PART TWO

_ANDANTE CANTABILE_

_ANDANTE CANTABILE_

[ I ]

Bank pass-books and private account-books are revealing documents,

strangely neglected by biographers. One of the most useful things to

know about any hero is the extent of his income, whether earned or

unearned, whether crescendo or diminuendo. Complicated _états d’âme_

are the luxury of leisured opulence. Those who have to earn their

living must accept Appearances as Reality, and have little time for

metaphysical woes and passions. I once thought of beginning this

section with an accurate facsimile of George’s private account and

pass books. But that would be _vérisme_. It is enough to say that his

unearned income was nil, and his earned income small but crescendo.

Like most people who are too high-spirited to work for stated hours at

a weekly wage, he drifted into journalism, which may be briefly but

accurately defined as the most degrading form of that most degrading

vice, mental prostitution. Its resemblance to the less reprehensible

form is striking. Only the more fashionable cocottes of the dual trade

make a reasonable income. The similarity between the conditions of

the two parallel prostitutions becomes still more remarkable when you

reflect that on the physical side you pretend to be a milliner, or a

masseuse, or a clergyman’s daughter, or a lady of quality, or even a

lady journalist in need of a little aid for which you are prepared to

make suitable acknowledgment; and on the mental side you pretend to be

a poet, or an expert in something, or a lady of quality, or a duke.

Both require suppleness in a supreme degree, and in both the fatal

handicaps are honesty, modesty and independence.

All of which George discovered very rapidly; and acted accordingly.

But his powers of simulation were inadequate, and consequently he

failed at all times to conceal the fact that he possessed some

knowledge and beliefs, and held to them. This, of course, for a long

time prevented his obtaining work from any but crank periodicals, of

which London before the war possessed about three, which believed in

allowing contributors to say what they thought. Needless to say, they

have since perished; and London journalism is now one compact sun of

sweetness and light. If this, or indeed anything, much mattered, one

might be tempted to deplore it.

In the course of his _naif_ peregrinations George became temporarily

acquainted with numerous personages, whom he classified as morons,

abject morons and queer-Dicks. The abject morons were those editors

and journalists who sincerely believed in the imbecilities they

perpetrated, virtuous apprentices gone to the devil, honest bootblacks

out of a job. The morons were those who knew better but pretended

not to, and who by long dabbling in pitch had become pitchy. The

queer-Dicks were more or less honest cranks, or at least possessed so

much vanity and obstinacy that they seemed honest. After a few vague

and awkward struggles, George found himself limited to the queer-Dicks.

Of these there were three, whom for convenience sake, I shall label

Shobbe, Bobbe and Tubbe. Mr. or Herr Shobbe ran a literary review, one

of those “advanced” reviews beloved by the English, which move rapidly

forward with a crab-like motion. Herr Shobbe was a very great man.

Comrade Bobbe ran a Socialist weekly which was subsidized by a demented

eugenist and a vegetarian Theosophist. Since Marxian economics,

eugenics, pure food and theosophy did not wholly fill its columns,

the organ of the intellectual and wage-weary worker permitted regular

comments on art and literature. And since none of the directors of the

journal knew anything whatever about these subjects, they occasionally

and by accident allowed them to be treated by some one with ideas and

enthusiasm. Comrade Bobbe was a very great man. As for Mr. Waldo Tubbe,

who hailed (why “hailed”?) from the Middle Western districts of the

United States, he was an exceedingly ardent and patriotic British Tory,

standing for Royalism in Art, Authority in Politics and Classicism in

Religion. Unfortunately, there was no dormant peerage in the family;

otherwise he would certainly have spent all his modest patrimony

in endeavouring to become Lord Tubbe. Since he was an unshakable

Anglo-Catholic there were no hopes of a Papal Countship; and Tory

governments are proverbially shabby in their treatment of even the most

distinguished among their intellectual supporters. Consequently, all

Mr. Waldo Tubbe could do in that line was to hint at his aristocratic

English ancestry, to use his (possibly authentic) coat-of-arms on his

cutlery, stationery, toilette articles and book-plates, and know only

the “best” people. How George ever got to know him is a mystery, still

more how he came to write for a periodical which once advertised that

its list of subscribers included four dukes, three marquesses and

eleven earls. The only explanation is that Mr. Tubbe’s Americanized

Toryism was a bit more lively than the native brand, or that he leaned

so very far to the extreme Right that without knowing it he sometimes

tumbled into the verge of the extreme Left. But, in any case, Mr. Waldo

Tubbe was also a very great man.

Upon the charity of these three gentlemen our hero chiefly but

not extravagantly subsisted, skating indeed upon very thin ice in

his relations with them, and expending treasures of diplomacy and

dissimulation which might have been employed in the service of his

Country. It subsequently transpired (why “transpired”?) that his

Country did not need his brains, but his blood.

* * * * *

Sunday in London. In the City, nuts, bolts, infinite curious pieces

of odd metal, embedded in the black shiny roads, frozen rivers of ink,

may be examined without danger. The peace of commerce which passes all

desolation. Puritan fervour relapsed to negative depression. Gigantic

wings of Ennui folded irresistibly over millions. Vast trails of

automobiles hopelessly hooting to escape. Epic melancholy of deserted

side-streets where the rhythmic beat of a horse’s hoofs is an adagio

of despair. Horrors of Gunnersbury. The spleen of the railway line

between Turnham Green and Hammersmith, the villainous sordidness of

Raynes Park, the ennui which always vibrates with the waiting train at

Gloucester Road Station, emerge triumphant when the Lord is at rest and

possess the streets. The rain is one melancholy, and the sun another.

The supreme insult of pealing bells morning and evening. Dearly beloved

brethren, miserable sinners, stand up, stand up for Jesus. Who will

deliver us, who will deliver us from the Christians? O Lord Jesus, come

quickly, and get it over.

* * * * *

It was a merry Sunday evening of merry England in the month of March,

1912. After a long day of unremitting but not very remunerative toil,

George had gone to call on his friend, Mr. Frank Upjohn. The word

“friend” is here, as nearly always, inexact, if by friend is meant one

who feels for another a disinterested affection unaccompanied by sexual

desire. (Friendship accompanied by sexual desire is love, the phœnix

or unicorn of passions.) In the case of George and Mr. Upjohn there

was at least a truce to the instinctive hostility and grudging which

human beings almost invariably feel for one another. Ties of mutual

self-interest bound them. George made jokes and Mr. Upjohn laughed at

them: and vice versa. Mr. Upjohn desired to make George a disciple, and

George was not averse from making use of Mr. Upjohn. Mutual admiration,

implied if not expressed and perhaps not wholly insincere, enabled them

to form a small protective nucleus against the oceanic indifference of

mankind; and thus feel superior to it. They ate together, and even lent

each other small sums of money without security. The word “friend” is

therefore justified _à peu près_.

Needless to say, Mr. Upjohn was a very great man. He was a Painter.

Since he was destitute of any intrinsic and spontaneous originality, he

strove much to be original, and invented a new school of painting every

season. He first created a sensation with his daring and brilliant

“Christ in a Bloomsbury Brothel,” which was denounced in no unmeasured

terms by the Press, ever tender for the Purity of Public Morals and the

posthumous reputation of Our Lord. “The Blessed Damozel in Hell” passed

almost unnoticed, when fortunately the model most unjustly obtained

an affiliation order against Mr. Upjohn, and thus drew attention to

a neglected masterpiece, which was immediately bought by a man who

had made a fortune in intimate rubber goods. Mr. Upjohn then became

aware of the existence of modern French art. One season he painted in

gorgeous Pointilliste blobs, the next in monotone Fauviste smears, then

in calamitous Futuriste accidents of form and colour. At this moment

he was just about to launch the Suprematist movement in painting, to

which he hoped to convert George, or at any rate to get him to write

an article about it. Suprematist painting, which has now unfortunately

gone out of fashion, was, as its name implies, the supreme point of

modern art. Mr. Upjohn produced two pictures in illustration (the word

is perhaps inaccurate) of his theories. One was a beautiful scarlet

whorl on a background of the purest flake white. The other at first

sight appeared to be a brood of bulbous yellow chickens, with thick

elongated necks, aimlessly scattered over a grey-green meadow; but

on closer inspection the chickens turned out to be conventionalized

phalluses. The first was called Decomposition-Cosmos, and the second

Op. 49. Piano.

Mr. Upjohn turned on both electric lights in his studio for George to

study these interesting productions, at which our friend gazed with a

feeling of baffled perplexity and the agonized certainty that he would

have to say something about them, and that what he would say would

inevitably be wrong. Fortunately, Mr. Upjohn was extremely vain and

highly nervous. He stood behind George, coughing and jerking himself

about agitatedly:

“What I mean to say is,” he said, puncturing his discourse with coughs,

“there you’ve got it.”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“What I mean is, you’ve got precise expression of precise emotion.”

“Just what I was going to say.”

“You see, when you’ve got that, what I mean is, you’ve got something.”

“Why, of course!”

“You see, what I mean to say is, if you get two or three intelligent

people to _see_ the thing, then you’ve got it. I mean you won’t get

those damned blockheaded sons of bitches like Picasso and Augustus John

to see it, I mean, it simply smashes them, you see.”

“Did you expect them to?”

“You see, what you’ve got is complete originality _and_ The Tradition.

One doesn’t worry about the hacks, you see, but what I mean to say, one

does _mildly_ suppose Picasso had a few gleams of intelligence, but

what I mean is they won’t _take_ anything new.”

“I get the originality, of course, but I admit I don’t quite see the

traditional side of the movement.”

Mr. Upjohn sighed pettishly and waved his head from side to side in

commiserating contempt.

“Of course, you _wouldn’t_. What intelligence you have was ruined

by your lack of education, and your native obtuseness makes you

instinctively prefer the academic. I mean, can’t you SEE that the

proportions of Decomposition-Cosmos are exactly those of the Canopic

vase in the Filangieri-Museum at Naples?”

“How could I see that,” said George, rather annoyed, “since I’ve never

been to Naples?”

“That’s what I mean to say,” exclaimed Mr. Upjohn triumphantly, “you

simply have no education _what-so-ever!_”

“Well, but what about the other?” said George, desiring to be placable,

“is that in the Canopic vase tradition?”

“Christ-in-petticoats, NO! I thought even you’d see _that_. What I mean

is, can’t you _see_ it?”

“They might be free adaptations of Greek vase painting?” said George

tentatively, hoping to soothe this excitable and irritated genius. Mr.

Upjohn flung his palette knife on the floor.

“You’re _too_ stupid, George. What I mean is the proportion and placing

and colour-values are exactly in the best tradition of American-Indian

blankets, and what I mean is, when you’ve got that, well, I mean,

you’ve got something!”

“Of course, of course, it _was_ stupid of me not to see. Forgive me,

I’ve been working at hack articles all day, and my mind’s a bit muzzy.”

“I mildly supposed so!”

And Mr. Upjohn, with spasmodic movements, jerked the two easels round

to the wall. There was a short pause in the conversation. Mr. Upjohn

irritatedly cast himself at full length upon a sofa, and spasmodically

ate candied apricots. He placed them in his mouth with his forefinger

and thumb, holding his elbow at a right angle to his body, with his

chin far extended; and bit them savagely in half. George watched this

impressive and barbaric spectacle with the interest of one who at last

discovers the meaning of the mysterious rite of Urim and Thummim. A

timid effort at making conversation was repelled by Mr. Upjohn, with a

gesture which George interpreted as meaning that Mr. Upjohn required

complete silence to digest and sweeten with candied apricots the memory

of George’s treasonable obtuseness. Suddenly George started, for Mr.

Upjohn, after coughing once or twice, swung himself from his couch

with incredible swiftness, hawked vigorously, flung open a window with

unnecessary violence and spat voluminously into the street. He then

turned and said calmly:

“You’d better come along to fat Shobbe’s.”

George, who was young enough to enjoy going to miscellaneous parties,

gratefully acquiesced; and was still further gratified by being allowed

to witness the strange and complex ablutions performed by Mr. Upjohn

from a wash-basin startlingly concealed in a veneered mahogany tail-boy.

Mr. Upjohn was evidently a very clean man, at least in those portions

of his body exposed to the public gaze. He washed and rinsed his

face thoroughly, brushed his teeth until George apprehended lest the

bristles be worn to the bone, gargled and spat freely. He soaped and

pumiced his hands, which were large, yellow and slightly spatulate; and

excavated his nails with singular industry and pertinacity. He then sat

down before a folding table-mirror in three parts, which reflected both

profiles as well as full-face and combed and brushed and re-brushed

and re-combed his coarse hay-like hair until it crackled with induced

electricity. When Mr. Upjohn judged that hygiene and beauty-culture

had received their full due, he arrayed himself in a clean collar, a

tie of remarkable lustre and size, and a narrow-waisted rather long

coat which, taken in conjunction with the worn but elegant peg-top

trousers he had on, gave him a pleasantly rake-helly and Regency look.

