by Hugh Walpole
Henry, as he sat on his bed, looking before him out of the little window across to the corner gables of the Comedy Theatre, appeared very much the same crude and callow youth that he had seemed on going up to Oxford just before the war.
He had not yet caught up to his size which had leapt ahead of his years when he was about sixteen. He was still long, lean, and untidy, his black hair refusing any kind of control, his complexion poor with a suspicion of incipient pimple, his ears too red, his hands never quite clean. The same and yet not at all the same.
The hint of beauty that there had been when he was nineteen in the eyes and mouth and carriage of neck and shoulders was now, when he was twenty-six, more clearly emphasized. At first sight Henry seemed an untidy and rather uncleanly youth; look again and you would see quite clearly that he would be, one day, a distinguished man. His untidiness, the way that his trousers bagged at the knee, that he carried, like some knight with his lady’s favour, the inevitable patch of white on his sleeve, that his boots were not rightly laced and his socks not sufficiently “suspended” — these things only indicated that he was in the last division of the intermediate class, between youth and manhood.
The war had very nearly made him a man, and had not the authorities discovered, after his first wound in 1915, that he was quite hopeless in command of other men but not at all a fool at intelligence he would have been a man complete by this time. The war smartened him a little but not very much, and the moment he was free he slipped back into his old ways and his old customs with a sigh of relief.
But there again not entirely. Like his cousin John, who was killed in Galicia in 1915, stretcher-bearing for the Russians, he was awkward in body but clean in soul. The war had only emphasized something in him that was there before it, and the year and a half that he spent with his family in the Westminster house after the Armistice was the most terrible time of his life. No one knew what to do with him. His mother had had a stroke in the spring of 1917 and now lay like a corpse at the top of the old house, watching, listening, suffering an agony of rebellion in her proud and obstinate soul. With her influence gone, his grandfather and his great-aunt Sarah dead, his two aunts Betty and Anne living in the country down at Walton-on-Thames, his father more and more living his own life in his study, his sister Katherine married and involved now entirely in her own affairs, Henry felt the big house a mausoleum of all his hopes and ambitions. Return to Oxford he would not. Strike out and live on his one hundred and fifty pounds he would at the first possible moment, but one thing after another prevented him. He remained in that grim and chilly house mainly because of his sister Millicent, whom he loved with all his heart and soul, and for whom he would do anything in the world.
She also had a little money of her own, but the striking out was a little difficult for her. Her father and mother, all the relations said, needed her, and it wanted all the year and a half to prove to the relations that this was not so. Her father scarcely saw her except at breakfast and, although he regarded her with a kindly patronage, he preferred greatly his books, his club, and his daily newspaper. Her mother did not need her at all, having been angered before the war at the action that Millie took in the great family quarrel of Katherine v. Mrs. Trenchard, and being now completely under the control of a hard and tyrannical woman, Nurse Bennett, whose word now was law in the house, whose slightest look was a command.
Millicent and Henry determined that when they escaped it should be together. Millicent had her own plans, and after some months of mysterious advertising in the newspaper, of interviews and secret correspondences, she secured the post of secretary companion to a certain Miss Victoria Platt who lived at 85 Cromwell Road, Kensington. At the very same time Philip found for Henry the secretaryship of which I have already spoken. They escaped then together — Millicent to rooms at the top of Baker Street that she shared with a girl friend, Mary Cass, and Henry to the hospitality of Mr. King. Their engagements also were to begin together, Millicent going to Miss Platt for the first time on the morning after the day of which I am writing, Henry to go to his Baronet on the day after that.
They were beginning the world together. There was surely a fine omen in that. Apart they would do great things — but, together, was there anything they could not do?
At 7.15 that evening, bathed in the blue dusk that filtered in through the little attic window Henry was sitting on his bed staring, wide-eyed, in front of him.
At 8.15 on that same evening, hidden now by the purple shades of night he was still sitting there, his mouth open, staring in front of him. It is desperately platitudinous — it is also desperately true, that there is no falling in love like the first falling in love. And Henry was fortunate in this — that he had fallen in love for the first time at a comparatively ripe age. To some it is the governess or the music-master, to some even the nurse or the gardener’s boy. But Henry had in the absolute truth of the absolute word never been in love before to-night.
He had loved — yes. First his mother, then his sister Katherine, then his sister Millicent, then his friend Westcott. These affections had been loyal and true and profound but they had been of the heart and the brain, and for true love the lust of the flesh must be added to the lust of the mind and the heart.
He had tumbled in then, to-day, head foremost, right in, with all his hero-worship, his adoration, his ignorance, his purity, his trust and confidence, fresh, clean, unsullied to offer as acceptable gifts. He could not, sitting on his bed, think it out clearly at all. He could only see everything in a rosy mist and in the heart of the mist a flaming feather, and Piccadilly boiling and bubbling and Mrs. Tenssen with her bright green dress and the stable-yard and the teapot with the flowers and there — somewhere behind these things — that girl with her fair hair, her unhappy gaze beyond him, far far beyond him, into worlds that were not as yet his but that one day might be. And with all this his heart pounding in a strange suffocating manner, his eyes burning, his throat choking, his brain refusing to bring before him two connected thoughts.
At last, when St. James’s Church struck half-past eight a thought did penetrate.
He had promised to go to the Hunters’ evening party. Never less did he want to go to a party than to-night. He would wish to continue to sit on his bed and study the rosy mist. “I will sit here,” he said, “and perhaps soon the face will come to me just as it was. I can’t see it now, but if I wait. . . .” Then he had cramp in his leg and the sudden jerk shot him from the bed and forced him to stand in the middle of the floor in an extraordinary attitude with one leg stiff and the other bent as though he were Nijinsky practising for the “Spectre de la Rose.”
