That night at dinner Beresin's crowning laugh reached to every corner of the extensive room. It darted like an insolent mask among the voices and sounds of all the other diners. Everyone objected to it except the Russians, who objected to nothing that wasn't Russian: several people administered the glance of annoyance. This caused him a real satisfaction. He had the mania of shocking, the love of facile challenges. Let the aristocratically-minded display at least, by a suitable arrogance, by a flouting of the bourgeois hush, that a master was present. Let no human apprehension within reach enjoy its meal until it had bitterly noted, scowled, paid its tribute.
'Richard! Richard! your howl freezes my nerves,' his companion said, not so seasoned in the insolent life as he.
'I like laughing like that. D'you know, I always feel a better man when I laugh. If I didn't laugh for a fortnight, I believe I should grow so inhuman and wicked that I should be—a criminal without a crime!'
He brought this out with eager surprise, -overlapped by a doubtful and critical moment. However, it was only Nicky. When Beresin wrote, it was always on the model of pen, pencil, and poison. Charlie Peace was of course in the first rank of his heroes. The Brides in the Bath, in those sinister houses especially designed by the Great Architect of the Universe to entrap the innocently cunning, was a case he much liked discussing. Crime —as an artist he appreciated crime! For those above the law the only mates within it are those who break law in the grip of some beautiful folly! Madness alone may mate privilege; but it must be an evil (or a pretty) madness. The saint breaks out at the opposite end, loaded with more villainous chains than any central drudge. Wilde, the philosopher of the English dandy and fashionable frigid oligarch, the flower of West European democratic life, he liked better but respected less than Nietzsche. Beresin, after all, was not a Prussian! He had a far cunninger brand of Junker than any Nietzsche knew on which to model himself.
Now, as regards his connection with Nicky, it is necessary to say that Beresin was not a broadly comic 'aristocrat': that is, his discourse did not divulge with a farcical grossness the hobby of his mind. You might converse with him for half an hour and not suspect him, unless you were very acute, of being an aristocrat in any way. He had good sense: bonhomie, disastrous quality for his dreams, complicated his romantic humours. On this occasion he gave Nicky, as it happened, a brief lecture, designed to improve him; to free him, as it were.
'Besides, I like getting amongst these beggars with my laugh. I made that man at the next table there purple with anger. He's getting red again now: that's because he's listening to what I'm saying! It's so stupid of him to listen! You see, Nick, here you have a lot of glum-looking cattle. You want to stir them up: show the whole mob what you think of them! If they don't like what they hear, well, Nicky, they can do the other thing! If that gentleman there wants to know what I think of his unprepossessing countenance, why shouldn't he, bless him?'
The gentleman at the neighbouring table was prodding his wife with apoplectic sentences, to avoid listening to Beresin. A rupture would hardly arrive from him, although red. Nicky grinned. He had had his first definite lesson in the school-boy creed, and had grasped the cunning truth behind Beresin's simple exposition. This truth consisted in the perception of the impunity of the bold: of how much fun and swank could be compassed without so much as a black eye! Who would not be a 'blood' on these terms, indeed, who not?—the eager, rather vain but cautious soul of Nicky considered! Beresin imparted this with the glee of life's unfortunately wasted morning, as some new-found infallible 'tweek'. Beresin had not found out these things for himself, either. A real live prancing young noble of his acquaintance had initiated him into the fine subtleties and sublimities—so cheap as really to be within the reach of the poorest—of insolence and disregard. However humble a gentleman, you need not even be able to pass for that, once you have the trick, there will always be at least a million unenlightened souls on whom to practise. You know: they don't: an accident. Therefore you have the trickster's glee, you satisfy your eternal mood—which would be exactly theirs had they the tip, not you—and your hilarity. Is it ever necessary, Nicky might heedfully have inquired, to pay with violence on your body, or with money? Yes, his noble mentor would have been compelled veraciously to reply. For instance: you have to maintain a certain style: your tips to commissionaires, to servants and so on have to partake of that redundant quality that must characterize you. In everything you are really checkmated. That must be borne in mind. You need the anger of the shcA' :eper as much as the opinion, or imagination, of the commissionaire. It is because you are fundamentally like, as like as two peas to, your less informed, less polished brother, that you have need of him. You need to be seen by him, to keep close to or far from him. You are always a pea disguising itself from a million other peas. The other peas all know you are a pea, and love to think of a pea like themselves being a soft, subtle, clever, insolent pea! But your identity is precarious. Yes, you must be lavish; otherwise—you will receive that deadly look that one pea gives another when pretence is laid aside. You must furthermore be careful never to touch, mingle with or attack anything before first convincing yourself that it be, in fact, a pea. Do not be so fatuous as to interfere with a melon! it might not result in harm, but it is no fun! The whole game is constructed, all its rules made, for bodies roughly speaking, identical in volume and potentialities.