This singular scene, which occupied the better part of an hour, was

conducted by Mr. Upjohn with great gravity, varied by the emission of a

singular and discordant chant or hum, and wild petulant oaths whenever

any object of the toilet or of his apparel did not instantly present

itself to his hand. Oddly enough, Mr. Upjohn was not a sodomist. He was

a professedly ardent admirer of what our ignorant forefathers called

the soft sex. Mr. Upjohn often asserted that after the immense toils of

Suprematist painting nothing could rest him but the presence of several

beautiful women. While gallantly and probably necessarily discreet as

to his conquests, he was always prepared to talk about love, and to

give subtle erotic advice, which led any man who had actually lain with

a woman to suspect that Mr. Upjohn was at best a fumbler and probably

still a virgin.

Mr. Upjohn then endued a very Regency thin grey overcoat, stuck a long

ebony cane with no handle under his left arm-pit, tossed a soft grey

hat rakishly on to his hair, and made for the door. George followed,

half-impressed, half-amused by this childish swagger and self-conscious

bounce.

* * * * *

In the street the Sabbath ennui of London emerged from its lair like

a large dull grey octopus, and shot stealthy feelers of depression at

them. Mr. Upjohn, safe as Achilles in the Stygian dip of his conceit,

strode along energetically with an inward feeling that he had gone one

better on James McNeill Whistler. The boredom of Mr. Upjohn came from

within, not from without. He was so absorbed in Mr. Upjohn that he

rarely noticed what was going on about him.

George fought at the monster and plunged desperately into talk.

“What about this coal strike? Will it ruin the country as the papers

say? Isn’t it a foolish thing on both sides?”

This strike was George’s first introduction to the reality of the

“social problem” and the bitter class hatred which smoulders in England

and at times bursts into fierce crises of hatred, restrained only

by that mingling of fear and “decency” which composes the servile

character of the British working man.

“Well, what I mean to say is,” said Mr. Upjohn, who very rarely managed

to say what he meant but always meant to say something original and

startling, “it ain’t our affair. But what I mean is, if the miners get

more money it’ll be all the better for us. They’re more likely to buy

our pictures than sons of bitches like Mond and old Asquith.”

George was a bit staggered at this. In the first place, he had been

looking at the problem from a national, not a personal, point of view.

And, in the second place, he knew just a little about working men and

their conditions. He could not see how five shillings a week more would

convert the miners to collecting the Suprematist school of painting,

or make them abandon their cultivated amusements of coursing, pigeon

flying, gambling, wife-beating, and drinking. But Mr. Upjohn delivered

his _obiter dicta_ with so much aplomb that a boy of twenty might be

excused for failing to see their complete absurdity.

* * * * *

They were walking up Church Street, Kensington, that dismal

communication trench which links the support line of Kensington High

Street with the front line of Notting Hill Gate. How curious are

cities, with their intricate trench systems and perpetual warfare,

concealed but as deadly as the open warfare of armies! We live in

trenches, with flat revetments of house-fronts as parapet and parados.

The warfare goes on behind the house-fronts—wives with husbands,

children with parents, employers with employed, tradesmen with

tradesmen, banker with lawyer, and the triumphal doctor rooting out

life’s casualties. Desperate warfare—for what? Money as the symbol

of power; power as the symbol or affirmation of existence. Throbbing

warfare of men’s cities! As fierce and implacable and concealed as the

desperate warfare of plants and the hidden carnage of animals. We walk

up Church Street. Up the communication trench. We cannot see “over the

top,” have no vista of the immense No-Man’s Land of London’s roofs.

We cannot pierce through the house-fronts. What is going on behind

those dingy unpierceable house-fronts? What tortures, what contests,

what incests, what cruelties, what sacrifice, what horror, what sordid

emptiness? We cannot pierce through the pavement and Belgian blocks,

see the subterranean veins of electric cables, the arteries of gas and

water mains, the viscera of underground railways. We cannot feel the

water filtering through London clay, do not perceive the relics of

ruined Londons waiting for archæologists from the antipodes, do not

see, far, far down, the fossillised bones of extinct animals and their

coprolites. Here in Notting Hill, the sabre-toothed tiger roared and

savagely devoured its victims, the huge-horned deer darted in terror;

wolves howled; the brown bear preyed; overhead by day screamed eagles

and by night flitted huge bats. Mysterious forest murmurs, abrupt yells

and threatening growls, and the amorous hatred of female beasts, were

vocal when the Channel was the Rhine’s estuary.

“Time passes,” said George. “What do we know of Time? Prehistoric

beasts, like the ichthyosaurus and Queen Victoria, have laired and

copulated and brought forth....”

A motor-bus roared by, like a fabulous noisy red ox with fiery eyes and

a luminous interior, quenching his words.

“Eh?” said Mr. Upjohn. “*****!”

“Now, look at these simian bipeds,” George pursued, pointing to an

inoffensive pair of lovers and a suspicious cop, “more foul, more

deadly, more incestuously blood-lustful....”

“You see, what I mean is, nothing matters to these people but our

conversation.... Now, what I mean is, you get fat Shobbe to let you

write an article on me and Suprematism.”

“We should go to the Zoo more often, and watch the monkeys. The

chimpanzee leaps with the dexterity of a politician. The Irish-looking

ourang smokes his pipe as placidly as a Camden Town murderer. The

purple-bottomed mandrils on heat will initiate you into love. And

the perpetual chatter of the small monkeys—how like ourselves! What

ecstatic clicking about nothing! Go to the ape, thou poet.”

Mr. Upjohn laughed abruptly and spat with a raucous cough:

“An old idea, but what’s it got to do with _le mouvement?_ Still, what

I mean is, I might do something with it....”

Poor old George! He was a bloody fool. He never learned how fatally

unwise it is to express any sort of an idea to a brother—still less to

a sister—artist.

Mr. Upjohn discoursed on Suprematism and himself.

At Notting Hill Gate, George halted. The Sabbath ennui shot its

tentacles at him, and enlaced his spirit, dragging him down into the

whirlpool of wanhope. Why go on? Why affront the veiled hostility of

people? Why suffer those eyes to search and those nimble unerring

tongues to wound? Oh, wrap oneself in solitude, like an armoured

shroud, and bend over the dead words of a dead language! A simian

biped! O gods, gods! And Plato talks of Beauty.

“Come along,” shouted Mr. Upjohn, a few paces ahead, “this way. Holland

Park. Old Shobbe’ll be waiting for me in that mob. What I mean is, he

knows I’m the only other intelligent person in London.”

George still hesitated. He sank deeper in the maelstrom of

unintelligible and causeless despair. Why go on? The adolescent

love of death and suicide—corollary to youth’s vitality and vivid

energy—swept over him in choking waves. To cease upon the midnight

with no pain....

“I think I shan’t come,” he shouted after the retreating Mr. Upjohn.

Mr. Upjohn hurried back and seized George’s arm:

“What’s the matter with you? The best way to get an article out of

Shobbe is to go and see him on his Sunday evenings. Come on. We shall

be late.”

No Euripidean chorus uttered gnomic reflections on the inevitable and

irresistible power of Ananke, the Destiny which is above the gods. No

bright god warned him, no oracular voice spoke to him. Conflict of

free-will and destiny! But is there a conflict? Whether we move or are

still, whether we go to the right or the left, hesitate or rush blindly

forward, the thread is inexorably spun. Ananke. Ananke.

George yielded reluctantly to the tug at his arm.

“All right, I’ll come.”

[ II ]

As they were shown into Mr. Shobbe’s large studio they encountered

an indescribable babble of human voices, which gave strange point to

George’s zoological remarks, since it sounded as if all the macaws at

the Zoo had got into the monkey-house to argue with its inhabitants

about theology. Mr. Shobbe’s studio, or “stew-joe,” as his humbler

Cockney contributors called it, was already dim with cigarette smoke.

The excited and elevated babble of voices was due to the fact that this

was one of Mr. Shobbe’s rare caviar and champagne evenings, and not

one of the ordinary beer and ham-sandwich _débâcles_. George and Mr.

Upjohn were still in the doorway, hidden by the opening doors, when

a couple of champagne corks popped. George noticed a look of horror

and perplexity, mingled with the satisfaction always produced by the

prospect of free alcohol, in Mr. Upjohn’s countenance. George wondered

vaguely why, and followed the ebullient swagger of Mr. Upjohn into the

large room. It was not until long afterwards that he realized the cause

of this rapid and subtle flash of horror in Mr. Upjohn. The champagne

and caviar evenings were reserved for the “better” contributors to, and

the wealthier guarantors of, Mr. Shobbe’s periodical. Upjohn was County

and Cambridge, with a small income and prospects of a large inheritance

from a senile aunt—he was therefore one of the “better” contributors.

George, on the other hand, was merely middle-class, talented, and

penniless. Mr. Upjohn had thus committed a social error of hair-raising

enormity by bringing George to the champagne reception under the false

impression that it was merely a beer “do” for the common mob.

With genial bonhomie Mr. Shobbe greeted in Mr. Upjohn the potential

inheritance from the senile aunt. Upon George he turned a coldly

languid blue eye, and for a moment lent him a hand even limper,

flabbier and clammier than usual. George noticed the difference,

but ingenuously assumed that it was because he was younger than Mr.

Upjohn and incapable of producing “Christ in a Bloomsbury Brothel” or

the doctrines of Suprematism. But Mr. Upjohn, with more acute social

ambitions, was aware of his _gaffe_. He mumbled his apology, which was

almost lost in the surrounding babble:

“Brought ’m ’long discuss ’n article on Me ’n S’prematism.”

Mr. Shobbe only half-heard, and nodded vaguely. The slight awkwardness

of the situation was ended by the appearance of Mrs. Shobbe, who

greeted them both; and they passed into the room. George attributed the

feeling of strain to his own shyness and aloofness. He was still _naif_

enough to suppose that people are welcomed for their own sake.

* * * * *

In justice to the distinguished gathering in Mr. Shobbe’s studio (two

“social” journalists were present) it must be said that the babble and

the excitement were not wholly due to the champagne. Pre-war London

was comparatively sober. Numbers of women did not even drink at all,

and cocktails and communal copulation had not then been developed to

their present state of intensity. Whether the art of scandal-mongering

has suffered by this new social activity is hard to say, but as ever

it remains the chief diversion of the British intelligentsia. Serious

conversation is, of course, impossible, on account of the paper-pirates

who are always hovering about to snatch up an idea. One definite

improvement is that the _bon mot_, the _recherché_ pun, the intentional

witticism, are definitely discouraged. Indeed one of the brightest

of the post-war reputations was created by a young man who had the

self-restraint to sit through forty-five literary parties without

saying a word. This frightened everybody so much that when this modern

lay Trappist departed you heard on all sides: “Brilliant young man.”

“Extraordinarily clever.”

“I hear he’s writing a book on metaphysics in the Stone Age.”

“No, really?”

“They say he’s the greatest living authority on pre-Columbian

literature.”

“How quite too marvellous.”

But in those distant pre-war days people strove to chatter themselves

into notice through a chaos of witticisms. On this particular evening,

however, witticisms were in the background, for an event had occurred

to stagger this small cosmos of affectation into sincerity. With the

exception of George (who was too young and unknown to matter) and a few

women, almost everybody present had been connected with a publishing

firm which had suddenly gone bankrupt. On Mr. Shobbe’s recommendation

some of his wealthier guarantors had put money into the firm; the

painters were “doing” illustrated editions or writing books on the

Renaissance artists still popular in those unenlightened days; and

the writers had received contracts for an almost unlimited number of

works. Money had been lavishly spent and some rather amusing things

had been begun. Then suddenly the publisher vanished with the lady

typist-secretary and the remainder of the cash. Hence the excited

babble.

George stood, a little dazed, beside a small group of youngish men and

women. A dark, rather sinister-looking young man kept saying:

“Le crapule! Ah! le crapule!”

George wondered vaguely who was a crapule and why, and half-listened to

the conversation.

“He was paying me three hundred a year and...”

“My last novel did so well that he gave me a five years’ contract and

an advance of...”

“Yes, and I was getting twenty per cent...”

“Yes, but do let me tell you this. Shobbe says that the lawyers told

him four thousand pounds of the money came from the diocesan funds

of...”

“Yes, I know. Shobbe told us.”

“Le crapule!”

“What’ll the archbishop say?”

“Oh, they’ll smother that up.”

