shall take down
again from the shelf the books that I have written in the early
twenties, and that they will possess for me a significance that they
have never had for me before, and they can have for no one else. They
will be the spade with which I shall unearth the past.
I do not know what he will be like, the old man who, forty years from
now, will read them; what will be left to him of the thing that I now
imagine to be myself. I do not know whether he will be sad or happy,
married or single, rich or poor, lonely or befriended. I do not know
what injuries the years may do to him, or what recompenses bring him.
This only I know: with whatever else he parts he will never part with
the books that he has written. And as he sits turning these pages at
nightfall before his fire, he will find here once again the vigour, the
turmoil, and the confidence of twenty-five.