James Hilton: Collected Novels

by James Hilton

  That negation was performed, if performed is the word; talking, listening, and drinking then merged into a sigh of exhausted relief, and only a few Cassandra voices, among whom was Rainier’s, murmured that no miracle had really happened at all. But national hysteria urged that it had, and that one must not say otherwise, even if it hadn’t. Anyhow, the crisis passed, the rains of autumn soaked into half-dug trenches, and as the days shortened and darkened the Kenmore lamplight glowed again in the faces of diseuses and diplomats—Sir Somebody This and the Maharanee of That, the successful novelist and the Wimbledon winner, delegates from somewhere-or-other to the something-or-other conference, as well as visiting Americans who thought they were experiencing a real pea-souper fog because the sun of a November midday had turned red over the roofs.

  I went to a good many of those lunches, and somehow, I don’t remember exactly when, it became a recognized thing that I should have a place at all of them unless my duties with Rainier called me elsewhere.

  Often they did. Many days during that strange, almost somnambulist winter of 1938-1939 I sat in the Gallery of the House of Commons, listening to dull debates and hearing Big Ben chime the quarters till I saw Rainier get up and push his way through the swing doors with that casualness which is among the specialties of House procedure—a form of self-removal that implies neither rudeness nor even indifference to the speech in progress. Then he would dictate letters in a Committee Room, or order tea, or we might stroll along the usually empty Terrace, watching the last spears of sunset fade from the windows of St. Thomas’s Hospital, or staring over the parapet at a train of coal barges on their way upstream. It was at such moments that I came to know him most intimately, and to feel, more from his presence than from words, that the years he no longer talked about were still haunting; that he was still, as two women had said, vainly searching for something and never at rest. Yet outwardly, and to others, there were few signs of it. Indeed, the disfavor into which he fell as a result of his attitude towards official policy seemed to come rather as a release than as a suppression. It was not that he blamed the government for what had happened at Munich; such blame, he said, when history assessed it, would doubtless be spread over many years and many personages, of which the men of 1938 were but last in a tragic line. He did, however, blame those who had stepped out of panic only to sink back into hypnosis. “These are the last days,” he said to me once. “We are like people in a trance—even those of us who can see the danger ahead can do nothing to avert it—like the dream in which you drive a car towards a precipice and your foot is over the brake but you have no physical power to press down. We should be arming now, if we had sense,—arming day and night and seven days of the week,—for if the Munich pact had any value at all it was not as a promise of peace to come, but as a last-minute chance to prepare for the final struggle. And we are doing nothing—caught in the net of self-delusion and self-congratulation. We don’t realize the skill and magnitude of the conspiracy—the attempt to reverse, by lightning strokes, the whole civilized verdict of two thousand years.”

  Such talk, during the winter of 1938-1939, was heresy in a country that permitted heresy, but could not regard it as in good taste. People began to remark, in advance of any argument about him, that they liked Rainier—this also was a bad sign in a society where likings are rarely expressed except by way of fair-minded prelude to disparagement. And one reflected that there had always been something against his chances of attaining high office—something expressed by his political enemies when they praised him as “brilliant,” and by his political friends when they doubted if he were altogether “safe.” Such doubts were now running high.

  In the City, however, safety and brilliance were not held as incompatibles by gatherings of grateful shareholders at annual meetings in the Rainier Building. Here also it was my duty to accompany him, handing out appropriate documents and keeping his memory jogged against forgetfulness of such things as—“You will be glad to know that during the past year we have opened a new factory at West Bromwich where we are now manufacturing a model especially designed for the Colonies.” He made such announcements with a solemnity in which only I, perhaps, detected any ironic note; similarly there seemed to me a touch of disdain in his bent for handling complicated masses of figures, a touch that did not detract from the enormous confidence reposed in him by enriched but usually mystified investors. Nor was that confidence misplaced. Once I said to him: “Leaving sentiment out of it, you haven’t done so badly. You saved the family inheritance, you rescued the money of hundreds of outsiders, and you kept intact the jobs of a whole army of workpeople. You did, in fact, everything you set out to do.”