“Yes, but look here—do shut up for a minute, Bessie—what I want to

know is how do we stand? What about our copyrights? Shobbe told me the

legal position is...”

“Hang the legal position. What do we get out of it?”

“Crapule!”

“Nothing, probably. _You_ won’t get much anyhow. He hadn’t even

published your book, and I was to get three hundred a year and...”

“It isn’t so much the money I mind as having my book off the market

when it was going so well—did you see the long article on me in last

week’s...”

“Crapule!”

George glanced almost affectionately at the sinister-looking young man.

It struck him that the repeated “crapule” was addressed as much to his

present audience as to the unknown perpetrator of these calamities. At

that moment Mr. Upjohn came along, and George took him aside.

“I say, Frank, what’s all this talk about?”

“Dear Bertie has eloped with Olga and the cash.”

“Dear Bertie? Oh, you mean—. But the firm will go on, won’t it?”

“Go on the streets. You see, there isn’t a cent left. What I mean is, I

shall have to find some one else to do my Suprematist book. What I mean

to say is, Bertie had a glimmering of intelligence....”

“Who’s Olga?”

But at that moment a lady with two unmarried daughters and private

information about the senile aunt’s fortune plunged sweetly at Mr.

Upjohn.

“Oh, Mr. Upjohn, how _nice_ to see you again! How _are_ you?”

“Mildly surviving.”

“You _never_ came to my last at-home. Now, you _must_ come and have

dinner next week. Sir George was _so_ much impressed last week by what

you said about the new school of painting you have founded—what _is_

the name? I’m so _stupid_ about remembering names.”

Mr. Upjohn introduced them:

“Lady Carter—George Winterbourne. He’s a painter—of sorts.”

Lady Carter took in George at a glance—shabby clothes, old tie

carelessly knotted, hair too long, abstracted gaze, poor, too young

anyway—and was politely insolent. After a few words, she and Mr.

Upjohn walked away. She pretended to be amused by Mr. Upjohn’s

conversation.

* * * * *

George went over to the table and took a sandwich and a glass of

champagne. The ceaseless babble of petty talk about petty interests

irritated and bored him. He felt isolated and hate-obstinate. So

this was Upjohn’s “only intelligent group in London!” If this is

“intelligence” then let me be a fool for God’s sake. Better the great

octopus ennui outside than these jelly-fish tentacles stinging with

conceit, self-interest and malice.

* * * * *

He went over to talk to Comrade-Editor Bobbe. Mr. Bobbe was a

sandy-haired, narrow-chested little man with spiteful blue eyes and a

malevolent class-hatred. He exercised his malevolence with comparative

impunity by trading upon his working-class origin and his heart

disease, of which he had been dying for twenty years. Nobody of decent

breeding could hit Mr. Bobbe as he deserved, because his looks were a

perpetual reminder of his disease, and his behaviour and habits gave

continual evidence of his origin. He was the Thersites of the day, or

rather that would have been the only excuse for him. Intellectually

he was Rousseau’s sedulous and somewhat lousy ape. His conversation

rasped. His vanity and class-consciousness made him yearn for affairs

with upper class women, although he was obviously a homosexual type.

Admirable energy, a swift and sometimes remarkable intuition into

character, a good memory and excellent faculty of imitation, a sharp

tongue and brutal frankness, gave him power. He was a little snipe,

but a dangerous one. Although biassed and sometimes absurd, his weekly

political articles were by far the best of the day. He might have

been a real influence in the rapidly growing Socialist Party if he

could have controlled his excessive malevolence, curbed his hankering

for aristocratic alcoves, and dismissed his fatuous theories of the

Unconscious, which were a singular mixture of misapprehended theosophy

and ill-digested Freud. George admired his feverish energy and talents,

pitied him for his ill-health and agonized sense of class inferiority,

disliked his malevolence, and ignored his theories.

“What are _you_ doing here, Winterbourne? I shouldn’t have thought

Shobbe would invite _you_. You haven’t any money, have you?”

“Upjohn brought me along.”

“Upjohn-and-at-’em? What’s he want of you?”

“An article on his new school of painting, I think.”

Mr. Bobbe tittered, screwing up his eyes and nose in disgust, and

flapping his right hand with a gesture of take-it-away-it-stinks.

“Suprematist painting! Suprematist dung-bags! Suprematist conceit and

empty-headed charlatanism. Did you see him toady to that Carter woman,

_Lady_ Carter? Puh!”

There was such vindictiveness in that “puh” that George was

disconcerted. True, he himself suspected Mr. Upjohn was a bit of a

charlatan and knew he was odiously conceited; at the same time, there

was something very kind-hearted and generous in poor Upjohn-and-at-’em,

who had received that nickname for his furious onslaughts on any one

who was established and successful in alleged defence of any one who

was struggling and neglected. Unfortunately, these vituperative efforts

of poor Mr. Upjohn did no good to his friends and served only to bring

himself advertisement—the advertisement of ridiculousness. But George

felt he ought to say something in defence.

“Well, of course, he’s eccentric and sometimes offensive, but he’s got

a streak of curious genius and real generosity.”

Mr. Bobbe snarled rather than tittered.

“He’s an insignificant toadying little cheese-worm. That’s what he

is, a toadying little _cheese-worm_. And you won’t be much better, my

lad, if you let yourself drift with these people. You’ll go to pieces,

you’ll just go _com-plete-ly_ to pieces. But humanity’s rotten. It’s

all rotten. It stinks. It’s worm-eaten. Look at those mingy fellows

prancing round those women on the tips of their toes. Cold-hearted,

****-********* mingy sneaks! Look at the women, pining for a bit o’

real warm-hearted man’s love, and what do they get? Mingy cold-hearted

********! I know ’em, I know ’em. Curse the mingy lot of ’em. But it

won’t last long, it can’t. The workers won’t stand it. There’ll be a

revolution and a bloody one, and soon too. Mingy sons of spats and

eye-glasses!”

George was amazed and embarrassed by this outburst. He did, indeed,

feel repelled by most of the gathering, particularly by persons like

Mr. Robert Jeames, the Poets’ Friend, who made anthologies of all

the worst authors, wore a monocle and spats, and lisped through a

wet tooth. But after all Mr. Jeames was harmless and quite amiable.

One might not agree with his taste; one might not feel attracted by

him, or indeed by most of the people present. But there was certainly

a wide difference between such a feeling and “mingy sneaks” and

“cheese-worms.” Moreover, George was a little offended by Mr. Bobbe’s

proletarian vocabulary, while he failed to see exactly why the sexual

frigidity of a few men in dinner jackets should cause the workers to

rise in bloody revolution.

“I shouldn’t think the workers care a hoot. If it’s as you say, the

women are more likely to join the suffragettes.”

“Faugh!” said Mr. Bobbe, “puh! Suffragettes? Take them away. They

smell. They’re unclean. They’re obscene. Women and votes! It’s the

last stage of decomposition of the mingy world. When the women start

to get power, it’s the end. It means the men are done for, mingy

cold-hearted sneaks. Once let the women in, and nothing can save the

world. Socialism, perhaps, and a genuine out-reaching of the inward

unconscious Male-life to the dark Womb-life in Woman. But no, they’re

not worthy of it. Let ’em go. You’ll see, my lad, you’ll see. Within

five years there’ll be a...”

“Oh, Mr. Bobbe,” said Mrs. Shobbe’s voice, and a timid little greyish

lady, all in grey and silver, appeared, gentle and fluttering, beside

them, like a large gentle grey moth. “Oh, Mr. Bobbe, do forgive me

for interrupting your _interesting_ conversation. Lady Carter is _so_

anxious to meet you and admires you so much. I’m sure you’ll like her

and her two daughters—such _beautiful_ girls.”

George watched Mr. Bobbe as he bowed servilely to Lady Carter and

entered into an animated conversation with that living rung in the

social ladder. He watched the scene for several minutes, and was just

thinking of leaving when Mr. Waldo Tubbe came near him.

“Well, Winterbourne,” he remarked in his neat, mincing English,

“you appeared sunk in thought. What was the precise object of your

contemplation?”

“Bobbe was inveighing against Upjohn for toadying to Lady Carter, and

then as soon as Mrs. Shobbe came and asked him to be introduced, he

rushed off and you can see him there sitting at Lady Carter’s feet with

clasped hands.”

Mr. Tubbe looked unnecessarily grave.

“O-oh,” he said with a very genteel roll to the “o,” and an air of

suggesting unutterable things. This was a very great asset to Mr.

Tubbe in social intercourse. He found that an interrogative silence on

his part forced other people to talk, and made them slightly ill at

ease, so that they betrayed what they did not always wish to express.

He would then gravely remark “Oe-oh” or “In-deed?” or “Really?” with

a deportmental air which was highly impressive and somehow slightly

reproving. It was reported that Mr. Tubbe spent hours practising in

private the exact intonation of his “Oe-ohs,” “Reallys” and “Indeeds.”

He had certainly brought them to a high pitch of gentility and

suppressed significance. Mr. Tubbe drank a good deal—gin mostly—but

it must be said for him that the drunker he got the more genteel and

darkly significant he became.

There was a pause after Mr. Tubbe’s “Oe-oh.” His interrogative silence

did its work. George plunged into talk, saying the first thing which

came into his head.

“I came along with Upjohn, after seeing his new pictures.”

“In-deed?”

“He would like me to write an article on them, but it’s very difficult.

Honestly, I don’t understand them and think they’re rather nonsense,

don’t you?”

“Oe-oh.”

“Have you seen them?”

“Noe-o.”

Say something, blast you!

Another long pause.

“Well, my dear Winterbourne, I am very happy to have had some

conversation with you. Come in and see me soon, quite soon. Will you

excuse me? I must ask Lord Congreve a question. Good-bye. _Good_-bye!”

* * * * *

George observed the greeting between Mr. Waldo Tubbe and Lord Congreve.

“Hullo, Waldo!”

“My _dear_ Bernard...!”

Mr. Tubbe shook hands with an air of restrained but very considerable

emotion. He treated Lord Congreve with a kind of dignified familiarity,

rather like Phélypeaux playing billiards with Louis Quatorze. Mr.

Shobbe, who was the third party to this interesting re-union, behaved

more easily, with a _puissance-à-puissance_ geniality. George could not

hear what they were saying, and did not want to. He was watching Mrs.

Shobbe, who was talking gently with two younger women on a couch in

one corner of the studio. Poor Mrs. Shobbe, of whom one always thought

as a soft, kind, grey moth, for ever fluttering with kindly intent and

for ever fluttering wrong. She had that sweet exasperating gentleness

and refined incompetence which marked so many women of the wealthier

class whose youth was blighted by Ruskin and Morris. Her portrait had

been painted by Burne-Jones—there it was on the wall, over-sweet,

over-wistful, stylized to look like one of his Arthurian damosels. And

there she was, grey and moth-like, the sweetness gone insipid, the

wistfulness become empty and regretful. Had she ever looked like that

portrait? No one would have known it was she, unless they had been told.

Poor Mrs. Shobbe! In turns one pitied, almost loved, despised and

was exasperated by her. Such crushed insipidity. And yet such a

gallant effort to do “what is right.” Yet she somehow disgusted one

with refinement and trying to do what is right, and made one yearn

sympathetically towards a hard-swearing, hard-working, hard-drinking

motor mechanic. Her life must have been very unhappy. Her well-off

Victorian parents (wholesale wine trade, retired) had given her a

good education of travel and accomplishments, and had systematically

and gently crushed her. It was chiefly the mother, of course, that

abominable mother-daughter “love” which is compact of bullying,

jealousy, parasitism and baffled sexuality. With what ghastly

pertinacity does a disappointed wife “take it out” on her daughter! Not

consciously, of course; but the unconscious cruelty and oppression of

human beings seem the most dreadful. To escape, she had married Shobbe.

Nothing can be more fatal for a girl than to marry an artist of any

kind. Have affairs with them, my dears, if you like. They can teach

you a great deal about life, human nature and sex, because they are

directly interested in these matters, whereas other men are cluttered

with prejudices, ideals and literary reminiscences. But do not marry

them, unless you have a writing of divorcement in the pocket of your

night-gown. If you are poor, life will be horrid even though there are

no children; and if you have children, it will be hell. If you have

money, you may be quite sure that it is not you but your money which

has been espoused. Every poor artist and intellectual is looking for a

woman to keep him. So you loot out, too. Of course, not only are there

no delicious marriages, there are not even any good ones—Rochefoucauld

was such an optimist. And in any case marriage is a primitive

institution bound to succumb before the joint attack of contraceptives

and the economic independence of women. Remember, artists are not

seeking tranquillity and legitimate posterity, but experience and an

income. So look out!

