“Very good. We’ll go downstairs.”
I felt a hand tighten approvingly on my arm and, looking round, saw Ivan Heald. He came with me.
“Slog him, Gerald,” he said earnestly.
But I felt most unheroic, and I know that as I made my way to the door I was trembling a little.
[278]
]The whole room was interested now, and I realised that we were going to have spectators. And then the unexpected happened. The Club Secretary and a few committee men rushed between us, dragging my sudden enemy away. I was glad to be separated, for I was afraid of him.... Is it possible that he was afraid of me?
. . . . . . . .
Augustus John used to come sometimes, and I remember chatting with P. G. Konody about Byzantine architecture, about which I think I know something. But one did not go to the Crab Tree for serious conversation. It was the diversion of excitement we all sought....
I think that for some weeks in the spring of 1914 I felt like a character in a rather second-rate novel. Literally, I was intoxicated with life. And so full of vitality did I feel that I scarcely found time for sleep. I remember walking with my wife from Soho to Battersea Park in the early hours of a June or July morning after being up all night. Several friends accompanied us, and though we ought to have felt extremely jaded, we were as fresh as paint at our seven o’clock breakfast of cherries and coffee and honey. I tried to feel like George Meredith as I ate, for I had read somewhere that he frequently breakfasted on honey and coffee and fruit.... The imitative instincts that we little artists have! How strange it is! We can never be ourselves for long. We are always imagining ourselves to be someone else more distinguished, or more interesting. We are always insatiably curious about the feelings and thoughts of others. Pale imitators we are. And when we snatch at our personalities, how feeble they seem ... how feeble they are.
. . . . . . . .
One frightfully busy week an invitation came to us from Madame Strindberg to sup with her at the Sign of the Golden Calf, popularly known as The Cabaret. We [279] ]did not particularly want to go, but I had been deeply interested in August Strindberg ever since I had read Max Nordau’s Degeneration (that, I think, is not the title, but you know the book I mean) and I had wished to learn more about this strange vitriolic personality, and since Strindberg himself was dead, Madame Strindberg seemed to be the best person to whom to go for information.