I intended to call on the Aschers as soon as I could after I returned to
London. I owed Ascher some thanks for his kindness in providing me with
letters of introduction for my tour. However, they heard that I was home
again before I managed to pay my visit. I daresay Gorman told them. He
sees Mrs. Ascher two or three times a week and he must get tired talking
about Ireland. A little item of gossip, like the news of my return,
would come as a relief to Gorman, and perhaps even to Mrs. Ascher, after
a long course of poetic politics mixed with art.
I had a note from Mrs. Ascher, in which she invited me to dinner.
“Very quietly,” she said. “I know my husband would like to have a talk
with you, so I shall not ask any one to meet you. Please fix your own
night. We have no engagements this week.”
I got the note on Monday and fixed Wednesday for our dinner. I could not
think that Ascher really wanted to talk to me. I did not see what he had
to talk to me about; but I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to tell him
about my tour and to give him some idea of the effect which my glimpse
at his business had produced on my mind. I also wanted to find out what
he thought about Irish affairs. I had heard a good deal more talk about
the Ulster situation. Malcolmson got at me nearly every day, and several
other men, much more level-headed than Malcolmson, seemed to regard the
situation as serious. I heard it hinted that the Army would not relish
the idea of shooting the Ulstermen. I understood the feeling. If I were
still in the Army I should not like to be told to kill Malcolmson. He
was my brother officer at one time, and I found him a good comrade. The
same feeling must exist among the rank and file. Northeast Ulster was,
at one time, a favourite recruiting ground for the Guards. Malcolmson’s
volunteer army was leavened with old Guardsmen, reservists, many of them
quite well known to the men still serving in the Brigade.
I could not, of course, expect Ascher to be much interested in Irish
affairs. Ireland is the one country in the world over which financiers
have not cast their net, possibly because they would catch next to
nothing there. So we, who escaped the civilisation of Roman law, almost
escaped the philosophy of the mediaeval church, were entirely untouched
by the culture of the Renaissance, remained a kind of Gideon’s fleece
when the dew of the industrial system of the 19th century was moistening
Europe, are now left untouched by the new civilisation of international
finance. Yet Ascher, if not personally interested in our destiny, has a
cool and unprejudiced mind. His opinion on Irish affairs would be of the
greatest interest to me. I was not satisfied with Gorman’s reading
of the situation. Nor did I feel sure that Malcolmson, though he was
certainly in earnest, quite understood what a big thing he was letting
himself in for.
The Aschers live near Golders Hill, a part of London totally unknown to
me. They have a large old-fashioned house with a considerable amount of
ground round it. Some day when Ascher is dead the house will be pulled
down and the grounds cut up into building plots. In the meanwhile Ascher
holds it. I suppose it suits him. Neither he nor Mrs. Ascher cares for
fashionable life, and a Mayfair address has no attraction for them. The
few artistic and musical people whom they wish to know are quite willing
to go to Hampstead. Everyone else who wants to see Ascher--and a good
many people do--calls at his office or dines with him in a club. Ascher
knows most of the chief men in the political world, for instance, but
even Prime Ministers are not often invited to the house at Golders
Hill. If Ascher really controls them, as Gorman says, he does so without
allowing them to interfere with his private life.
The house and its appointments impressed me greatly. The architecture
was Georgian, a style familiar to any one who has lived much in Dublin.
It gave me a feeling of spaciousness and dignity. The men who built
these houses knew what it was to live like gentlemen. I can imagine them
guilty of various offences against the code of Christian morality, but
I do not think they can ever have been either fussy or mean. There is
a restlessness about our fashionable imitations of the older kinds of
English domestic architecture. Our picturesque gables, dormer windows
and rooms with all sorts of odd angles, our finicky windows stuck high
up in unexpected parts of walls, our absurd leaded diamond panes and
crooked metal fastenings, all make for fussiness of soul. Nor can I
believe that people who live under ceilings which they can almost touch
ever attain a great and calm outlook upon life.