Poor Mrs. Shobbe did not look out, she had never been allowed to do

anything so unmaidenly. She became the means whereby Mr. Shobbe avoided

the dismal but common fate of working for a living. He snubbed her, he

patronized her, he neglected her, he was unfaithful to her, but hung on

to her like a sloth to a tree-branch—she had three thousand a year,

most of which he spent. As for Shobbe he was a plump and talented snob

of German origin. His aquiline nose was the one piece of evidence,

apart from his bad manners, which supported his claim to aristocratic

birth. Before the Great War he was always talking about his year’s

service in an aristocratic German regiment, or beginning a sentence

“When I was last with the Kaiser,” or talking voluble German whenever

there was an audience, or saying “of course, you English...” After the

war he discovered that he was and always had been a patriotic English

gentleman. Be it said to his credit, he “rolled up” himself and did

not only “give” a few cousins. But then, there was Mrs. Shobbe to get

away from on a legitimate excuse—how many patriotic English gentlemen

in the war armies were rather avoiding their wives than seeking their

country’s enemies? Shobbe was an excellent example of the artist’s

amazing selfishness and vanity. After the comfort of his own person he

really cared for nothing but his prose style and literary reputation.

He was also an amazing and very amusing liar—a sort of literary

Falstaff. As for his affairs with women—my God! Yet, after all, were

they really so lurid? Probably they were grossly exaggerated because

Shobbe had talent, and everybody was jealous of it....

* * * * *

George suddenly became aware that Mrs. Shobbe was beckoning to him from

the couch. Some of the noisier guests had departed—probably to drink

more freely—and a wide-opened window had carried away much of the

tobacco smoke. George emerged from his reverie and went quickly over to

her.

“You know Mrs. Lamberton, don’t you, Mr. Winterbourne? And this is Miss

Paston, Elizabeth Paston.”

How-do-you-dos.

“And oh, Mr. Winterbourne, will you get us some iced lemonade, please?

We’re all dying of thirst in this smoky room.”

George brought the drinks, and sat down in a chair facing the women.

They chatted aimlessly. Soon Mrs. Shobbe went away. She saw a lonely

old maid in the opposite corner of the room, and felt it “right” to

talk to her. Mrs. Lamberton sighed.

“Why does one come to these intellectual agapes? An expense of spirit

in a waste of time.”

“Now, Frances!” said Elizabeth, with her hard nervous little laugh,

“you know you’d hate it if you weren’t asked.”

“Besides, it’s one place where you’re sure not to meet your husband,”

said George.

“Oh, but then I _never_ see him. Only last week I had to ask the

servants if Mr. Lamberton were still alive or only pre-occupied with a

new conquest.”

“And was he?”

“What?”

“Alive.”

“I didn’t know he ever had been.”

They laughed, though the paltry jest was near the truth.

“And yet,” George pursued, with the ruthless clumsiness of youth,

“you must have liked him once. Why? Why do women like men? And on

what singular principle do they choose their husbands? Instinct?

Self-interest?”

Neither answered. Women do not like these questions, especially from

young men whose duty it is to be dazzled by charms they cannot analyze.

Of course, the questions were impertinent; but if a young man is not

impertinent, what on earth is the use of him?

The women lit cigarettes. George looked at Elizabeth Paston. A

slender figure in red silk; black glossy hair drawn back from a high

intellectual forehead; large, very intelligent dark eyes; a rather

pale, rather Egyptian-looking face with prominent cheek bones, slightly

sunken cheeks and full red lips; a nervous manner. She was one of

those “near” virgins so common in the countries of sexual prohibition.

Her hands were slender, the line from her ear to her chin exquisitely

beautiful, her breasts too flat. She smoked cigarettes too rapidly,

and had a way of sitting with a look of abstraction in a pose which

showed off the lovely line of her throat and jaw. Her teeth were a

little irregular. The delicate ear was like a frail pink shell under

the dark sea-fronds of her hair. Her calves and ankles, such important

indications of female character and temperament, were hidden under the

long skirts of those days; but the bared arms and wrists were slender

and a little sensual as they lay along her clothed thighs. George was

greatly attracted. Apparently she also liked him, and Mrs. Lamberton

noticed it with that swift rather devilish intuition of women. She rose

to leave.

“Oh, Frances, don’t go yet!” exclaimed Elizabeth. “I only came to see

you, and you were so surrounded by men I have scarcely seen you.”

“Yes, don’t go.”

“I must. You don’t know the duties awaiting a careful wife and good

mother.”

She slipped away, leaving them alone.

“Isn’t she a dear?” said Elizabeth.

“Something very lovely and precious. Even when she talks nonsense in

that slightly affected way she seems to be saying something valuable.”

“Do you think she is beautiful?”

“Beautiful? Yes, in a way, but she isn’t one of those horrid regular

beauties. You notice her at once in a room, but you’d never see her

on the walls of the Academy. It isn’t her beauty so much as her

personality, and that you feel more by intuition than by observation.

And yet the effect is beauty.”

“Are you very much in love with her?”

“Why, aren’t you? Isn’t every one?”

“In love with her?”

George was silent. He was not sure whether the question was _naif_ or

very much the reverse. Elizabeth changed the conversation.

“What do you ‘do’?”

“Oh, I’m a painter, and I write hack articles for Shobbe and such

people to earn a living.”

“But don’t you sell your pictures?”

“I try to, but you see people in England aren’t much interested in

modern art, not as they are on the Continent or even in America. They

want the same old thing done over again and done with more sugar. One

thing about the British bourgeois—he doesn’t know anything about

pictures but very stoutly stands for what he likes, and what he likes

is anything except art. The newest historians say that the Anglo-Saxons

come from the same race as the Vandals, and I can well believe it.”

“Surely there are some up-to-date collectors in England.”

“Why, yes, of course, probably as many as anywhere else, but too many

of them collect pictures as an investment and so only take what the

dealers advise them to buy; others are afraid to touch English art,

which has gone soggy with pre-Raphaelitism and touched imbecility with

the anecdotal picture. There are people with taste and enthusiasms, but

they’re nearly all poor. It’s much the same in Paris. The new painters

there are having a terrific struggle, but they’ll win. The young are

with them. And then in Paris it’s rather chic to know the latest

movements and to defend the rebel artists against the ordinary mass

ignorance and hostility. Here they’re still terrified by the fate of

Oscar, and it’s chic to be a sporting imbecile. The English think it’s

virile to have no sensibilities.”

“Are you English or American?”

“English, of course. Should I care about them if I were not? In a way,

of course, it doesn’t really matter. The nationalist epoch of painting

is over—it’s now an international language centred in Paris and

understood from Petersburg to New York. What the English think doesn’t

matter.”

George was excited and talking volubly. Elizabeth encouraged him.

Females know instinctively or by bitter experience that males like to

tell them things. It is so very curious that we talk of vanity as if

it were almost exclusively feminine, whereas both sexes are equally

vain. Perhaps males are vainer. Women are sometimes plainly revolted

by really inane compliments, while there is no flattery too gross

for a male. There simply isn’t. And not one of us is free from it.

However much you may be on your guard, however much you may think you

dislike it, you will find yourself instinctively angling for female

flattery—and getting it. Oh, yes, you’ll get it, just as long as that

subtle female instinct warns them there is potency in your loins....

“Mother of the race of Æneas, voluptuous delight of gods and men,

sacred Aphrodite”—how does it go? But the poet is right. She, the

sacred one, the imperious reproductive instinct, with all Her wiles and

charms, is indeed the ruler over all living things, in the waters, in

the air, on land. Over us her sway is complete, for it is not seasonal

but permanent. (Who was the lady who said that if the animals don’t

make love all the time the reason is that they are _bêtes?_) Priests,

with all weapons from circumcision to prudery, have warred with Her;

legislators have laid down rules for Her; well-meaning persons have

tried to domesticate Her. Useless! “At thy coming, goddess,” the

celibate hides his shaved crown and sneaks to a brothel, the clerk in

holy orders enters into holy matrimony, the lawyer visits the little

shop-girl he “helps,” domestic peace is shaken alive with adulteries.

For man is an ambulatory digestive tube which wants to keep alive,

and Death waits for him. Descartes was a fool in these matters, like

so many philosophers. “I think, therefore I am.” Idiot! I am because

others loved; I love that others may be. Hunger and Death are the

realities, and between those great chasms flits a little Life. The

enemy of Death is not Thought, not Apollo with gold shafts of light,

useless against the Foe of gods and men, as you see him in the prologue

to “Alkestis.” It is She, the Cyprian, who triumphs, woman-like with

her wiles. Generations She yields Him, the Devourer, as His prey, and

unwearyingly raises up new races of men and women. It is She who swells

the loins of men with an intolerable burden of seed; She who makes

ready the thirsty womb; She who creates implacable desire and infinite

yearning and compels the life-giving act; *** *** ****** *** **** *****

********* **** *** **** **** ********* ******; She who plumps the flat

white belly and then, treacherous and cruel to Her instrument once Her

purpose is achieved, with intolerable anguish tears forth from shaking

mother-flesh the feeble fruit of Man. All the thoughts and emotions and

desires of adult men and women circle about Her, and Her enemies are

but Death’s friends. You may elude Her with asceticism, you may thwart

Her purpose (who shall write a new myth of the rubber-tree, Death’s

subtle gift?), but if you love Life you must love Her, and if you

puritanically say She is not, you are both a fool and Death’s servant.

If you hate Life, if you think the suffering outweighs the pleasure, if

you think it the supreme crime to transmit life, then you must indeed

dread Her as the author of the supreme evil—Life.

Elizabeth and George talked and found each other delightful. They

thought it was their interest in art and ideas. Delightful error! All

the arts of mankind are the Cyprian’s hand-maids, and even the chaster

and tweeded spectre Sport has unwittingly been made Her pander—for

with no grudging hand does the Goddess scatter Her gifts, smiling

upon the amorous play of children and not disdaining even those who

desire their own sex. She is beneficent and knows there are only too

many ready to propagate and is not anxious to create too many victims

for Hunger, and therefore patronizes even the heretics of Sparta and

Lesbos....

* * * * *

We should turn churches into temples to Venus, and set up a statue

to Havelock Ellis, the moral Hercules who has partially succeeded in

cleansing the Augean stable of the white man’s mind....

* * * * *

Under the benign influence of the Cyprian they talked, they went on

talking. They had drifted on to the topics of Christ and Christianity,

that interminable _pons asinorum_ of youthful discussions.

“But I think Christ is wonderful,” Elizabeth was saying with an

air of having discovered something, “because he completely ignored

social values and considered people only for what they really were in

themselves. It is so strange to think of his being made the pretext for

the world’s most elaborate system of priest-craft when the whole of his

life and teaching are a protest against it.”

“The bohemian Christ? But have you noticed what a Proteus he is?

Everybody interprets the historical Jesus to please himself. He is

a whole mythology in himself. If you really try to discover the

historical Jesus, you find you keep stripping away veil after veil,

and then just as you think you are coming to the real figure, you find

there’s nothing there. But, I grant you, Christ is a very sympathetic

figure. What I cannot endure is Christianity and the harm it has

done Europe. I detest its system of values, its persecution, its

hatred of life (it worships a tortured and expiring god), its cult

of self-sacrifice and sexual aberrations, like sadism, masochism and

chastity....”

Elizabeth laughed, a little shocked.

“Oh, oh! Now you are exaggerating!”

“Not at all. I think I could prove what I say, at the expense of some

time and boring you. Consider the lives of Saints like Catherine

of Siena, Sebastian and all the infinite martyrs, look at their

representation in art; and then ask yourself what instincts are really

satisfied by the cult of these personalities and images.”

“That sounds like good Protestant prejudice.”

“There are lots of things I detest in Protestantism—its smugness and

aridity for instance—but I like its honesty. And we owe it a great

deal. It was because of the political inconveniences resulting from a

multitude of sects, that Holland and England reintroduced religious

tolerance, which had disappeared with the triumph of the Christians. Of

course, the tolerance is not complete, because the Christians are still

persecutors at heart and have a thousand ways of vexing and maligning

those who disagree with them or are merely indifferent. Hence the

extraordinary defensive puritanism of many English rationalists. But

something has been achieved. After all, during many centuries I should

have been arrested, tortured and probably murdered for what I have

just said to you, and you would have thought me a carbonized monster.

Now any alleged truth or moral proposition or belief which has to be

enforced by torture or defended by sophistry stands self-condemned.”

Was ever woman in this manner wooed? But George had mounted one of his

hobby-horses and was careering away through a dust of words. Elizabeth,

with practical instinct, stopped him.

“Where do you live?”

