He would blurt it out and then hide his face in her lap for shame, and she would stroke his hair softly and smile.
“Silly old dear,” she would say. “I knew it all along!”
How trite it would be, how banal! And the fact that it might be very likely true would not in any way redeem it. We are plagiarists in life as we are in books, and there are certain motives that are now impossible in a story, although they occur in life. They have been used too often. What a weariness overcomes us when we discover in a novel of matrimonial dispute that the wife is about to become a mother, and that in consequence the hero cannot run off with his secretary.
No doubt it is an affair of frequent occurrence; impending maternity frustrates an impending honeymoon. Autumn lays waste the spring. But no self-respecting novelist would allow “the little stranger” to extricate him from a difficulty. And, in the same way, no self-respecting novelist would allow a heroine “to know it all along.” It is a motive that has served its purpose well enough in its time, but when a coin has passed through many hands the signs and figures on it are worn away; it is valueless and is returned to the Mint; which is the proper place for “the little stranger” and “I knew it all along.”
And now, having attempted five different stories, all of them unsatisfactory, I know that it is my duty to provide a conclusion that shall be unexpected and that shall ridicule my previous conjectures. I know that I ought to meet in the restaurant at a later date the hero or heroine, or both of them together, and learn from them the true story; there should be—I know it—a punch in the last paragraph; but that is exactly what I cannot give, for I do not know the real end of the story and have been unable to invent one. Unsatisfactory, perhaps, but intriguing all the same. In a world where so much is ordered by the inviolable laws of mathematics, it is pleasant to find something that is truly incomplete. For the first time in my life I was the witness of a dramatic episode, the sort of thing that one would not see again in a thousand years. It was a fragment in the lives of two people, and it must remain a fragment, a baffling, fascinating fragment. And, on the whole, I am glad to have it so. Such another moment will never come to me. When the voice of the lecturer begins to fade, when the sun beats down upon the mound at Lord’s and the cricket becomes slow: at all times when the mind detaches itself from its surroundings I shall return in my imagination to that evening in the restaurant. It will be a treasure for all time, a book in which I shall read for ever without weariness. Perhaps one day I shall hit upon the meaning of it; but I hope not. I prefer to keep it an enigma, to be able to shut my eyes and watch the growing embarrassment of a young man who is planning an unnatural theft, to see a young girl stand in the doorway of a restaurant, a fur cap fitting tightly over her head, a gloved hand raised across her throat.
XII
CERTAIN motives, I said, after a while get written out, and must be sent like coins for renewal to the mint. And so of a particular technique, of certain ways of narrative, the chronicle novel for example. In 1911 everyone was telling the story of a generation’s passage through youth to middle age; it had become the fashionable medium for social satire; it seemed the destined channel for the main stream of early twentieth-century narrative. But already a dam has been placed across its path, the dam of the years 1914-1918.
The novel reader, I suppose, knows no greater weariness, no sensation of more profound misgiving than that which comes over him when he realises on page 173 that the action of the story is about to land him in the year 1913. He loses interest immediately. What does it matter, he asks himself, whether Jane becomes engaged to that rascal Harry, or Arthur elopes with the designing Marjorie? August 1914 is coming, and from whatever manner of fix into which, between now and then, they may contrive to place themselves the author will have no difficulty in extricating them. The reader feels that he has been deceived. He has no use for the deus ex machinâ. He feels as the small boy did who flung the Iliad in disgust across the room, and exclaimed: “Rotten! they never had a fair fight once. There was always a god on one side or another.”
The war, in the average novel, is an effect without a cause. It is unquestionable that a great many homes were absolutely turned inside out by “the great interruption.” There is no doubt that a great many difficulties were removed by this heaven-sent intervention, even as a great many simple situations were made interminably complex. All over the world there was effect without a cause, but in the novel, which is an essentially artificial thing, a thing that one makes with one’s own hands, there can be no effect without cause. And the conscientious novelist gazes in dismay at this tear across the fabric of life. He can, of course, start his story earlier; but there can be no real conclusion to a chronicle novel that ends in 1910. The reader knows that, in four years’ time, the happy home on which the curtain has so tenderly descended will be in chaos and that the hero will have to set out again on his travels. He can hardly begin it in December 1918 with the picture of a young man walking out of his tailor’s, in a grey tweed suit. A chronicle novel can barely get started in five years. And it is equally difficult for a writer to take the war in his stride. There have been one or two attempts; but, with the exception of “The Forsyte Saga,” they have been failures. For that type of novel one wants a clear ten years on either side.
Or it may be that the generating force of the movement is already spent; it may be that the reader has grown indifferent through repetition to the fortunes of the shy, sensitive young man who retired into a corner and read Keats while his companions were playing football, and to whom one of the masters would deliver himself of some such portentous prophecy as: “You are not for the middle way. You will rise or you will sink. The stars for you, or the depths.” And there was certainly a singular similarity about that young man’s early amatory adventures; the wanton with the heart of gold; the pure girl and the unhappy marriage; the splendid heroism of infidelity. It seemed very daring and original in 1912 to end a novel with a divorce instead of with a marriage. But was such an end any more conclusive than the Victorian wedding bells? In the Victorian novel the young man gets engaged to the wrong girl, but meets the right girl in time to marry her. In the Georgian novel the marriage to the right girl is preceded by a divorce, instead of a broken engagement.