There was nothing “artistic” about Ascher’s house. This surprised me
at first. I did not, of course, expect that Mrs. Ascher would have
surrounded herself with the maddening kind of furniture which is
distinguished by its crookedness and is designed by men who find their
inspiration by remembering the things which they see in nightmares. Nor
did I think it likely that she would have crammed her rooms with those
products of the east which are imported into this country by house
furnishers with reputations for aestheticism. I knew that she had
passed that stage of culture. But I did expect to find the house full
of heavily embroidered copes of mediaeval bishops, hung on screens;
candlesticks looted from Spanish monasteries, standing on curiously
carved shelves; chairs and cabinets which were genuine relics of the age
of Louis XV.; and pictures by artists who lived in Italy before the days
when Italians learned to paint.
I found myself in a house which was curiously bare of furniture. There
were a few pictures in each of the rooms I entered, modern pictures, and
I suppose good, but I am no judge of such things. There were scarcely
any ornaments to be seen and very few tables and chairs. My own feeling
is that a house should be furnished in such a way as to be thoroughly
comfortable. I like deep soft chairs and sofas to sit on. I like to have
many small tables on which to lay down books, newspapers and pipes. I
like thick carpets and curtains which keep out draughts. I would not
live in Ascher’s house, even if I were paid for doing so by being given
Ascher’s fortune. But I would rather live in Ascher’s house than in one
of those overcrowded museums which are the delight of very wealthy
New York Jews. I should, in some moods, find a pleasure in the fine
proportions of the rooms which Ascher refuses to spoil. I could never, I
know, be happy in a place where I ran the risk of dropping tobacco ashes
on thirteenth century tapestry and dared not move suddenly lest I should
knock over some priceless piece of china.
We ate at a small table set at one end of a big dining-room, a
dining-room in which, I suppose, thirty people could have sat down
together comfortably. There was no affectation of shaded lights and
gloomy, mysterious spaces. Ascher had aimed at and achieved something
like a subdued daylight by means of electric lamps, shaded underneath,
which shone on the ceiling. I could see all the corners of the room, the
walls with their pictures and the broad floor across which the servants
passed. The dinner itself was very short and simple. If I had been
actually hungry, as I am in the country after shooting, I should have
called the dinner meagre. For a London appetite there was enough, but
not more than enough. I might, a younger and more vigorous man would,
have got up from the table hungry. But the food was exquisite. The cook
must be a descendant of one of those artists whom Lord Beaconsfield
described in “Tancred,” and he has found in Ascher’s house a situation
which ought to satisfy him. Ascher does not care for sumptuousness
or abundance; but he knows how to eat well. We had one wine, a very
delicately flavoured white Italian wine, perhaps from Capri, the juice
of some rare crops of grapes in that sunny island.
“We found ourselves in a little difficulty,” said Ascher, “when you
fixed on to-night for your visit to us.”
“I hope,” I said, “that I haven’t lit on an inconvenient evening. Had
you any other engagement?”
I was eating a very small piece of fish when he spoke to me, and was
trying to guess what the sauce was flavoured with. It occurred to
me suddenly that I might have broken in upon some sort of private
anniversary, a day which Ascher and his wife observed as one of
abstinence. There was, I could scarcely fail to notice it, a sense of
subdued melancholy about our proceedings.
“Oh, no,” said Ascher, “but on Wednesdays we always have some music. I
was inclined to think that you might have preferred to spend the evening
talking, but my wife----”
He looked at Mrs. Ascher. I should very much have preferred talk to
music. It was chiefly in order to hear Ascher talk that I had accepted
the invitation.
“I know,” said Mrs. Ascher, “that Sir James likes music.”
She laid a strong emphasis on the word “know,” and I felt that she was
paying me a nice compliment. What she said was true enough. I do like
music, some kinds of music. I had heard for the first time the night
before a song, then very popular, with a particularly attractive chorus.
It began to run through my head the moment Ascher mentioned music. “I
didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it.” I liked that song. I was
not sure that I should like the Aschers’ music equally well. However, I
had no intention of contradicting Mrs. Ascher.
“I’m passionately fond of music,” I said.
Ascher is a singularly guileless man. I cannot imagine how any one so
unsuspicious as he is can ever have succeeded as a financier, unless
indeed people are far honester about money than they are about anything
else. I do not think Mrs. Ascher believed that I am passionately fond of
music. Her husband did. The little shadow of anxiety which had rested on
his face cleared away. He became almost cheerful.