“In Greek Street. I’ve got a large room there, big enough to paint in.

Where do you live?”

“In Hampstead. It’s rather horrid and the place is full of old maids.

But anything is better than being at home. I don’t mind my father, but

my mother makes me so nervous when I’m at home that I feel I shall just

die if I have to be any longer with her.”

“I’m so glad you hate your parents, at least one of them. It’s so

important to recognize these antipathies, which are after all perfectly

natural. Most animals hate their mature young. I remember I used to

watch the young robins exterminating their fathers and think how right

it was. But it ought to be the mothers. Men somehow leave each other

alone.”

“Oh, it’s partly due to the awful domestic-den family life. They can’t

really help it, poor dears. The den was forced on them, and they had to

live in it.”

“Not really. They must have wanted it. It’s all part of people’s

amazing cowardice, their panic terror of life. It’s a device of

governments, an official cheat.” George was off again. “All states are

founded on the obligation of a man to provide for the child he begets

and the woman who produces it. The State wants children, wants more and

more ‘citizens’ for various reasons. The State exploits the love of a

man for a woman and his tenderness towards her children—even she may

not know whether they’re his or not. And so she’s taught to say: ‘Be

careful, step warily, don’t offend any one, remember your first duty

is to provide for me and the children, you mustn’t let us starve, oh,

do be careful,’ with the result that the poor man very soon becomes a

member of the infinite army of respectable commuters....”

“Oh! Oh!” Elizabeth laughed again, “why are you so full of moral

indignation?”

“I’m not. Most of my brilliant acquaintances, like Upjohn, have so

much to say about themselves that I never seem to get a chance of

discussing anything else. And my non-brilliant acquaintances are

simply shocked and reproving. They think I’m utterly damned because

I read Baudelaire, for instance. Have you noticed the British

middle-class superstition that anything they can label ‘Gallic’ must

necessarily be libidinous and depraved? I get tired of telling them

that the beauty of Baudelaire’s verse is infinitely more spiritual

and ‘uplifting’—to use their damned cant—than all the confounded

nonconformist-baptist-cum-Salvation Army....”

But the end of George’s denunciation was never uttered, for at that

moment they were interrupted by the gentle Mrs. Shobbe.

“Excuse me for interrupting you, Mr. Winterbourne. Elizabeth dear, do

you know how late it is? I’m afraid you’ll miss the last bus, and you

know I promised your dear mother I would look after you....”

Both George and Elizabeth saw with surprise and some embarrassment that

the studio was nearly empty. Almost every one else had gone and they

hadn’t noticed it, absorbed in their delightful exploration of each

other. Of course, in these cases it isn’t what is said that matters,

but all that remains unsaid. The talk is mere “parade,” a rustling out

of the peacock’s tail, a kind of antennæ delicately fumbling. Lovers

are like mirrors—each gazes rapturously at himself reflected in the

other. How delicious the first flashes of recognition!

Elizabeth jumped nervously to her feet, almost upsetting a small table.

“Oh, my! I’d no idea it was so late. I must go. Good-bye, Mr.—Mr.—”

“Winterbourne,” said George. “But if you’re going to Hampstead, let

me take you back as far as Tottenham Court Road and put you on the

Hampstead bus. It’s not out of my way at all.”

“Yes, do, Elizabeth. I feel so nervous at your being alone in London at

night like this. Whatever should we do if anything happened to you?”

“Why, what’s likely to happen?” said George contemptuously, ever ready

to defend the cause of female emancipation, “she’s got sense enough not

to let herself be run over, and if any one tries to rape her she can

yell for a policeman.”

* * * * *

“Such a violent and rude young man,” Mrs. Shobbe lamented as they went

for Elizabeth’s things. “But they’re all like that now. They seem to

have _no_ respect for _anything_, not even the purity of womanhood. I

don’t know if I ought to let him take you home, Elizabeth.”

“Oh, that’s all right; besides, I rather like him. He’s quite amusing.

I shall ask him to come and have tea with me at my studio.”

“_Elizabeth!_”

But Elizabeth was already at the door where George was waiting. All

the guests had departed, except Mr. Upjohn and Mr. Waldo Tubbe. A last

whiff of their conversation reached George’s ears:

“You see, what I mean is, you take Suprematism, what I mean is, you

see, there you’ve got something....”

And like the toll of Big Ben over the sleeping city came Mr. Tubbe’s

last, deep-breathed, significant, deportmental:

“Oe-oh.”

[ III ]

This banal party and banal conversation with Elizabeth were of capital

importance in George’s life. The party, with its revelations of

character and general tedium, confirmed George in his growing dislike

for the intellectual banditti. Self-interest, though universal, is

less tolerable in those who are supposed to be above it—there is,

of course, no reason why a good artist should not be successful, but

when one considers the intrigues now necessary for success there is a

natural prejudice in favour of those who do not elbow in the throng.

Vanity is none the less odious even when there is some reason for it,

though why any one should feel vain of publishing books and exhibiting

pictures is a mystery, when you reflect that two thousand novels a year

are published in England alone and that tens of thousands of canvases

are showed annually in Paris. Gossip and scandal are none the less

scandal and gossip even when witty and the victims are more or less

conspicuous in the small world which receives, or haughtily disdains

to receive, press-cuttings. George felt it rather unimportant to know

which talented lady was “with” which famous gentleman. His interest

was comparatively so languid that he forgot most of the scandal he

was told ten minutes after he heard it, and rarely bothered to repeat

what little he remembered. Somehow people are frightfully offended

if you say, “Does it matter?” when they tell you with sparkling eyes

that somebody you know has run away with the mistress of Snooks, the

painter, or that Pocock, the eminent impresario, has just celebrated

the birth of his twenty-fifth illegitimate child. Does it matter,

indeed! Why this fascinated delight in the private lives of the great?

They’re just as sordid as everybody else’s.

The artist, anyway, is not nearly so important as he thinks himself.

It’s all poppycock and swagger for Baudelaire to say that a man can

live three days without food but not a day without poetry. It may

have been true of Baudelaire; it certainly isn’t true of the world

in general. In any nation only a comparatively small minority are

interested in the arts, and most of those merely want to be amused. If

all the artists and writers of a nation were suddenly obliterated by

some plague of Egypt, some legitimately vengeful angel, most people

would be totally unaware that they had suffered any loss, unless the

newspapers made a fuss about it. But let the journeymen bakers go on

strike for a fortnight.... If I were a millionaire it would amuse me to

go about giving high-minded artists five hundred pounds a year to shut

up. The suggestion is not copyright.

Our young friend was, of course, filled with numerous high-falutin’

delusions about the supreme importance of art and the dazzling

supremacy of artists over the rest of mankind. But he had two fairly

sound ideas. One was that the artist should do his job, like any one

else, as well as he could, without making too much fuss about it;

the other was that knowledge of the arts and practice of any art are

chiefly important for sharpening the intelligence and perceptions,

extending one’s experience and intensifying life. These objects are

not furthered by scandal, preposterous vanity and arrivism. He was

therefore perfectly right in feeling a certain amount of contempt for

Mr. Shobbe’s guests. The life of Rousseau the Douanier is infinitely

more respectable than that of a fashionable portrait-painter, touting

socially for orders.

* * * * *

Elizabeth and George continued their conversation on the bus from

Holland Park to Tottenham Court Road. Like most bright young things

they abounded in their own sense. As George said, it was perfectly

obvious that they were an immense improvement on their predecessors,

that they knew exactly how to avoid the lamentable errors and

absurdities of former generations, and that they were going to have

most interesting and delightful lives. Anybody who has not felt these

pleasing delusions at the age of twenty must, I fear, be ranged in

George’s category of abject morons. Youth is so much more valuable

than experience; it is also far more intelligent. Few things are more

astounding and touching than the kindly tolerance of the young for

their imbecile elders. For, have no doubts about it, even the greatest

minds degenerate annually, and the finest moral character is repulsive

at forty. Think of the fire and flash and inspiring genius of young

General Bonaparte and the stupid degeneracy of the Emperor who had to

retreat ignominiously from Moscow. A nation which relies on the alleged

wisdom of sexagenarians is irrevocably degenerate. Attila was only

thirty when he sacked sexagenarian Rome—at least, he ought to have

been.

Elizabeth and George were very young and hence, on _a priori_ grounds,

extremely intelligent. Probably the highest intensity of life ever

reached by man or woman is in the early stages of their first real

love affair, particularly if it is not thwarted by insane social and

religious prejudices inherited from the timid and envious aged, and not

contaminated by marriage.

They emerged from the stuffy smoke-heavy room into the broad avenue,

and walked towards Notting Hill tube station. A warm southwesterly wind

was blowing, moisture-laden, the kindly courier of Spring. Gone was the

raw acrid damp of Winter, and they imagined they could taste in the air

the faint salt flavour of southern seas and the earthy English acres.

“We shall have rain to-morrow,” said George, instinctively looking up

at the cloudy sky invisible beyond the glare of street lamps. “It is

Spring at last. The crocuses will be nearly over. I must go and look at

the flowers at Hampton Court. Will you come?”

“I’d love to, but isn’t Hampton Court full of trippers?”

“Not if you go at the right time. I have walked there in the early

morning as solitary as ever King Charles when the Privy Garden was

really private. I should rather like to Jive in King William’s

summer-house.”

“I like wilder and more primitive country, the Downs and those great

round empty Exmoor hills. And I like the clear rough waves dashing

against the rocks in Cornwall.”

“I don’t know Cornwall, but I love the Downs above Storrington and

I’ve walked over Exmoor twice. But now I’m rather in revolt against

mere country—‘Nature,’ as they used to call it. Nature-worship is a

sort of Narcissus-worship, holding up Nature’s mirror to ourselves.

And how abominably selfish these Nature-worshippers are I Why! they

want a whole landscape to themselves and they complain bitterly

when farm-labourers want modern grocery stores and W. C.’s. Whole

communities apparently are to live in static ignorance and picturesque

decay in order to gratify their false ideas of what is beautiful.”

“Of course, I hate the Simple-Lifers too. There was a set of them near

the place in the seaside where we went for the holidays as children....”

“Oh! Have you got brothers and sisters?”

“A sister and two brothers. Why, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I believe so, but I never think about it. Relatives are

awful—they contribute absolutely nothing to your interest in life, and

think that gives them a perpetual right to interfere in your affairs.

And they have the monstrous impudence to pretend that you ought to love

them. ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ they say sententiously. So it may

be, but I don’t want to dabble in thick blood. I hate proverbs, don’t

you? I’ve always noticed that anything absurd or tyrannical or fatuous

can always be supported by a proverb—the collective stupidity of the

ages. But, I say, I’m so sorry I interrupted you. I go on talking and

talking, and don’t give you a chance to say a word.”

“Oh, I like it. I think your ideas are amusing.”

“Not amusing, merely common-sense. But you mustn’t let me talk all the

time. You see, I find most people rather oppress my spirits, and keep

me from saying what I really think. So as a rule I’m silent, but when I

find a sympathetic victim, well, you’ve already had a bitter experience

of how I chatter nineteen to the dozen. There, I’m off again! Now tell

me what you were going to say about the Simple-Lifers.”

“The Simple-Lifers? Oh, yes, I remember. Well, there was a set of

people down there who had fled from the horrors of the mechanical

age—you know, the usual art-y sort, Ruskin-cum-William Morris....”

“Hand-looms, vegetable diet, long embroidered frocks and home-spun

tweed trousers from the Hebrides? I know them. ‘News from Nowhere’

people. What a gospel to lead nowhither!”

“Yes. Well, they were to lead the simple life, work with their hands

part of the time, and do arts and crafts and write the rest of the

time. They were also to show the world an example of perfect community

life. They used to make the farm girls dance round a Maypole—the boys

wouldn’t come, they stood in the lane and jeered.”

“And what happened?”

“Well, those who hadn’t private incomes got very hard up, and were

always borrowing money off the two or three members who had money.

The arts and crafts didn’t sell, and the toiling on the land had very

meagre results. Then they got themselves somehow into two or three

cliques, always running down the people in the other cliques, talking

scandal about them, and saying they were ruining everything by their

selfish behaviour. Then the wife of one of the rich members ran away

with one of the men, and the other rich members were so scandalized

that they went away too, and the whole community broke up. The village

was very glad when they went. The farmers and gentry were furious

because they talked Socialism and the ideal state to the labourers. And

all the labourers’ wives were furious because the Simple-Life women

tried to brighten up their lives and make them furnish their cottages

‘artistically....’”

They had missed two buses outside the tube station in their excited

chatter. A third came along. George grabbed Elizabeth’s arm:

“Come on, here’s our bus. Let’s go on top.”