  “There’s only one thing more important,” he answered, “and that is, after you’ve done what you set out to do, to feel that it’s been worth doing.”

  That was the day when he took me down to the sub-basement of the Rainier Building to show me the result of certain constructional work that had been in progress there for several weeks. “I’ve allowed it to be supposed that these are new storage vaults,” he told me, as we entered the first of a series of empty catacombs, “but actually I had another thought in mind—and one that it would be too bad to thrust on a group of happy dividend collectors. But the fact is—and entirely at my own personal expense—I’ve made this place bombproof. So you see, something’s been worth doing.” He walked me round like an estate agent. “Comfort, as well as safety,—there’s an independent heating plant,—because it’s no good saving people from high explosive just to have them the of influenza. And another reason—the greatest man of the twentieth century may have to be born in a place like this, so let’s make it as decent as we can for him. A steel and concrete Manger—sixty feet below ground … that’s why I’ve had to keep it a big secret, because you couldn’t expect the investing public to swallow that.”

  But we liked the City—“the City of Meticulous Nonsense,” he called it once, after an annual meeting at which somebody had used the adjective in praise of his own attention to the firm’s affairs. “Meticulous,” he echoed, afterwards, “really meaning timid—and how right that it should nowadays be used as a compliment, since so many of the most complimented people nowadays deserve it! Meticulous little people attending meticulous meetings, passing meticulous votes of thanks for meticulous behavior!”

  One rainy Saturday we waited several minutes while the homeward rush-hour crowd swarmed in front of the car, taking no notice of the horn until a man, just an ordinary mackintoshed fellow with (I remember) a piece of garden trellis under his arm, called out: “ ’Ere, give the bloke a chawnce!”—whereat the crowd, heeding just as casually as they had been heedless before, made way for us to pass There was no resentment in their faces because we had an expensive car or because we kept them waking a few seconds longer in the rain, no social significance in the appeal to give the bloke a chance, no indication of who the bloke was—I or Rainier or the chauffeur. The very absence of all these things was English, Rainier said—something offhand but good-humored, free but obedient, careless but never heartless.

  “But tell that,” he added, “to the Indians in Amritsar, to the Chinese who read the notice in a Shanghai park; ‘No Dogs or Chinese Allowed,’ to the tribesmen in Irak, to the peasant in County Cork, to the …” But then he laughed. “God, how we’re hated! It isn’t so much because we really deserve it. Even at the bottom of the charge sheet I could quote Santayana’s remark that the world never had sweeter masters. Sweet—a curious adjective—and yet there is a sweetness in the English character, something that’s almost perfect when it’s just ripe—like an apple out of an English orchard. No, we’re not hated altogether by logic. It’s more because the world is tired of us—bored with us—sickened by a taste that to some already seems oversweet and hypocritical, to others sour and stale. I suppose the world grew tired of the Romans like that, till at last the barbarians were excused for barbarism more readily than the Caesars were forgiven for being tough. There c
ome such moments in the lives of nations, as of persons, when they just can’t do anything right, and the world turns on them with the awful ferocity of a first-night audience rejecting, not so much a play it doesn’t want, as a playwright it doesn’t want any more. … But wait till they’ve experienced the supplanters—if we are supplanted. A time may come when a cowed and brutalized world may look back on the period of English domination as one of the golden ages of history. …”

  I remember that afternoon particularly because as we were waiting for the traffic lights in Whitehall we saw Nixon at the curbside vainly signaling a taxi and Rainier had the car stopped to offer him a lift. Bound for Victoria to catch a train, he chattered all the time during the short drive, finally and quite casually remarking; “Oh, you remember that fellow Ransome who took us to tea at his house in Browdley that day when his wife wasn’t there?”