“To-night,” he said, “we are going to hear some of the work of----”
He said a name, but I utterly failed to catch it. I had never heard it
before, and it sounded foreign, very foreign indeed, possibly Kurdish.
“------,” said Ascher, “is one of the new Russian composers.”
I heard the name that time, but I can make no attempt, phonetic or
other, to spell it. I suppose it can be spelled, but the letters must
be given values quite new to me. The alphabet I am accustomed to is
incapable of representing that man’s name.
“I daresay you know him,” said Mrs. Ascher.
I strongly suspected that she was trying to entrap me. I have never
been quite sure of Mrs. Ascher since the day she discovered that I was
talking nonsense about the statuette of Psyche. Sometimes she appears to
be the kind of foolish woman to whom anything may be said without fear.
Sometimes she displays most unexpected intelligence. I looked at her
before I answered. Her narrow, pale-green eyes expressed nothing but
innocent inquiry. She might conceivably think that I had already made
a careful study of the music of the new Russian composer. On the other
hand, she might be luring me on to say that I knew music which was to be
played in her house that night for the first time. I made up my mind to
be safe.
“No,” I said, “I never even heard of him.”
Then Ascher began to talk about the man and his music. He became more
animated than I had ever seen him. It was evident that Russian music
interested Ascher far more than finance did--that it was a subject which
was capable of wakening real enthusiasm in him. I listened, eating from
time to time the delicate morsels of food offered to me and sipping the
delicious wine. I did not understand anything Ascher said, and all the
names he mentioned were new to me; but for a time I was content to sit
in a kind of half-conscious state, hypnotised by the sound of his voice
and the feeling that Mrs. Ascher’s eyes were fixed on me.
Not until dinner was nearly over did I make an effort to assert myself.
“I was talking to Gorman the other day,” I said, “about Irish affairs
and especially about the Ulster situation. I have also been hearing
Malcolmson’s views. Malcolmson is a colonel and an Ulsterman. You know
the sort of views an Ulster Colonel would have.”
Ascher smiled faintly. He seemed no more than slightly amused at the
turn Irish affairs were taking. After all neither international finance
nor Russian music was likely to be profoundly affected by the Ulster
rebellion. (Malcolmson will not use the word rebellion, but I must.
There is no other word to describe the actions he contemplates.) No
wonder Ascher takes small interest in the matter. On the other hand,
Mrs. Ascher was profoundly moved by the mention of Ulster. I could see
genuine passion in her eyes.
“Belfast,” she said, “stands for all that is vilest and most hateful in
the world. It is worse than Glasgow, worse than Manchester, worse than
Birmingham.”
Belfast is, no doubt, the main difficulty. If there were no Belfast the
resistance of the rest of Ulster would be inconsiderable. I admired the
political instinct which enabled Mrs. Ascher to go straight to the very
centre of the situation. But, in all probability, Gorman gave her the
hint. Gorman does not seem to understand how real the Ulster opposition
is, but he has intelligence enough to grasp the importance of Belfast.
What puzzled me first was the extreme bitterness with which Mrs. Ascher
spoke.
“What has Belfast ever given to the world?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, “ships are built there, and of course there’s linen. I
believe they manufacture tobacco, and----”
“That,” said Ascher, “is not quite what my wife means. The gifts which a
city or a country give to the world must be of a more permanent kind if
they are to be of real value. Ships, linen, tobacco, we use them, and in
using we destroy them. They have their value, but it is not a permanent
value. Ultimately a city will be judged not by its perishable products,
but by----”
“Art,” said Mrs. Ascher.
I might have known it. Mrs. Ascher would be sure to judge cities, as she
judges men, by their achievement in that particular line. I was bound
to admit that the reputation of Belfast falls some way short of that of
Athens as a centre of literature and art.
“Or thought,” said Ascher, “or criticism. It is curious that a community
which is virile and fearless, which is able to look at the world and
life through its own eyes, which is indifferent to the general consensus
of opinion----”
“Belfast is all that,” I said. “I never knew any one who cared less what
other people said and thought than Malcolmson.”
“Yet,” said Ascher, “Belfast has done nothing, thought nothing, seen
nothing. But perhaps that is all to come. The future may be, indeed I
think must be, very different.”