The bus-top was empty except for a couple spooning on a back-seat.

George and Elizabeth a little haughtily went to the very front.

“Other peoples’ love-affairs are very tedious,” said George

sententiously.

“Oh, very.”

“Rather primitive and humiliating.”

“Why humiliating?”

“Oh, because...”

“Fares, please!”

The conductor lurched skilfully against the front of the bus as it made

a cow-like leap forward. George raked in his pocket for the pennies.

“Let me pay my share.”

Elizabeth produced a sixpence.

“Oh, no, please. Look, let me take you back to Hampstead, and you can

pay from Tottenham Court Road.”

“All right.”

The conductor and the fare-paying had interrupted the rhythm of

their communication. They were silent. The bus ran noisily along the

wave-furrowed shiny tarred street, with the dark mystery of Kensington

Gardens to the right and the equally mysterious boarding-houses of

Bayswater to the left. Near the street-lamps the grass behind the

railing was a vivid artificial green, as if some one had splashed down

a bucket-ful of bright paint. Like savages in some primitive dance, the

ancient trees swayed slowly, irregularly and mysteriously in the strong

wind. A red apocalyptic glow from the lights of Oxford Street stained

luridly and uneasily the low rolling clouds before them. The grey

monster Ennui of Sunday-in-London had vanished. George took his hat off

and let the wind rumple his hair. Their young cheeks were fresh with

driving moist wind.

“Don’t you really like the Pre-Raphaelites?” asked Elizabeth, as the

bus slowed down near Lancaster Gate.

“I used to. About three years ago I was quite cracked about Rossetti

and Burne-Jones and Morris. Now I simply hate them. I can still read

Browning and Swinburne—Browning for his sense of life, Swinburne for

his intoxicating rhetoric. But after spending three months in Paris I

got frightfully excited about modern painting. Do you know Apollinaire?”

“No, who’s he?”

“Oh, he’s a Polish Jew who has written some quite good poems and does

amusing word-pictures he calls Calligrammes. He lives by writing and

editing obscene books, and he’s the great defender of the new painters

like Picasso and Braque and Léger and Picabia.”

“The Cubists?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve only heard of them. I never saw any of their work. I thought they

were just ‘wild men’ and _fumistes?_”

“You wait ten years, and see then if you dare to say that Picasso is a

_fumiste!_ But haven’t you been to Paris?”

“Yes, I was there last year, in September.”

“We must have been there together. How curious, I wish I’d seen you.”

“Oh, it was very dull. I was with father and mother, and everybody

we met kept talking about the coming war with Germany. A friend of

father’s in the Admiralty told him in confidence that it was absolutely

certain to happen.”

“What nonsense!” said George explosively, “what absolute nonsense!

Haven’t you read Norman Angell’s ‘Great Illusion’? He shows quite

conclusively that war does nearly as much damage to the victor as the

conquered. And he also says that the structure of modern international

commerce and finance is so delicate and widespread that a war

couldn’t possibly last more than a few weeks without coming to an end

automatically, because all the nations would be ruined. I’ll lend you

the book if you like.”

“I don’t know anything about such things, but father’s friend said the

Government was very worried about the position.”

“I can’t believe it. What! A war between European nations in the

twentieth century? It’s quite unthinkable. We’re far too civilized.

It’s over forty years since the Franco-Prussian War....”

“But there’s been a Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan Wars....”

“Well, yes, but they’re different. I can’t believe any of the big

European nations would start a war with another. Of course, there are

Chauvins and Junkers and Jingoes, but who cares a hang about them? The

people don’t want war.”

“Of course, I don’t know, but I heard Admiral Partington telling father

that the navy is bigger, newer and more efficient than it’s ever been.

And he said the German army is huge and most efficient, and the French

are so frightened they’ve made the period of conscription three years.

And he said, look out when the Kiel canal is opened.”

“Good Lord, you surely don’t believe what stodgy old Admirals say, do

you? It’s their job to frighten people with war scares so that they can

go on getting money out of the country and building their ridiculous

Dreadnoughts. I met a coast-guard officer last summer, who got drunk

and said he’d sealed orders as to what to do in case of war. I told

him I thought that seal would not be broken until the angels in the

Apocalypse arrived.”

“And what did he say to that?”

“He just shook his head, and ordered another whiskey.”

“Well, it doesn’t concern us. It’s not our business.”

“No, thank God, it doesn’t and can’t concern us.”

* * * * *

They were in Oxford Street, rolling past the shuttered shop-fronts.

A good many people were on the pavements, but the street was

comparatively empty of vehicles, empty and sonorous. As they ran down

past Selfridge’s, the curved line of lights in the centre of the street

looked like an uncoiled necklace of luminous, glittering beads. At

Oxford Circus they gazed down old Regent Street with its long lines of

_café-au-lait_ Regency houses, broken only at the Quadrant by the new

Piccadilly Hotel.

“Isn’t that like us?” said George. “We have an attempt at

town-planning, and dull as Nash is, at any rate his design is simple

and dignified, and then we go and ruin the Quadrant with a horrid

would-be-modern hotel.”

“But I thought you believed in modernity in art.”

“So I do, but I don’t believe in mucking up the art of the past if it

can be avoided. Besides, I don’t call these pastiches of Renaissance

palaces modern architecture. The only people who have got a live modern

architecture are the Americans, and they don’t know it.”

“Those awful sky-scrapers!”

“They’re awful in one way, but they’re original. I saw some photographs

of New York from the harbour recently, and I thought it the most

beautiful city in the world, a sort of gigantic and stupendous Venice.

I’d like to go there, wouldn’t you?”

“No, I’d like to go to Paris and live in the real student’s quarter,

and to Italy and Spain.”

* * * * *

The bus stopped at the end of Tottenham Court Road. They got down, and

crossed the street to wait for the Hampstead bus.

“Look here,” said Elizabeth, “why do you bother to come all the way out

to Hampstead? I’m perfectly used to going about alone. I shall be all

right.”

“Of course, you would be. But I’d like to come most awfully. I hope I

shall see a good deal of you, and we haven’t arranged where and when to

meet again.”

“But there won’t be a bus back.”

“Oh, I shall walk. I like walking. And it’ll be an antidote to the fug

and idiotic talk at Shobbe’s. Here’s the bus. Come on.”

They clambered on to the top of the bus, and again got the front seat.

Elizabeth took off her right-hand glove to pay the fare, and after the

conductor had gone George gently and rather timidly put his hand on

hers. She did not withdraw it. Having established this delicious and

dangerous contact, they sat silent for a while. The firm cool male

hand gently espoused her slim glove-warmed fingers. In them both was

the exaltation of the Cyprian, potential desire recognized only as a

heightening of vitality. The first step along the primrose path—how

delightful! But whither does it lead? To what everlasting bonfires of

servitude or ashy wastes of indifference? Neither of them thought of

the future. Why should they? The young at least have the sense to live

only in the present moment.

Preceded by the silver dove-drawn chariot of the Paphian, the heavy

bus lumbered northward. Sweet is the smile of Cypris, but ironic and a

little terrifying, enigmatic as the fixed smile of the Veian Apollo.

Like all imaginative and sensitive men George was not what is called

an enterprising lover. He had too much male modesty, the inherent

_pudor_ which is so much stronger and more genuine than the induced

modesty of women, that coquettish flight of the nymph who casts a rosy

apple at her pursuer to encourage him to continue. Odd, but perhaps in

the nature of things, that those men who have most contempt for women

are generally most successful with them. There must be a vast amount

of latent masochism in women, ranging from the primitive delight in

being knocked down to the subtle enjoyment of complex jealousies. How

ghastly—if you think about it—their passion for soldiers! To breed

babes by him who has slain men—puh! there’s too much spilt blood in

the world, one sickens at it. Give me some civet....

Once more they fell into talk, eager, excited, more intimate talk.

They were calling each other “George” and “Elizabeth” before they

reached the stately homes of Camden Town. By the time they passed

Mornington Crescent they had admitted that they liked each other

“frightfully” and would see a good deal of each other. In their

excitement they talked rather incoherently, jumping from one topic

to another in their eagerness to say something of all that seemed to

clamour for expression, recklessly wasting their emotional energy.

Their laughter had the ring of pure happiness. George slipped his arm

through Elizabeth’s and held her fingers more amorously. Their natures

expanded in a sudden delicious efflorescence; great coloured plumes of

flowers seemed to sway and nod above their heads. They were enclosed

in a nimbler air, the clear oxygen of desire, so light, so compact, so

resistant to the grey monster Ennui of Sunday-in-London.

“Isn’t it strange!” George exclaimed, with that fatuity peculiar to

lovers, “I only met you this evening and yet I feel as if I had known

you all my life!”

“So do I!”

He gratefully squeezed her fingers in silence, caught in a sudden panic

of bashfulness, unable to pursue further.

“Do let’s meet often. We can go to the galleries and Queen’s Hall and

Hampton and Oxshott. I can get you tickets for the new picture shows.

Do you know the Allied Artists?”

“Yes, I belong.”

“Do you? Why ever didn’t you tell me you are a painter, too?”

“Oh, I’m such a bad painter, besides you didn’t ask me.”

“Touché! How self-absorbed one is. I apologize.”

“You must come and have tea at my studio and look at my—what I call my

pictures. But you mustn’t be too critical. When can you come?”

“Any time. To-morrow if you like.”

Elizabeth laughed.

“Oh! Oh! You are impatient. Can you come on Friday?”

“So long? It seems ages away!”

“Well, Thursday then.”

“All right, what time?”

“About four.”

Elizabeth was probably not acquainted with Stendhal’s ingenious theory

of crystallization, but she acted instinctively in accordance with it.

Three days and four nights made exactly the right period. To-morrow was

too soon, the crystals would be in process of formation. A week would

be rather too long, they would be tending to disintegrate.... Infinite

subtlety of females! One must admit they need it.

* * * * *

George accompanied Elizabeth to the boarding-house where she lived and

took the address of her studio. She held out her hand, after putting

the latch-key in the yale lock.

“Till Thursday then, good-night.”

“Good-night.”

He held her hand a moment, and then awkwardly and timidly kissed it.

In her turn she felt a sudden panic, opened the door swiftly, and

disappeared inside, with a last hasty: “Good-night, good-night!”

George stood for several moments irresolutely on the step. He was

desolated, thinking he had offended her.

Inside Elizabeth was murmuring silently to herself: “He kissed my hand,

he kissed my hand! I’ve a lover, a lover.”

The sudden panic and flight were a masterpiece of erotic strategy—they

left that feeling of uncertainty, of mingled hope and fear, so valuable

to the production of a powerful crystallization.

* * * * *

George walked back to Greek Street, enclosing in himself a small

chaos of emotions and thoughts. He went by way of Fitzjohn’s Avenue

and St. John’s Wood. The infinite debate in a lover’s mind—did she

or didn’t she, would she or wouldn’t she?—moved in those curious

arabesques where a mind continually wanders away from a main stem of

thought, and perpetually comes back to it. Upjohn’s ridiculous conceit,

Shobbe’s party, never go to that sort of thing again, Bobbe’s acrid

offensiveness, how delicate that line from her ear to her throat, I

should like to paint her, now, in that article to-morrow I must try

to show clearly and definitely what the new painters are attempting,

I wonder if she was really offended when I kissed her hand, but I

must think about that article, let me see, begin with an explanation

of non-representational, yes, that’s it, I must get a new tie for

Thursday, this one’s worn out.... And thus, with merciless iteration.

* * * * *

Under a gas-lamp near Marlborough Road Station he stopped and tried to

write his first poem, and was surprised to find how difficult it was

and what nonsense he wrote. A policeman came out of a side-street, and

looked a little suspiciously at him. George moved on. A little later

he began to sing “Bid me to live,” interrupted himself halfway through

to make a note for a study in analysis of form. He walked rapidly and

absorbedly, unconscious of his physical fatigue. Just before he crossed

Oxford Street, he stopped and clapped his hands together. My God, I was

a fool to kiss her hand the first time I met her, she’ll think I do

that to every girl and won’t want to speak to me again. Oh, well, it’s

done. I wish I could kiss her mouth. I must remember to tell her on

Thursday about that show at the Leicester Gallery....

He lay awake long that night, unable to sleep for very love of living.

So much to see, so much to experience, so much to achieve, so much to

be and do! How wonderful to do things with Elizabeth! It would be fun

to go to New York, of course, but perhaps one ought to see the old

world first? She said something about Paris and Spain. We might go

together. Cursed money difficulty. Never mind, if one wants to do a

thing hard enough, one always manages to do it. I suppose I’m in love

with her? It would be divine to kiss her and touch her breasts and...

