It was the London of Whitehall, Chelsea, Mayfair, Cambridge, Bloomsbury, Downing Street, Oxford, and the Mont Agel—but of course the Mont Agel! The London of those new young men and women, but mainly young men, who in those few years before the war suddenly confronted and conquered it with a new and vivid charm, now never to be forgotten. They, even more acutely than the Russian Ballet, were the social success of that time, in a new and brilliant way. They were so immediately likeable, so fine! A new kind of young men they were entirely, these few from the Universities, and much less “provincial” than new young men had ever been before. They, just then beginning life, were much less provincial than those who were ending life. They were not good Londoners: for they were good Europeans. They were clean and intricate and pagan, and they were quick to believe in fine things; and they could both drink and think. In everything they were a denial of their fathers, for these young men were sceptical of generalisations: in everything they were a denial of the catchwords for which they were to fight; and in everything they were the finest expression of the paralytic civilisation for which they were to die. Vulgarity of thought was to them the abomination of abominations; and they died because of it. They were to go out to fight in a war for chivalry, and they were to die in a morass of spite.
And these young giants were friends to Lois Lamprey and Virginia Tracy, and often with them—too often, people said. And Lois was conscious of their beauty and her power over them, but Virginia was conscious only of liking them immensely. She loved one and then another, seldom alone but always in a crowd. She was swept magically off her feet, gaily, profoundly, almost impersonally; for Virginia was very much of them in spirit and in endeavour, and she, like them, for all the gaiety and publicity of their lives—for London loved these young men of destiny—had secret places in her being where she could think and strive impersonally—with what Lois could decide in one cunning, physical moment!
Great heights were reached in that swift circle of young people, and deep abysses plumbed. They were the new soldiers of fortune, Lois and Virginia and their laughing men. They intoxicated each other into brilliance, and often into truth. They were much more intoxicating to each other than was the wine which rumour so abundantly uncorked for them.
And, on a day seven years or so later, Virginia asked Ivor:—
“Why, just why, have they all gone, so utterly? Of that roomful of people at the Hallidays’ that night, the last night that I ever saw you there, there’s nothing left but the scum—except just you, who weren’t of them at all. There simply isn’t one of them left, Ivor——”
“And not only that,” he said. “But there is nothing of them left. The war killed them, and then Pretty Leyton and the Press killed them even more effectually, by making of them idols of prose and poetry and good looks. And they made idols of them in their own precious image and to suit their own precious ideals, ‘wonderful’ and ‘inspired.’ What was so splendid about them was that they were not inspired: they were thoughtful....”
For the giants had now become little books, a tragic and inevitable fate that often overtakes giants. They, who had never scattered themselves, were now scattered everywhere on the wings of their chance verses and chance letters; and there were Prefaces to bring them near in death who had been so rarely distant in life.
“It isn’t fair,” Virginia sombrely said, “to judge them by what they wrote, even if they had wanted to be judged by that. They’ve made brilliant and gallant poets out of men whose reality was idealism. Their reality was a fierce and gay idealism, Ivor, and poetry and gallantry were only afterthoughts with them....”
It was a lazy afternoon in Paris, and they were in the garden of a studio on the Butte, a garden overlooking Paris from the Mont Valérien to the Lion de Belfort.
“Youth isn’t made of definite things like prose and poetry,” Virginia said. “It’s made of everything. It’s a subtle and versatile thing, I do think, with lovely lapses into carelessness.”