3
“This is what remains,” I told Bertrand, when he insisted on holding a post mortem.
“These people don’t amuse you?,” he cried.
“They interest me,” I answered. “Looking on, listening . . .”
Since I had given up dancing on the outbreak of war and am one of the three worst bridge-players in London, I was thrown back on the delights of conversation; and, as every gathering included a contingent of Barbara’s literary friends, I tried to discover what inspiration they had won from the war. It was soon, however, made abundantly plain to me that the dangers of this quest were more apparent than the delights. I was welcomed at first—I hoped for my own sake—to the little circles of young writers, who—for want of better accommodation—camped on the landing and stairs outside my dressing-room. Soon, however, I found myself being used as a stick to beat my literary editor for having beaten one or other of my bitter-tongued guests. When I refused to help, they took the beating into their own hands. The “top-hat school of fiction” was flayed by the “sham-corduoroy school”, the “high-brows” by the “pin-heads”, the “best sellers” by every one. Shocking tales of self-advertising were exchanged for dire revelations of log-rolling; and critics who had been unanimously condemned a moment before were unanimously reprieved on condition of their taking service against yet another school that did not happen to be represented in our symposium.
“Aren’t you perhaps exaggerating the importance of contemporary opinion?,” I asked as soon as I could make myself heard. “If the men who praised and blamed twenty, forty, sixty years ago could read their notices now, they’d find they hadn’t spotted one winner in five hundred. If you’re suffering at the hands of irresponsible reviewers, you’re suffering in the company of Meredith and Hardy.”
And then I left the rising generation of writers, who had slain more reputations in half an hour than my staff could hope to scotch in six months. Truth to tell, I felt rather unworthy of their too discriminating society. Hampstead was so suspicious of Chelsea; Chelsea was so contemptuous of Bloomsbury; and all three were so scornful of Mayfair that I thanked Heaven my house was two hundred yards north of Oxford Street. The few names that these exotics praised were always unknown to me; and I was ashamed to admire publicly the work which they damned so comprehensively. If the war was to produce a new Elizabethan splendour of imagination, I saw no sign of it at present: perhaps we should have to wait a generation till the stench of blood and the shriek of shells had been forgotten.
“Are your very modern friends doing any good?,” I demanded of Barbara, when our party had dispersed. “If you were analysing the effect of the war on art . . .?”
“D’you get any reaction from their work?,” she asked. “In art there’s no such thing as absolute good.”
“I don’t understand it.”
“And I’m thrilled by it!,” she cried in unaffected rapture. “All the violence and horror and madness of the war are reflected in the art of to-day. It’s not pretty, but it’s true. This party, which dear Lady Dainton hated so much . . . The restlessness, the hysteria . . . Jazz, in itself . . .”
“That which remains,” I murmured, in Bertrand’s phrase.
I was reminded of the days before the war when revues and ragtime first established their empire in London. Then, as the curtain prepared to fall, principals and supers, the latest beauty and the last comedian, a scene-shifter or two and the prompter all jigged and shuffled to the haunting syncopation of the Honeymoon Rag or That Ol’ Mason-Dixon Line. The audience jigged and shuffled up the gangways; the men were still humming, the women still working their shoulders when they drove away. ‘Oh, honey, I feel funny when dat coon begin to play . . .’ Now they jigged and shuffled through the streets and into the houses; they could not stop; life was become an endless syncopation.
I wondered when our friends would settle down. If the art of the day seemed, in my philistine eyes, epileptic, it was at least faithful to the epileptic contortions and fitful mood of the times. Reviewing these stupefying parties, I see men and women in a high fever. The girls all wear the same short skirts and exhibit the same bare backs; they have achieved the same flat figure; and, granted an upturned nose, they bob their hair in the same way. Very young, very pretty and very full of high spirits, they think the same thoughts and express them in the same jargon with the same loud assurance. Their sameness makes every party the same. I see myself talking feverishly of films with some star from Los Angeles and being told, by little Ivy Gaymer, of the latest divorce; I see young poets discussing a recent lampoon and young actresses describing their last triumph. There are financial groups and political caves; my cousin Laurence, who has cultivated a knowing and shrewd manner, runs feverishly from one to another, nodding, whispering, waving a vast cigar and, I fancy, rather modelling himself on Saltash. Sam Dainton, who is beginning to look dissipated, engages in feverish pursuit of one woman after another. This fever has infected the women; the divorce-court does a flourishing trade; no one can remember who at any moment is allied with whom; and Sam makes overtures to all in the sure belief that some—and, perhaps, most—will prove to be complaisant. Sir Rupert Foreditch spreads the fever among the young politicians.
I can understand that Lady Dainton is too inelastic for the universal syncopation of these days. I could wish, in this season of comprehensive toleration, that I were far more tolerant or far less, for many of these women would not be received by Violet Loring or my mother, many of the men would be roughly handled if their business records were examined by unsympathetic counsel. And no one can for long live comfortably in a state of delirium. The clatter from the dining-room and the din from the musicians’ corner are unceasing. Every one is moving, talking, smoking at top speed. And Robson holds all the threads in his capable hands; he is, to my house in Seymour Street, what Gaspard is to the Turf and Stage. My house is indeed a small and noisy club.
It is to be hoped that our guests enjoyed themselves; I believe that they, like Barbara, were only concerned to be so busy that they could not think. I should not be surprised to hear that, like Barbara, some of them broke down before the end. We had intended to stay in London until I went to shoot with the Knightriders; but early in July Barbara collapsed suddenly and was ordered to the country. Though there was nothing organically amiss with her, Gaisford threatened to throw up the case if she remained in London.
“When I die, you can tell people I was the only honest leech you ever met,” he muttered with a frown. “I’m never afraid to say I don’t know; and I don’t know now what’s wrong with that child. She’s very ill indeed; and there’s nothing the matter with her. I have my suspicions. You’ll go with her?”
“If I can arrange things at the office,” I answered.
“Office be damned! If she wants you, go!”
More than a little frightened, I took Barbara to Crawleigh next day and for a week tried to run our paper by means of special messengers and an indistinct telephone. Then I returned to London. The explosion which Bertrand had predicted four months earlier took place at a moment when the office was entrusted to the learned and wholly unpractical Spence-Atkins; and I judged—God knows how rashly!—that Ireland called to me the more urgently. I suppose our lives would have been different if Barbara’s rest-cure had been postponed till September; if Bertrand had taken his holiday in August, I a month earlier.
“If you must go, you must,” sighed Barbara. “Will you open all my letters, as you did before? I’m not to be worried; and my letters are always so uninteresting that they send my temperature up two points.”
“I’ll do anything if you’ll only promise to get well,” I answered.