Of course, one mustn’t have a baby, that would be too ghastly. I must

find out. I wish we could go to Paris, the trees will be leafing in the

Luxembourg....

* * * * *

In the night-silence water dripped with insistent melody in some hidden

tank. From outside came the shrill distant notes of train whistles,

rather silvery and exquisite, bringing the yearning for travel, “the

horns of elf-land faintly blowing.” Where had he read that? Oh, of

course, Stevenson. Funny how the Coningtons thought Stevenson a good

author....

“Good-night, Elizabeth, good-night, sweet, sweet Elizabeth,

good-night, good-night.”

[ IV ]

Before our eyes we have the regrettable examples of George Augustus and

Isabel, Ma and Pa Tartly, dear Mamma and dear Papa—eponyms of sexual

infelicity.

Are we more intelligent than our ancestors? What a question for the

British Press or for those three musketeers of publicity cheap and

silly, of tattered debates on torn topics—Shaw, Chesterton and Belloc.

Shaw, yes, the puritan Beaumarchais—_un coup de chapeau_—but the

others! To the goddess Ennui sung by Pope, the groans of the Britons.

Who will deliver us from the R. C. bores?

* * * * *

The problem may be stated thus:

Let X equal the _ménage_ of dear Mamma-dear Papa, or a typical couple

of the seventies and eighties;

And let Y equal the _ménage_ George Augustus and Isabel, or a typical

couple of the nineties and noughts;

And further, let Z equal Elizabeth and George, or a typical bright

young pair of the Georgian or European War epoch;

Then, it remains to be proved whether Z is equal to, or greater than or

less than X and / or Y.

A pretty theorem, not to be solved mathematically—too many unknown

quantities involved.

I am naturally prejudiced in favour of Z, because I belong to their

generation, but what do _les jeunes_, the sole competent authority,

think? For, after all,—let us be perfectly frank—dear Papa expired

peacefully in his bed; George Augustus was unhappily but accidentally

slain in the performance of his religious duties; whereas George, if

you accept my interpretation of the facts, virtually committed suicide

at the age of twenty-six.

But then dear Papa and George Augustus did not have to fight the

European War....

The problem, you see, is almost insoluble, no doubt because it is

wrongly stated. Let us examine it in different terms.

* * * * *

Without going back to Horace’s egg, may we not assume that he and she

have lived well who have lived with felicity?

This not only involves the problem of the _summum bonum_ or sovereign

good, so much debated by the ancient philosophers, but the awful

difficulty of knowing who is to decide whether another person has lived

with felicity. Is there such a thing as a happy life? And, if there is

would it be the most desirable life? Would you like to be Claudian’s

old man of Verona? Or Mr. John D. Rockefeller? Or Mr. Michael Arlan? Or

any other type of unabridged felicity?

There are, of course, lots of things and people who will eagerly or

dogmatically tell you exactly what you have to do to be happy. There

is, for instance, the collective wisdom of the ages, as embodied in our

religions, philosophies, laws, and social customs. What a mess! What

a junk-shop of dusty relics! And in any case, “the collective wisdom

of the ages” is merely one of the innumerable devices of government by

which the Anglo-Saxon peoples are humbugged into thinking themselves

free, enlightened and happy.

* * * * *

But let us abandon these abstruse and arid speculations.... The point

is, did George and Elizabeth (consider them for the moment, please,

rather as types than individuals) come better prepared to the erotic

life than their predecessors, were they more intelligent about it, did

they make a bigger mess of things? Does the free play of the passions

and intelligence make for more erotic happiness than the taboo system?

Liberty versus Restraint. Wise Promiscuity versus Monogamy. (This is

becoming a Norman Haire tract.)

Here, of course, I shall come into collision (if this has not happened

long ago) with the virtuous British journalist. This gentleman will

inform us that there are far too many books about the erotic life, that

to dwell upon sex is morbid and disgusting, that monogamous marriage

as established by religion and law must remain sacred, et cetera,

et cetera, and that it provides a perfect solution, et cetera, et

cetera. Moreover, in the few cases where it goes wrong, the situation

must be met by frequent applications of cold water to the genitals,

by propelling balls of different sizes in different manners with

various instruments in mimic combat, by slaying small animals and

birds, by playing bridge for modest sums, avoiding French wines and

dancing, scattering saltpetre on one’s bread and butter, regularly

attending church, and subscribing to the virtuous organ of the virtuous

journalist....

To which may be said; for example,

That without sexual intercourse, frequent and pleasant, adult life is

maimed and tedious;

That social hypocrisy prescribes that we shall avoid open discussion

and practice of the sexual life, and that we all (virtuous journalists

included) think a great deal about it;

That the sporting-ascetic practices recommended are only effective in

those predisposed to abnormal frigidity, and

That they, taken in conjunction with the segregation of the sexes,

economic difficulties and insane prejudices, form one of the chief

predisposing causes of the pictures of Dorian Grey and wells of

loneliness which cause the virtuous journalist so much horror and

indignation.

We therefore unanimously dismiss the virtuous British journalist with a

firm but vigorous kick in the seat of his intelligence, and return to

our speculations.

* * * * *

Mother of the race of Æneas, voluptuous delight of gods and men,

sacred Aphrodite, who from the recesses of thy divine abode lookest

in pity upon the sorrowing generations of men and women, and sheddest

upon us rose-petals of subtle and recurrent pleasure and the delicious

gift of Sleep, do Thou, Goddess, be ever with us, and neglect not the

felicity of Thy worshippers. Do Thou, alone beautiful, daughter of the

Gods, drench us with loveliness.

* * * * *

From which to the lives of Pa and Ma Hartley _et al._, is indeed a

staggeringly long step....

* * * * *

I hold a brief for the war generation. J’aurais pu mourir; rien ne

m’eût été plus facile. J’ai encore à écrire ce que nous avons fait....

(Bonaparte à Fontainebleau—admirez l’érudition de l’auteur.)

* * * * *

Yet why should we mourn, O Zeus, and why should we laugh? Why weep,

why mock? What is a generation of men that we should mourn for it?

As leaves, as leaves, says the poet, spring, burgeon and fall the

generations of Man—No! but as rats in the rolling ship of the Earth as

she plunges through the roar of the stars to the inevitable doom. And

like rats we pullulate, and like rats we scramble for greasy prey, and

like rats we fight and murder our kin.... And—O gigantic mirth!—the

voice of the Thomiste is heard!

* * * * *

Peace be to you, O lovers, peace unto Juliet’s grave!

* * * * *

At the time of which I am writing—the three or four years preceding

1914—young men and women were just as much interested in sexual

matters as they are now, or were at any other time. They were in revolt

against the family or domestic den ethic, that “ordained for the

procreation of children” attitude whereby the State turns its adult

members into a true proletariat, mere producers of _proles_. And they

were almost as much in revolt against Tennysonian and Pre-Raphaelite

“idealism,” which made love a sort of hand-holding in the Hesperides.

But, let it be remembered, Freudianism (as distinct from Freud, that

great man whom every one talks about and nobody reads) had scarcely

begun to penetrate. All things were not interpreted in terms of sexual

symbolism; and if one had the misfortune to slip on a banana peel in

the street, he was not immediately told that this implied repressed

desire to undergo the initiatory mutilating rite of the Mohammedans.

They thought they were rediscovering the importance of the physical in

love; they hoped they were not neglecting the essential tenderness, and

the mythopœic faculty of lovers which is the source of much beauty.

* * * * *

Late in April, George and Elizabeth went to Hampton Court. They met at

Waterloo about nine, went by train to Teddington, and walked through

Bushey Park. Each had brought a frugal lunch, half because of poverty,

half from some Pythagorean delusion about austerity in diet.

They walked on the grass through the long elm naves.

“How blue the sky is,” said Elizabeth, throwing back her head, and

breathing the soft air.

“Yes, and look how the elms make long Gothic arches!”

“Yes, and do look at the young leaves, so shrill, so virginal a green.”

“Yes, and yet you can still see the beautiful tree skeleton—youth and

age.”

“Yes, and the chestnut blossom will be out soon.”

“Yes, and the young grass is— Oh Elizabeth, look, look! The deer!

There’s two young ones.”

“Where? Where are they? I can’t see them. I _want_ to see them!”

“There they are! Look, look, running across to the right.”

“Oh, yes! How funny the little ones are I But how graceful. How old are

they?”

“Only a few days I should think. Why are they so beautiful and young

babies so hideous?”

“I don’t know. They’re always supposed to look like their fathers,

aren’t they?”

“Touché—but I should think that would make the mothers hate them, and

they love the little beasts.”

“Not always. A friend of mine had a baby last year, and she didn’t want

it when it was coming, but kept thinking she would love it when it

came. And when she saw it, she simply loathed it, and they had to take

it away. But she _made_ herself look after it. She says it’s ruined her

life and she doesn’t find it a bit interesting, but now she’s fond of

it and couldn’t bear it to die.”

“Perhaps she didn’t love her husband.”

“Oh, yes, she does. She simply dotes on him.”

“Well, maybe it wasn’t his child.”

“Oh! Oh!” Elizabeth slightly shocked. “It _was_ his child. But one

reason why she didn’t like it was because it separated them.”

“How long had they been married when the child was born?”

“Oh, I don’t know—less than a year.”

“Idiotic,” said George, banging the end of his walking stick on the

ground, “Ab-so-lute-ly idiotic! Why the devil did they go and have

a child bang off like that? Of course, she’s unhappy and they’re

‘separated.’ Serves ’em right.”

“But could they help it? I mean—well, you know—it just happens,

doesn’t it?”

“Good Lord, Elizabeth, what a prehistoric notion! Of course it doesn’t

‘just happen.’ There are several ways...”

“It seems a bit revolting?”

“Not a bit! You may feel so because you’ve had mushy ideas about

maidenly modesty and such twaddle instilled into you. That’s all part

of the taboo. Now I think the really civilized thing is _not_ to let

such things happen to us like animals, but to control them. It’s all

most frightfully important, perhaps the most important problem for our

generation to solve.”

“But you surely don’t think everybody should give up having children?”

“Why, of course not! I do say so sometimes when I feel discouraged

and disgusted with the poor scarecrows of humanity we are now. Fewer

and better babies. Isn’t it insane that we exercise over animals the

control they haven’t got themselves, and yet resolutely refuse even

to discuss it about human beings? How can you have a fine race if you

breed insensately like white mice?”

“Well, but, George dear, you can’t interfere with other peoples’ lives

like that!”

“I didn’t say one should. But I believe that if people have the

necessary knowledge and we get rid of the taboo they will for their own

sakes come to breed more eugenically. Of course, it’s an intimate and

private matter—no need for Sir Thomas Moore’s insane regulations and

naked exhibitions before modest matrons and discreet old gentlemen.

It’s not for the old to interfere with the lusts of youth! Damn the

old. But here’s another point. Like most intelligent women and a few

men you’re indignant at the way women have been treated in the past and

at the wicked mediæval laws of this country. You want women to be free

to live more interesting lives. So do I. Any man who isn’t an abject

moron would rather see women becoming more intelligent and magnanimous

instead of having them kept ignorant and timid and repressed and meekly

acquiescent, and therefore sly and catty and wanting to get their own

back. But you won’t achieve that with Suffrage. Of course, let women

have votes if they want them. But who the devil wants a vote? I’d

gladly give you mine if I had one. But the point is this—when women,

all women, know how to control their bodies, they’ll have an enormous

power. They’ll be able to choose when and how they’ll have a child and

what man they want as its father. Overpopulation causes wars as much as

commercial greed and diplomatic deceit and imbecile patriotism. Talk

about the miners’ strike! What I want to see is a universal strike of

women. They could bring all the governments of the world to their knees

in a year. Like the Lysistrata, you know, but not a failure this time.”

“Oh, George, you are amusing with your fancies I You make me laugh!”

“Laugh away! But I’m serious. Of course, it isn’t possible to have

such a concerted action all over the world. For one thing it wouldn’t

be politic to announce it, because the unscrupulous governments will

always go to any extent of force and fraud to sustain their infamous

régimes....”

