“True—what true?”
“About Clive Ferguson?”
She laughed a loud, harsh, triumphing laugh. “True, that! good God, no. Clive Ferguson! I wouldn’t look at him. Dirty great oily Jew. I wouldn’t have looked twice at him, not that way. I expect he started that story one evening when he was drunk—sheer swank to save his vanity. Oh no, he wasn’t the cause of that little jaunt of mine. No, I was away for six months, old sport, with the only man I think I’ve ever really cared for. A young boxer, he was, engaged to some soppy fool in the chorus. She brought him round to see us one evening. I had one look at him and made my mind up. He wasn’t going to waste himself on the likes of her. God! but I was mad about that boy. That’s really what started things against me. I rushed him straight away; didn’t give him time to think; and Clive Ferguson never forgave me. The understudy was an utter dud; clean smashed the piece, it did, in its second month. He never forgave me. Wouldn’t take me back again. And the money I spent on that boy; all my jewellery went and the things I’d put away. And of course I couldn’t keep him. One never can keep them. They use one as a stepping-stone. I never really got over it. I shan’t ever forget. But, oh, well! two pound a week for life I’ve got out of it.
“And if it’s a woman’s job in life to make a man happy, to give him a good home and children, well, I suppose I’ve done it. I could laugh sometimes when I think how I have done it. But it doesn’t matter, does it, as long as the thing gets done.”
What are you going to argue against that? and in literature as in life.
As far as effect is concerned, social and moral effect that is to say, bad books, bad deeds, are just as valuable as good. Our contempt for the best seller, is it anything but a form of intellectual snobbery, or jealousy, which is the same thing, from another side.
Best sellers!
Whenever I see, on railway bookstalls and the shelves of Mudie’s library, a novel by Florence Barclay I am reminded of one of my first, certainly my strangest, school friends. He was not the conventional public-school type. He disliked games. He refused to join the corps. He had no house or school spirit. He was a fine swimmer, but never trained for the competitions. Games were compulsory. But I do not recollect to have ever seen him on the cricket field, and he played football scarcely once a fortnight. He arranged for every afternoon of the week a music lesson or a music practice. Authority let him go his own way. He was, in fact, the sort of person whom one would expect to be bullied, and thoroughly wretched generally. And yet he was not, I think, unhappy. Certainly he was never bullied. Even the swashbuckling element, in what was admittedly a fairly boisterous community, treated him with respect. This in itself would make him a well-placed candidate for immortality. But it is his study that I particularly remember. It was the sort of study that challenged enterprise, and an old boy on seeing it was reported to have exclaimed: “Good God! what must the house be coming to! Why hasn’t this place been shipped?”
It was like no study that had ever been. They were small dark rooms, our studies, monastic quarters that lay under the shadow, on one side, of the abbey, and on the other, of the lindens and big school. We tried to make them brighter with light festooned wallpapers, allegorical pictures, and brackets on which we placed china shepherdesses; to the height of four feet the walls were panelled, and fashion decreed that the woodwork should be covered with long strips of brightly coloured cloth. It was a fashion that had been handed down, like the pictures, from one generation to another. Thus in my father’s day did they disfigure honest handiwork, and thus will they disfigure it when I am fifty. My friend had, however, little use for fashions. He decided that he would have his woodwork painted in mauve and black. And to match it he had the walls covered with a deep mauve paper. From the ceiling he hung before the window a mauve curtain, edged with black. On the window seat and on the chairs he heaped high a profusion of mauve cushions; the walls, for he was a great admirer of Napoleon, he devoted exclusively to a picture gallery for the dictator. It was, in fact, a study that would, in Chelsea, occasion a mild surprise; at school it made you reel in outraged dismay across the passage. Yet no one shipped it, no one turned the portraits of Napoleon to the wall, nor bedecked the ceiling with red ink; nor did anyone tear from their bracket beneath the gas the calf-bound set of Mrs Barclay’s novels.
The Rosary was his favourite novel, as it was mine. At each fresh reading we were moved to the edge, if not over the edge, of tears. It is, in the author’s words, the story of a beautiful woman in a plain shell. No man has ever seen below that surface. But one day she sings “The Rosary” at a concert: the veil is torn aside, and Garth Dalmain, the famous painter, perceives her spiritual worth. But because she fears that he will tire of her, she will not marry him, and in a scene of sustained pathos, during which the name of the Deity is never long absent from her lips, she tells him that their paths must separate. But “love never faileth.” Garth is providentially blinded in a shooting accident, and his lover returns to him as a nurse. Then the drama opens. She writes him letters, which in the position of nurse and secretary she reads to him, and as his nurse she makes him gradually appreciate the intensity of his need for the woman who has refused him. And, when the last barrier has gone, the nurse reveals herself as the lover by striking triumphantly the solemn chords of “The hours I spent with thee, dear heart.”