  Rainier looked up sharply.

  “Rather sad business,” Nixon continued. “She’d gone out to buy a cake, as Ransome thought—must have been hurrying back, because she was carrying it as she ran into the bus … killed instantly … poor chap was in a terrible state, so I heard. Only been married about a year.”

  We drove on in silence after dropping Nixon in the station yard; Rainier’s face was strained, tense, as if he had suffered a personal blow. Halfway to Kenmore he tapped on the window, and ordered the chauffeur to turn and drive back. “Let’s hear somebody play the piano,” he said. “That’s the best cure for the mood I’m in.”

  We drove to the West End, while I searched the Telegraph for recital announcements. The only one I could find was of the first and only appearance in London of Casimir Navoida, who would give a mixed program of Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, and Ravel at the Selsdon Hall. I had never heard of Navoida, and the fact that Rainier hadn’t either lent no optimism to my expectations. We found a photograph on the rain-sodden posters outside the Hall—the conventionally somber, heavy-lidded profile brooding over the keys. That too was not encouraging, nor was the obviously “paper” audience of only a few score. Nor, for that matter, were the explanatory notes in the printed program—composed, Rainier grimly suggested, by some schoolgirl in a mood of bibulous Schwärmerei. With less distaste we read a paragraph about the performer, though even that was vague enough—merely mentioning a Continental reputation, tuition under Leschetizky (misspelt), a prix-de-somewhere, and an ancient press-agent anecdote beginning—“One morning, at the So-and-So Conservatoire …” Then the door at the rear of the platform opened and this fellow Navoida walked to the piano, gave a hinge-like bow to half-hearted applause, and began. He did not look much like his photograph, though a description could not have omitted the same points—the gloomy profile, wrinkled nape, and upflung hair. We listened with tolerance, soon aware that his playing was not exactly bad. When the interval came I noticed a woman in the seat beyond Rainier’s fumbling for a dropped program; presently he stooped and retrieved it for her. She thanked him with a foreign accent and added: “You think he plays well?”

  Rainier answered: “He might be good if he weren’t out of practice.”

  “You are a critic?”

  “Only to myself.”

  “You are not on one of the newspapers?”

  “Oh dear, no.”

  She seemed both relieved and disappointed. “I thought you might be. I suppose they are here.”

  Rainier looked round and included me in the conversation by saying: “Notice anybody? I don’t… I’m afraid Saturday afternoon’s a bad time in London.”

  Then Navoida came on again and played the Chopin group. At the next interval she said: “You are quite right. He is out of practice. He played cards till four this morning.”

  Rainier laughed. “Stupid of him, surely?”

  “Oh, he doesn’t care. He lost much money, also. If only people would realize that he can play so much better than this—”

  “Why should they? If he chooses to drink and gamble the night before a concert—”

  “Oh no, not drink. He never drinks.”

  “No?”

  “But gambling is in his blood. It is in the blood of all the Navoidas. If he travels by autobus he will bet on how many people get in at each stop.”

  Rainier looked slightly interested. “How do you know all this about him?”

  She had just time to reply, as the piano began again: “I am his wife.”

  I could judge that throughout the Brahms Sonata Rainier was feeling somewhat embarrassed at having discussed the pianist so frankly, but when the next interval came she gave him no time to apologize. “Oh, I could kill him for being so bad! The foolish boy. … Maybe it was a mistake to come to England at all.”

  Rainier answered: “Oh, no need to feel that. But your husband’s concert agent ought to have chosen a better day for a first appearance. Londoners like to get away to the country at week ends.”

  “Even when it rains?”

  “My goodness, we never bother about rain.”

  “Ach, yes, your London climate … when it is not rain, it is fog. … I understand.”