* * * * *

They had crossed the road outside Bushey Park and entered the palace

gates. Between the wall which backs the Long Border, the Tudor side

of the palace and another long high wall, is the Wilderness, or old

English garden, composed on the grandiose scale advocated by Bacon. It

is both a garden and a “wilderness,” in the sense that it is planted

with innumerable bulbs (which are thinned and removed from time to

time), but otherwise allowed to run wild. George and Elizabeth stopped

with that sudden ecstasy of delight felt by the sensitive young—a

few of them—at the sight of loveliness. Great secular trees, better

protected than those in the outer Park, held up vast fans of glittering

green and gold foliage which trembled in the light wind and formed

moving patterns on the tender blue sky. The lilacs had just unfolded

their pale hearts showing the slim stalk of closed buds which would

break open later in a foam of white and blue blossoms. Underfoot was

the stouter green of wild plants, spread out like an evening sky of

verdure for the thick clustered constellations of flowers. There shone

the soft slim yellow trumpet of the wild daffodil; the daffodil which

has a pointed ruff of white petals to display its gold head; and the

more opulent double daffodil which, compared with the other two, is

like an ostentatious merchant between Florizel and Perdita. There

were the many-headed jonquils, creamy and thick-scented; the starry

narcissus, so alert on its long slender stiff stem, so sharp-eyed, so

unlike a languid youth gazing into a pool; the hyacinth-blue frail

squilla almost lost in the lush herbs; and the hyacinth, blue and

white and red, with its firm thick-set stem and innumerable bells

curling back their open points. Among them stood tulips—the red,

like thin blown bubbles of dark wine; the yellow more cup-like, more

sensually open to the soft furry entry of the eager bees; the large

parti-coloured gold and red, noble and sombre like the royal banner of

Spain.

English spring flowers! What an answer to our ridiculous “cosmic woe,”

how salutary, what a soft reproach to bitterness and avarice and

despair, what balm to hurt minds! The lovely bulb-flowers, loveliest of

the year, so unpretentious, so cordial, so unconscious, so free from

the striving after originality of the gardener’s tamed pets! The spring

flowers of the English woods, so surprising under those bleak skies,

and the flowers the English love so much and tend so skilfully in the

cleanly wantonness of their gardens, as surprisingly beautiful as the

poets of that bleak race! When the inevitable “fuit Ilium” resounds

mournfully over London among the appalling crash of huge bombs and

the foul reek of deadly gases while the planes roar overhead, will

the conqueror think regretfully and tenderly of the flowers and the

poets...?

* * * * *

When George, on one of our walks, told me the gist of this

conversation with Elizabeth, I was at once more amused and more

interested than I allowed him to see. There are certain aspects of

peoples’ bodies, certain things they say and do, which not only

determine one’s attitude towards them but seem to explain them. And

more, in some cases they seem to reveal an epoch. Every one has

experience of attraction or repulsion caused by another’s body. For

instance, there was once a poet, whose work I admired; but the first

time I met him he tried to hold a girl’s hand. I didn’t mind _that_,

au contraire. What I minded was the awful spectacle of his large ugly

raw-red hand, with knotty fingers and gnawed mourning nails, trying

to enclose the washed and chubby hand of my little friend.... I could

never read his poems again without thinking of that Mr. Hyde-like hand,

the Barrymore film hand of Mr. Hyde....

Now I had a reason for dwelling at some length on these preliminary

conversations of George and Elizabeth with George much in the

foreground. They seem to explain a great deal, at least to me. They

reveal him and at the same time “throw more light” (as the learned

say) on the state of mind of a generation of young men who mostly

perished in their twenties. As a rule, George was very silent. Like

most people who think at all he had very little of the small change

of conversation and disliked aimless babbling. But when he was with

somebody he liked, he talked. My God, how much he talked! He was

passionately interested in ideas, passionately interested in his own

reactions to the appearances of things, comparatively little interested

in the lives of other people except in a general and abstract way. He

noticed in a flash the girl at a party who looked like a Botticelli

(people still admired Botticelli in those days and girls lived up to

it) but he would never see, for example, the look on the face of the

rather plain woman whom one guessed to be in love with the handsome

host uxoriously devoted to his new wife. Consequently his talk was all

ideas and impressions. He had an almost indecent love of ideas. If you

threw George a new idea he caught it with a skilled and grateful snap,

like a seal at the Zoo catching a fish jerked at it by the keeper.

Of course, it is very natural that young men and women should be

interested in ideas, which are new to them though probably stale

enough to those a bit older. But the young War Generation seem to me

to have been abnormally swayed by ideas of grandiose “Social reform.”

England swarmed with Social Reformers. I don’t pretend to know why.

Perhaps it was due to the political idealism of Ruskin and Morris,

aided by the infinitely more sensible work of the Fabians. Everybody

was the architect of a New Jerusalem, and a rummy assortment of plans

they provided. This passion has now reached the disinterested and

noble-minded trade unionist and to some extent even the agricultural

labourer. Consequently, you may now hear, at Hyde Park Corner or in

pubs or third-class carriages, beautifully garbled versions of the

highbrow talk of about twenty years ago. You thus have the encouraging

and delightful spectacle of a proletariat eagerly expecting a

millennium, impossible at any time, but particularly impossible after

a catastrophe which has plunged the intellectuals into Spenglerian

pessimism and hurled the weaker or more cynical into the ironic bosom

of Mother Church....

George was pretty much affected by this social reform bunk. He was

always looking at things from “the point of view of the Country” and

far more frequently from “the point of view of humanity.” This may

have been a result of his Public School, kicked-backside-of-the-Empire

training. I know he resisted it with commendable contempt and fury, but

where so much pitch was flying about he could scarcely avoid some of

it. Perhaps the young are always like that, although one does not seem

to notice it. As I pointed out to George years afterwards, he was quite

right to discuss the matter frankly and openly with Elizabeth before

they proceeded further, but all this bunk about eugenics and women’s

rights and preventing wars by birth control would have discouraged any

girl who had not fully made up her mind already that she wanted him.

It was appallingly bad strategy as seduction—though, _en passant_

let it be noted that “seduction” is one of those primitive notions

which could only inhabit the degenerate minds of lawyers and social

uplifters, since in nine cases out of ten the “seducer,” if any, is the

woman. I thought that George ought to have imparted a little elementary

information, and have pointed out that in the present state of human

affairs it is not quite right for people to have a child without being

legally married because it’s so hard on the child, although in some

cases it should be done deliberately as a protest against a foolish

prejudice. He ought then to have explained how it may spoil a sexual

relationship to have a child too soon and unthinkingly. And he should

then have demonstrated by example and precept that love is an art, and

a very difficult art, and one most dismally and disastrously neglected

especially by “well-bred” Englishmen. It sounds incredible but it is

true that there are thousands of such men, perfectly decent, humane

persons, who despise a woman if they think or know that she experiences

any sexual pleasure. And then they wonder vaguely why women are

shrewish and discontented....

All this will sound very elementary to some people and very

reprehensible to others. I am simply trying to explain these people.

Of course, there is always the superior person who veils puritanism by

saying: “I’m so bored with all this talk about sex. Why can’t people

go to bed with the person they want to, and stop talking about it?”

Well, why shouldn’t we talk about what interests us, and what, after

all, is extremely important to adult life and happiness? Maybe we can

learn something from the adulteries of others. It seems to me that the

error of the Elizabeth and George generation was that they were far

too absolute, too general, too dogmatic in their “ideas” about sex.

They _would_ let the Social Reform bunk distort their view. They had

seen in their own homes the dreadful unhappiness and suffering caused

by Victorian, and indeed Edwardian, ignorance and domestic dennery

and swarming infants, and they reacted violently against it. So far,

good. But they failed to see that in the way they went about it, they

were merely setting up another tyranny—the tyranny of free love. Why

shouldn’t people be monogamous if they want to be? Maybe it suits them.

Don’t be dragooned into it, of course, but don’t be frightened out of

it if you’re made that way. There are certain elementary precepts which

always hold good—for instance, Balzac’s “Never begin marriage with

a rape”—but this is a wholly personal and very complex and delicate

relation which people must work out for themselves. All one asks is

that they shall not be interfered with by law and busybodies. It is

an interesting comment on the sadism latent in communities that the

cruelty and misery of the Victorian home are legally protected and held

up as shining examples of behaviour, whereas any attempt to make people

a little more natural and happy and tolerant is supposed to be wicked.

How men destroy their own happiness! How they hate happiness and

pleasure! Think of the insane delusion of female chastity which holds

that any woman who has “had” more than one man is “impure,” whereas

in fact many women soon come to dislike profoundly their first lover,

and most are only really happy and satisfied with a fourth or sixth or

tenth.

Alas! “with human nature what it is,” the love-lives of most people

will always alternate between brief periods of happiness and long

periods of suffering. The “sexual problem” will only be solved with the

millennium which produces a perfect humanity. Until then we can only

look on and sigh at the ruined lives; and reflect that men and women

might be to each other the great consolation, while in fact they do

little but torment each other....

* * * * *

I do not pity Elizabeth and George. They were very happy that day—and

on other days—and to be quite happy even for one day is sufficient

sanction for the misfortune of existence.

They went from the Wilderness into the large garden and walked slowly

beside the Long Border where the gardeners were busily potting out

spring flowers. The crocuses were almost over, and the large motor

lawn-mower was smoothly humming over the delicate green turf of the

great lawns. They looked at the trimmed yews and wondered if they had

been planted by Cardinal Wolsey. They criticized, somewhat adversely,

the lead statue of the three Graces and, walking under the trees by

the canals, noticed the cold green lily-leaves just beginning to

unfold under water. They stood at the end of the Long Border and for

a long time in silence watched the swirl and eddy of the Thames, the

house-boats being freshly painted for the season, the exquisite swaying

fronds of the young willows. In the Privy Garden, on the raised walk

and under the lime-tree avenue where the great clumps of crocuses

lay sprawled and dying and overgrown at the foot of each tree, they

talked of King Charles, and fought over the age-old contest of King

and Parliament. Elizabeth was romantically for the handsome melancholy

King; George Whiggish and all for political freedom, though gravely

disapproving of Puritan vandalism. They went through the Fountain Court

and the beautiful Tudor Courts, and walked along the river, and sat

under a tree to eat their lunch. They talked and argued and laughed and

made plans and reformed the world and felt important (God knows why!)

and held hands and kissed when they thought no one was looking.... And

yes, they were very happy.

* * * * *

Dear Lovers! If it were not for you, how dreary the world would be!

Never shall a pair of you pass me without a kindly discreet glance

and a murmured wish, “Be happy.” How my heart warmed to an old French

poet as we walked slowly on the Boulevard, and the lovers in the soft

evening air passed us by, hand so close in hand, bodies so amorously

near, eyes so sparkling and alive. Now and then, in the intoxicating

air of the spring and the tolerant kindliness of the Parisians, a

pair would feel so exuberant and so enthusiastic and so moved with

each other’s perfections, that they would have to stop and exchange

a long kiss, perfunctorily hidden by a quite inadequate tree-trunk.

Nobody interrupted them, nobody scowled, no policeman arrested them

for indecency. And the old poet paused, and laid his hand on my arm,

and said: “Mon ami, I grow old! I am nearly sixty. And sometimes as I

pass along these streets and see these warm young people I find myself

thinking: ‘How impudique! Why is this permitted? Why do they intrude

their passions on me?’ And then I remember that I too was young, and I

too passed eagerly and happily with one or other of my young mistresses

whom I thought so beautiful, each of whom I loved with so immortal a

love! And I look at the lovers passing and I say to myself: ‘Allez-y,

mes enfants, allez-y, soyez heureux!’”

Dear Lovers! Let us never forget that you are the sweetness of the

bitter world.

* * * * *

And Elizabeth and George lingered through the sunny hours; and before

the afternoon became too chill—for April is cold in England—they went

back slowly through the long glades of the Park, they too hand in hand

like the lovers on the Boulevard, they too with bodies amorously near,

they too with eyes sparkling and alive, they too pausing to join their

lips when the loveliness of life and the ecstasy of loving drew them

together in a kiss.

They were so happy they did not know they were tired.

[ V ]

It is fascinating to observe how people organize and disorganize their

lives, fascinating to see how an impulse of vitality sends them off on

a certain line, how they wobble, err, suffer, recover themselves. What

is the most banal street, the most tedious place you know? Think how

fascinating if only you knew the real lives of those tedious people!

There are two centres or poles of activity in every adult life—the

economic and the sexual. Hunger and Death, the enemies. Your whole

adult life depends on how you deal with the two primitive foes, Hunger

and Death. Never mind how much the conditions of collective human life

seem to have altered them, they are there; you can never really get

away from Hunger and Death, from the need to eat and the will to live

again.

Thus, two problems are created—the economic and the sexual. There is

no cut-and-dried solution of either. Existence is tolerable—I will

not say “happy,” though I believe in happiness—to the extent that

as an individual you are successful in solving these two problems.

Certain traditional solutions are presented to us all in youth, and the

swiftness with which we see their foolishness is an almost unerring

test of intelligence. When we have seen through them, a new and

delicate problem presents itself—we have to create our own happiness

underneath or in despite of the Laws (or rules for collective life) and

at the same time preserve intact the sense of Justice, or that which is

due to each.