Ascher will never be a real leader of men. His habit of seeing two sides
of every question is an incurable weakness in him. Mrs. Ascher does not
suffer in that way. She saw no good whatever in Belfast, nor any hope
for its future.
“Never,” she said, “never. A people who have given themselves over
to material things, who accept frankly, without even the hypocrite’s
tribute to virtue, the money standard of value, who ask ‘Does it pay?’
and ask nothing else---- Have you ever been in Belfast?”
“Yes,” I said, “often. The churches are ugly, decidedly ugly, though
comfortable.”
Mrs. Ascher shuddered.
“Comfortable!” she said. “Yes. Comfortable! Think of it. Churches,
comfort! Irredeemable hideousness and the comfort of congregations as a
set-off to it.”
Mrs. Ascher panted. I could see the front of her dress--she wore a very
floppy scarlet teagown--rising and falling rapidly in the intensity of
her passion. I understood more or less what she felt. If God is at all
what we think He is, sublime, then there is something a little grotesque
about requiring a cushioned pew, a good system of heating and a nice fat
footstool as aids to communion with Him. Yet I am not convinced that
man is incapable of the highest emotion when his body is at ease. Some
degree of physical comfort seems to be required if the excursions of
the soul are to be successful. I cannot, for instance, enjoy the finest
kinds of poetry when I am very thirsty; nor have I ever met any one
who found real pleasure in a statue when he had toothache. There
is something to be said for the theory of the sceptical bishop in
Browning’s poem, that the soul is only free to muse of lofty things
“When body gets its sop and holds its noise.”
“The whole Irish question,” said Mrs. Ascher, and she spoke with
the most tremendous vehemence, “is a struggle not between political
parties--what are political parties?”
“Rotten things,” I said. “I quite agree with you there.”
“Not between conceptions of religion. What is religion but the
blind gropings of the human soul after some divine perfection vaguely
guessed?”
That is not what religion is in Ireland. There is nothing either dim
or vague about it there, and nobody gropes. Everyone, from the infant
school child to the greatest of our six archbishops, is perfectly clear
and definite in his religious beliefs and suffers no doubts of any kind.
That is why Ireland is recognised everywhere as an island of saints. But
of course Mrs. Ascher could not be expected to know that.
“It is a struggle,” she said, getting back to the Irish question as the
subject of her sentence, “between a people to whom art is an ideal and
a people who have accepted materialism and money for their gods, an
atheist people.”
It has been the great misfortune of my life that I have never been able
to escape from the Irish question. It was discussed round my cradle by a
nurse whom my parents selected for her sound Protestant principles. The
undertaker will give his views of the Irish question to his assistant
while he drives the nails into the lid of my coffin. I should not have
supposed that any one could have hit on an aspect of it wholly new to
me. But Mrs. Ascher did. Never before had I heard the problem stated as
she stated it.
“That,” I said, “is an extraordinarily interesting way of looking at it.
The only difficulty I see is----”
“It is true,” said Mrs. Ascher.
That was precisely my difficulty. It was not true. I went back to my
recollections of old Dan Gorman, a man as intensely interested in the
struggle as ever any one was. I remembered his great pot belly, his
flabby skin, his whisky-sodden face. I remembered his grasping meanness,
his relentless hardness in dealing with those in his power. The most
thoroughly materialised business man in Belfast has more spirituality
about him than old Dan Gorman ever had. Nor did I believe that his
son, Michael Gorman, would have accepted Mrs. Ascher’s account of his
position. He would have winked, humourously appreciative of an excellent
joke, if any one had told him that he was a crusader, out to wrest the
sacred sepulchre of art from the keeping of the Saracens of Ulster.
I did not, of course, attempt to reason with Mrs. Ascher. There is
nothing in the world more foolish than trying to reason with a woman who
is possessed by a cause. No good ever comes of it. But Mrs. Ascher is
quite clever enough to understand a man even if he does not speak. She
felt that I should have been glad to argue with her if I had not been
afraid. She entered on a long defence of her position.
She began with the Irish Players, and the moment she mentioned them I
knew what she was going to say.
