The Young Enchanted: A Romantic Story

by Hugh Walpole

The noise above was deafening and had that peculiarly shrill sound which the New literature seems to carry with it in its train, just as a new baby enjoys its new rattle. When Henry peered into the little drawing-room he could see very little because of the smoke. The scene outlined from the doorway must have seemed to an unprepared stranger to resemble nothing so much as a little study in the Inferno painted by one of the younger artists. Behind and through the smoke there were visions of a wall of bright orange and curtains of a brilliant purple. On the mantelpiece staring through the room and grinning malevolently was the cast of a negro's head.

A large globe hanging from the ceiling concealed the electric light behind patterns of every conceivable colour. The guests were sitting on the floor, on a crimson sofa, and standing against the wall. Henry soon discovered that to-night's was a very representative gathering.

Standing just inside the door he felt for the first time in the Hunters' house perfectly detached from the whole affair. Always before he had loved the sensation of plunging in, of that sudden immersion in light and colour and noise, of swimming with all the others towards some ideally fantastic island of culture that would be entirely, triumphantly their own. But to-night the intense personal experience that he had just passed through kept him apart, led him to criticize and inspect as though he were a visitor from another planet. Was that in itself a criticism of the whole world of Art and Literature proving to him that that must always crumble before real life, or was it simply a criticism of some of the crudity and newness of this especial gathering? Peering through the smoke and relieved that no one appeared to take the slightest notice of him, he saw that this was indeed a representative gathering because all the Three Graces were here together. Never before had he seen them all at one time in the same place. Whether it were because of the exhaustion that five years' war had entailed upon the men of the country or simply that the complete emancipation of women during the last decade had brought many new positions within women's power it was certain that just at this period, that is at the beginning of 1920, much of the contemporary judgement on art and letters was delivered by women—and in letters by three women especially, Miss Talbot, Miss Jane Ross and Miss Martha Proctor. These three ladies had certain attributes in common—a healthy and invigorating contempt for the abilities of the opposite sex, a sure and certain confidence in their own powers and a love of novelty and originality. Miss Talbot, seated now upon the red sofa, was the reviewer of fiction in The Planet. She was the most feminine of the three, slight in stature, fair-haired and blue-eyed, languid and even timid in appearance. Her timidity was a disguise; week after week did she destroy the novels before her, adroitly, dispassionately and with a fine disregard for the humaner feelings. In her there burnt, however, a truer and finer love of literature than either Jane Ross or Martha Proctor would ever know. She had ever before her young vision her picture of the perfect novel, and week after week she showed her scorn in italicized staccato prose for the poor specimens that so brazenly ventured to interfere between her vision and herself.

Had she her way no novelist alive should remain ungoaded, so vile a sin had he committed in thus with his soiled and clumsy fingers desecrating the power, beauty and wisdom of an impossible ideal.

Meanwhile she made a very good income out of her unending disappointment.

Far other Jane Ross.

Jane Ross was plain, pasty-faced, hook-nosed, squat-figured, beetle-browed, and she was the cleverest journalist at that time alive in England. Originally, ten years ago when she came from the Midlands with a penny in her pocket and a determination to make her way, it may have been that she cared for literature with a passion as pure and undeviating as Grace Talbot's own. But great success, a surprised discovery of men's weakness and sloth, a talent for epigrams unequalled by any of her contemporaries had led her to sacrifice all her permanent standards for temporary brilliance. She was also something of a cat, being possessed suddenly to her own discontent by little personal animosities and grievances that she might have controlled quite easily had not her tongue so brilliantly led her away. She had, deep down in her soul, noble intentions, but the daily pettinesses of life were too strong fer her; she won all her battles so easily that she did not perceive that she was meanwhile losing the only battle that really mattered. As her journalism grew more and more brilliant her real influence grew less and less. When her brain was inactive her heart, suddenly released, could be wonderfully kind. A little more stupidity and she would have been a real power.

For both Grace Talbot and Jane Ross the new thing was the only thing that mattered. When you listened to them, or read them you would suppose that printing had been discovered for the first time somewhere about 1890 and in Manchester. Martha Proctor, less brilliant than the other two, had a wider culture than either of them. The first glance at her told you that she was a journalist, tall, straight-backed, her black hair brushed back from a high forehead, dressed in tweeds, stiff white collars, and cuffs, wearing pince-nez, she seemed to have nothing to do with the prevalent fashion. And she had not. Older than the other two she had come in with the Yellow Book and promised to go out with Universal Suffrage. She had fought her battles; in politics her finest time had been in the years just before the war when she had bitten a policeman's leg in Whitehall and broken a shop-window in Bond Street with her little hammer. In literature her great period had been during the Romantic Tushery of 1895 to 1905. How she had torn and scarified the Kailyard novelists, how the Cloak and Sword Romances had bled beneath her whip. Now none of these remained and the modern Realism had gone far beyond her most confident anticipations. She knew in her heart that her day was over; there was even, deep down within her, a faint alarm at the times that were coming upon the world. She knew that she seemed old-fashioned to Jane Ross and her only comfort was that in ten years' time Jane Ross would undoubtedly in her turn seem old-fashioned to somebody else. Because her horizon was wider than that of her two companions she was able to judge in finer proportion than they. Fashions passed, men died, kingdoms fell. What remained? Not, as she had once fondly imagined, Martha Proctor.

Two children and a cottage in the country might after all be worth more than literary criticism. She was beginning to wonder about many things for the first time in her life. . . .

I have outlined these ladies in some detail because for the past year and a half Henry had worshipped at their shrines. How he had revelled in Grace Talbot's cynical judgments, in Jane Ross's epigrams, in Martha Proctor's measured comparisons! To-night for the first time a new vision was upon him. He could only see them, as he stared at them through the smoke, with physical eyes—Grace Talbot's languid indifference, white hands and faint blue eyes. Jane Ross's sallow complexion and crinkled black hair; Martha Proctor's pince-nez and large brown boots.