The shock of his agony drove him to consider two very good reasons for going to the Hunters’ party. One was material — namely, that he had had nothing to eat since Mrs. Tenssen’s pink cake, that he was very hungry in spite of his love and that there would be free sandwiches at the Hunters. The other reason was a better one — namely, that it was possible that his friend Westcott would be there and to Westcott, above all human beings, save only Millicent, he wished to confide the history of his adventure.
Concerning his friendship with Westcott a word must be said. About a year ago at the house of a friend of Philip’s he had been introduced to a thick-set saturnine man who had been sitting by himself in a corner and appearing entirely bored with the evening’s proceedings. His host had thrown Henry at this unattractive guest’s head as though he would say: “I dare not offer up any of my more important guests to this Cerberus of a fellow, but here’s a young ass who doesn’t matter and I don’t care whether his feelings are hurt or no.” Henry himself was at this time cultivating a supercilious air in public, partly from shyness and partly because he did not wish to reveal how deeply pleased he was at being invited to parties. He liked at once Westcott’s broad shoulders, close-cropped hair and nonchalant attitude. The first ten minutes of their conversation was not a success, and then Henry discovered that Westcott had, in the days of his
youth, actually known, spoken to, had tea with the God of his, Henry’s, idolatry, Henry Galleon. Westcott was perhaps touched by young Henry’s ingenuous delight, his eager questions, his complete forgetfulness of himself and his surroundings at this piece of information. He in his turn launched out and talked of the London of fifteen years ago and of the heroes of that time, a time that the war had made historic, curious, picturesque, a time that was already older than crinolines, almost as romantic as the Regency. Their host left them together for the remainder of the evening, feeling that he had most skilfully killed two dull birds with one stone. They departed together, walked from Hyde Park Corner together and by the time that they parted were already friends. That friendship had held firm throughout the succeeding year. As a friendship it was good for both of them. Westcott was very lonely and too proud to go out and draw men in. Henry needed just such an influence as Westcott’s, the influence of a man who had known life at its hardest and bitterest, who had come through betrayal, disappointed ambition, poverty and loneliness without losing his courage and belief in life, a man whose heart was still warm towards his fellowmen although he kept it guarded now lest he should too easily be again betrayed.
There was no need to keep it guarded from Henry whose transparent honesty could not be mistaken. Henry restored something of Westcott’s lost confidence in himself. Henry believed profoundly in what he insisted on calling Westcott’s “genius,” and that even the simplest soul on earth should believe in us gives some support to our doubting hopes and wavering ambitions. Henry admitted quite frankly to Westcott that he had not heard of him before he met him. Peter’s novels — Reuben Hallard, The Stone House, Mortimer Stant and two others — had been before Henry’s time and the little stir that Reuben had made had not penetrated the thick indifference of his school-days. Westcott was not at all sensitive to this ignorance. Before the war he had broken entirely with the literary life and his five years’ war service abroad had not encouraged him to renew that intimacy. He had had hard starving days since the Armistice and had been driven back almost against his will to some reviewing and writing of articles.
All men had not forgotten him he discovered with a strange dim pleasure that beat like a regret deep into his soul — the younger men especially because he had been a commercial failure were inclined to believe that he had been an artistic success. Mysterious allusions were made in strange new variegated publications to Reuben Hallard and Mortimer Stant.
He began to review regularly for The Athenæum and The New Statesman, and he did some dramatic criticism for The Nation. He soon found to his own surprise that he was making income enough to live without anxiety in two small rooms in the Marylebone High Street, where he was cared for by a kindly widow, Mrs. Sunning, who found that he resembled her son who was killed in the war and therefore adored him. Even, against his will, all his hopes, there were faint stirrings of a novel in his brain. He did not wish to revive that ambition again, but the thing would come and settle there and stir a little and grow day by day, night by night, in spite of his reluctance and even hostility.
Perhaps in this Henry had some responsibility. Henry was so sure that Peter had only to begin again and the world would be at his feet. One night, the two of them sitting over a small grumbling fire in the Coventry Street attic, Peter spoke a little in detail of his book.
After that Henry never left him alone. The book was born now in Henry’s brain as well as in Peter’s; it knew its own power and that its time would come.
Peter had by no means confided all his life’s history to Henry. The boy only knew that there had been a great tragedy, that Westcott was married but did not know where his wife was or even whether she were still alive. Of all this he spoke to no man.
Gabriel Hunter was a painter of the new and extravagant kind; his wife wore bobbed hair, wrote poetry and cultivated a little Salon in Barton Street, Westminster, where they lived.
The Hunters were poor and their house was very small and quite a small number of people caused it to overflow, but to Henry during the last year the Hunter gatherings had stood to him for everything in life that was worth while. It was one of his real griefs that Millicent wouldn’t go to that house, declaring that she hated the new poets and the new painters and the new novelists, that she liked Tennyson and Trollope and John Everett Millais and that as soon as she had a house of her own she was going to collect wax flowers and fruit and horsehair sofas. She said many of these things to irritate Henry and irritate him she did, being able to separate him from his very volcanic temper within the space of two minutes if she tried hard enough.
On every other occasion going to the Hunter’s had been synonymous to Henry with going to Paradise. To-night for the first time it seemed to be simply going to Westminster. At last, however, hunger drove him, and at a quarter-past nine he found himself in the Hunters’ little hall, all painted green with red stripes and a curtain covered with purple bananas and bright crimson oranges hanging in front of the kitchen stairs.
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.