“The one instance,” she said, “the single example in the modern world
of peasant art, from the soil, of the soil, redolent, fragrant of the
simple life of men and women, in direct touch with the primal forces of
nature itself. There is nothing else quite like those players and their
plays. They are the self-revelation of the peasant soul. From the
whitewashed cabins of the country-side, from the streets of tiny,
world-forgotten villages, from the islands where the great Atlantic
thunders ceaselessly, these have come to call us back to the realities
of life, to express again the external verities of art.”
That is all very well. I agreed with Mrs. Ascher thoroughly about the
art of Synge’s plays, and Lady Gregory’s and Yeats’, and the art of the
players. But it is merely silly to talk about the soil and whitewashed
cottages, and self-revelation of peasant souls. Neither the dramatists
nor the players are peasants or ever were. They are very clever,
sometimes more than clever, members of the educated classes, who see the
peasants from outside just as I see them, as Mrs. Ascher would see them
if she ever got near enough to what she calls the soil to see a peasant
at all.
When Mrs. Ascher had finished with the Irish Players she went on,
still in a white heat of excitement, to the attempt to revive the Irish
language.
“Where else,” she said, “will you find such devotion to a purely
spiritual ideal? Here you have a people rising enthusiastically to fight
for the preservation of the national language. And its language is
the soul of a nation. These splendid efforts are made in defiance of
materialism, without the remotest hope of gain, just to keep, to
save from destruction, a possession felt instinctively to be the most
precious thing of all, far above gold and rubies in price.”
“The only flaw in that theory,” I said, “is that the people who still
have this most precious possession don’t want to keep it in the least.
Nobody ever heard of the Irish-speaking peasants taking the smallest
interest in their language. The whole revival business is the work of an
English-speaking middle class, who never stop asking the Government to
pay them for doing it.”
That was the second occasion on which I came near quarrelling with Mrs.
Ascher. Yet I am not a man who quarrels easily. Like St. Paul’s friends
at Corinth, I can suffer fools gladly. But Mrs. Ascher is not a fool.
She is a clever woman with a twist in her mind. That is why I find
myself saying nasty things to her now and then. I suppose it was Gorman
who taught her to be an Irish patriot. If she had been content to follow
him as an obedient disciple, I should have put up with all she said
politely. But, once started by Gorman, she thought out Ireland for
herself and arrived at this amazing theory of hers, her artistic
children of light in death grips with mercantile and manufacturing
materialists. No wonder she irritated me.
Ascher saved us from a heated argument. Dinner was over. He had smoked
his half cigarette. He rose from his chair.
“I expect Mr. Wendall is waiting for us,” he said to Mrs. Ascher.
Her face softened as he spoke. The look of fanatical enthusiasm passed
out of her eyes. She got up quietly and left the room. Ascher held the
door open for her and motioned me to follow her. He took my arm as we
passed together down a long corridor.
“Mr. Wendall,” he said, “is a young musician who comes to play to us
every week. He is a man with a future before him. I think you will enjoy
his playing. We are going to the music room.”
We went through a small sitting-room, more fully furnished than any
other in Ascher’s house. It looked as if it were meant to be inhabited
by ordinary human beings. It was reserved, so I learned afterwards, for
the use of Ascher’s guests. We ascended a short flight of stairs and
entered the music room. Unlike the dining-room it was only partially
lit. A single lamp stood on a little table near the fireplace, and there
were two candles on a grand piano in the middle of the room. These made
small spots of light in a space of gloom. I felt rather than saw
that the room was a large one. I discerned the shapes of four tall,
curtainless windows. I saw that except the piano and a few seats near
the fireplace there was no furniture. As we entered I heard the sound of
an organ, played very softly, somewhere above me.
“Mr. Wendall is here,” said Ascher.
He led me over to the fireplace and put me in a deep soft chair. He laid
a box of cigarettes beside me and set a vase of spills at my right hand.
I gathered that I might smoke, so long as I lit my tobacco noiselessly,
with spills kindled in the fire; but that I must not make scratchy
sounds by striking matches. Mrs. Ascher sank down in a corner of a large
sofa. She lay there with parted lips and half-closed eyes, like some
feline creature expectant of sensuous delight. The light from the
lamp behind her and the flickering fire played a strange game of
shadow-making and shadow-chasing among the folds of her scarlet gown.