  I winked at him, apropos of this foreign belief that English weather is the worst in the world; it is not, Rainier had once said, but the convention is useful in that it enables an English man to appear modest by conceding something that, whether true or false, is of little consequence. All the time that Madame Navoida was bemoaning London rain and fog I was glancing at her sideways and judging her to be forty-five or so—younger, at any rate in looks, than her husband. The light in the concert hall was not particularly kind, and her make-up had either been put on hurriedly or else had got blurred by raindrops; her eyes were brown and rather small, but her forehead had a generous width that somehow compensated; it was an interesting face.

  During the Ravel I whispered this to Rainier and received his reply: “I don’t give a damn about her face. And I don’t give a damn about this Ravel either. I only know she amuses me and I’m more cheerful than I was an hour ago. …”

  For the next few minutes I heard the two of them in whispered conversation; then he turned to me. “They’re Hungarians, but she lived for a long time in Singapore—hence the English. She also speaks French and German—besides, of course, Hungarian. Writes poetry in all four, so she’d have you believe. Also worships Romance with a capital R. Reads Dekobra and D’Annunzio, but prefers Dekobra—so do I, for that matter. … Altogether rather like a female spy in a magazine story—every minute I expect her to say ‘Hein’ and produce a bundle of stolen treaties out of her corsage. And she says such delicious things—like—‘Ach, your English climate—’ and that bit about gambling being in the blood of all the Navoidas. … I’m trying to think of something half as good as what she’ll say next—remember that game we used to play?”

  That was one of the fooleries we would sometimes indulge in during our morning car journeys to the City. There was a certain newspaper shop at a street corner in Pimlico, and outside it, every Tuesday, appeared a picture poster advertising that week’s issue of a publication called Judy’s Paper; and this poster always showed an evening-clothed couple in some highly dramatic situation, captioned by such a sentence as “He refused her a ring” or “She lied to save him.” Most Tuesdays, before we reached the shop, Rainier and I would try to invent something even triter than what we should presently discover, but we never succeeded, so hard is it for the sophisticated mind to think in the natural idiom of the ingenuous. But it made an amusing diversion, for all that.

  After further whispering he turned to me excitedly. “She’s said it! I knew she would! She’s just told me that we English are so cold!” At that moment Navoida finished the Ravel and Rainier was able to answer her amidst the applause. I heard him say: “Madame, we are not cold—it’s merely that we have to be warmed up, especially on wet Saturdays. So I beg you to make allowances for us during the rest of your stay here.”

  “We are leaving tomorrow.”

  “So soon?”

  “Casimir h
as a concert in Ostend on Wednesday.”

  “You’d better take care of him there. It’s a great place for gambling.”

  “Oh, that will be all right. We shall go to the Casino and have champagne and Casimir will be lucky—he always is at roulette. It is cards he is no good at—especially poker.” (She pronounced it “pokker.”) “When I saw him playing poker with some Americans at the hotel last night, I knew he would be a bad boy today.”

  “I thought you said he didn’t drink?”

  “Only champagne. But of course it is so expensive in England. When we were in Singapore we drank nothing but Heidsieck all the time. A bottle every meal. It prevented him from being dysenteric.”

  “Probably it also prevented him from being Paderewski.”

  “You mean it is not good for him? But consider—if it pleases him, is he not entitled to it? What is the life of a concert artist nowadays? Nobody cares—there is no musical life as it used to be—in Berlin, in Leipzig, in Wien. Only in America they pay an artist well, but I do not want him to go there again.”

  “Why not?”

  She whispered something in Rainier’s ear and then added: “Of course I forgave him afterwards. He was faithful according to his fashion.”

  Rainier let out a shout of sheer glee. “What’s that? What?”

  She repeated the sentence. “Do you not know the poem by one of your English poets, Ernest Dowson?” And she began to recite the whole thing from beginning to end, while Casimir, in whom I was beginning to feel a deeper interest after these varied revelations, appeared on the platform to play the Chopin “Black Key Study” as an encore, muffing the final octaves and finishing on a triumphantly wrong note in the bass. “Perhaps you would now like to meet him?” she concluded.