Ascher sat down beside her.
The organ was played very softly. I found out that it was placed in a
gallery above the door by which we had entered. I saw the pipes, like
a clump of tall spears, barely discernible in the gloom. There was no
light in the gallery. Mr. Wendall was no doubt there and was able to
play without seeing a printed score. I supposed that he was playing the
music of the new Russian composer. Whatever he played he failed to catch
my attention, though the sounds were vaguely soothing. I found myself
thinking that Mrs. Ascher had no right to be furiously angry with the
people of Belfast for making their churches comfortable. This was her
form of worship, and never were any devotees more luxuriously placed
than we were. If her soul can soar to spiritual heights from the depths
of silken cushions, surely a linen-draper may find it possible to pray
in a cushioned pew.
I was mistaken about the music I was listening to. Mr. Wendall was only
soothing his nerves with organ sounds while he waited for us. When he
discovered our presence he left the gallery and descended to the room
in which we sat, by a narrow stairway. No greeting of any kind passed
between him and the Aschers. He went straight to the piano without
giving any sign that he knew of our presence. I lit a cigarette and
prepared to endure what was in store for me.
At first the new Russian music struck me as merely noisy. I found
no sense or rhythm in it. Then I began to feel slightly excited. The
excitement grew on me in a curious way. I looked at the Aschers. He was
sitting nearly bolt upright, very rigid, in a corner on the sofa. She
lay back, as she had lain before, with her hands on her lap. The only
change that I noted in her attitude was that her fists were clenched
tightly. Mr. Wendall stopped playing abruptly. There was a short
interval of silence, through which I seemed to feel the last chord that
was struck vibrating in my spine.
Then he began to play again. Once more the feeling of excitement came on
me. I am far from being a Puritan, but I suppose I have inherited
from generations of sternly Protestant ancestors some kind of moral
prejudice. I felt, as the excitement grew intenser, that I had
discovered a new, supremely delightful kind of sin. There came to my
memory the names of ancient gods and goddesses denounced by the prophets
of Israel: Peor and Baalim, Milcom, Moloch, Ashtaroth. I knew why the
people loved to worship them. I remembered that Milton had rejoiced in
the names of these half-forgotten deities, and that Milton loved music.
No doubt he, too, understood this way of sinning and, very rightly, he
placed the gods of it in hell. Wendall, at the piano, stopped and began
again. He did this many times. His music was loud sometimes,
sometimes soft, but it did not fail to create the sense of passionate
deliciousness and, for a time, a longing for more of it.
After a while my senses grew numb, sated I suppose. I looked over at the
Aschers. She still lay as she had lain at first, but her fists were no
longer clenched. All her muscles seemed to be relaxed. Ascher had crept
over close to her. He lay back beside her, and I saw that he held one of
her hands clasped in his. His eyes were fixed intently on hers, and even
as I watched I saw her lids droop before his gaze. She gave a long, soft
sigh of satisfaction.
I realised that Ascher and his wife were lovers still, though they had
been married for a score or more of years. That strange emotion, which
touches human life with romance for a year or two and then fades into
a tolerant companionship, had endured with them. In some way altogether
unknown to me the music and all the art in which they delighted had the
power of stimulating afresh or re-creating again and again the passion
which drew them together. Under the influence of art they enjoyed a
mystical communion with each other, not wholly spiritual, but like all
mysticism, a mixture of the physical, the ecstasy of contact, actual or
imagined, with yearnings and emotions in which the body has no part.
I suppose the music had its effect on me, too, gave me for a few moments
a power of sympathy not usually mine. I understood Ascher as I had never
understood him before. I knew that the man I had hitherto seen, austere,
calm, intellectual, the great financier whom the world sought, was a
man with a mask before his face; that accident and the excitement of the
music had enabled me to see the face behind the mask. I understood, or
supposed I understood, Mrs. Ascher, too. All her foolish fine phrases
and absurd enthusiasms were like cries in which tortured creatures find
some kind of relief from pain, or the low, crooning laughter of a young
mother with her baby at her breast. They were the inevitable, almost
hysterical gaspings of a spirit wrought upon over highly and over often
by the passion of romantic love. A mask hid the man’s face. The woman
was not strong enough to wear it.