This is taking the lesson farther than Beresin would have done, and to a conclusion, or by means, too unflattering, perhaps to have furthered his end—in the event of so much instruction being considered desirable for Nicky. But had you said to Beresin with sufficient authority and the credentials of a newer or more ancient time, that all political philosophies were for the herd, one herd or another, big or little; that a man who was indeed fastidious, or superior, was not so liable to think of himself as an 'aristocrat', whether he were or not, you would soon have reversed his discipleship. He would have been a ready apostate to the romance of the junker. For all he required was an illustrious segregation, a superiority. He would imitate any figure that would satisfy the natural vanity of a young animal with an acute sense of its personal life, without worrying much about the details of your argument.
Having developed the correct atmosphere of hostility in the surrounding hotel guests, he naturally paid no further attention to them.
'I have been looking for fresh quarters.'
'Oh! Why! Isn't this all right?'
'Well, the food here, as you can judge, is abominable. The expense is appalling. I am on the way to a fresh overdraft.'
'You are leaving Miss Brunker?' That was the name of the secretary. Beresin looked towards the hall.
'I spend half my time inside that jolly old window. Snow use! She's the only civilised being here. Well, I have found nothing up till now.'
'I should have thought there were plenty of rooms—'
'Ah!' Beresin animated himself, and drawled the word at him with a vigorous, argumentative cunning. 'Ah, yes—5! But not the rooms I want. I must, my dear Nicky, have a deep, sunny, square room.' (He was all for a bit of cubism, was Richard.) 'A deep, elastic bed, that reminds you of the vaulting, the velvet ocean! Spongy blankets, quite new, two inches thick. I like a large mirror on slender supports. I like everything top-heavy! Then a double-basined basalt wash-hand stand.'
Nicky's face grinned hospitably for these absurdities. Beresin stopped and looked at him, encouraging his grin to keep going as though to announce that something even better was about to arrive. It arrived at the end of a minute-long repression.
'I must have a girl, too! I have needed a girl now for three weeks. It is a scandal. Just consider: for three weeks I have wanted a woman! But I want a particular kind of woman!'
'Are you as particular about her as you are about the room? And do you want a top-heavy one, by any chance? Because if you do, I know just the thing for you. She is a waitress down in the Flying Corps Mess—'
'No; no. I want none of your air-sculli
ons. I want a woman so shy that she can hardly bear to be looked at. To undress her would be like tearing a shell off a living crab. Her nudity would be so indecent that I should rush out of the room, at first, in horror. She would at the same moment faint on realizing that she was there—'
'I can see you're in a bad way, old chap. Why don't you run up to London for a few days?'
'I haven't got any money. Besides, it is here, in Paynes, that that woman exists.'
'Ah, if you know that—' 'If, if—?'
Beresin laughed once more and duly disturbed the diners. When he was with a friend and crowing, Beresin never approached a woman. He did not go near the office of the hotel on leaving the dining-room. He went and scandalized and deafened the lounge for an hour or more.
Nicky left the camp on the following day. Beresin had grown accustomed to the hotel. But, once more examing the record of his expenditure, he was forced to the conclusion that this tendency must be discouraged.
In the hour between tea and nightfall the sun appeared bitterly and mechanically above the wet landscape, and created a dreary illumination unfavourable to hope. Richard hurried out, struggling inefficiently with inconsequent regrets, disinherited tendencies, all sorts of bleak, jabbering ideas. The unlucky sky, the squalid regularities of the town, his legs' exasperating shapeliness in their lemon puttees, his isolation in this apricot-coloured damp, severe evening; this was so unsuccessful a 'pocket', if thinking of flying in the air, or barrage of melancholy, if turning to land war for your analogies, that it damped the very recesses of his spirit. He would have to overhaul everything because of it.
It was in Tewkesbury Avenue and in a villa named after the god of Paynes that he found his room. Mars Villa did not face the south; it stood shamelessly, squabbly aligned with other villas, as ignorant of its more than relative bestiality as the Hottentot photographed in a row with his scowling kith and kin. But it contained what most of even such houses contain—a woman. And was not a woman what Richard wanted?— boasted that he wanted and would get. Here she was right enough. She was a particular description of woman; he was fortunate to have found her. Her lips at all times in a lurid pout of love, set in a stagnant dream, lay at the opening of the cooing cavities of her contralto physique. She appeared generally in a dull glow of extinct passion, receding from life, or some moment of early eruption, and burning away harmlessly in Mars Villa. Could she be retrospectively amorous? Had her parents watched very swarthy dying queens, and been familiar with volcanoes? By all means with volcanoes!
Whatever answers might be found to those questions at once presenting themselves along with her like a well-trained suite, Beresin now put himself in a posture of seductive aggression. He had not liked hanging on the counter of the office at the hotel like a string of sausages, nightly. Sex and his dignity—or should you say his imposed character—were at war. He gazed and gazed and gazed at Miss Brunker, and was too afraid of his ideas—his boon companions really—to act. Here was something accessible, not encompassed with commerce, in a cheaper dwelling, materializing his boast to Nicky, approved by the flashy poet within him.
The camel, however, he also has his thoughts. The young lady of Mars Villa thought her thoughts in the discomfort of her cramped female thinking space—merely so full of subterfuges and practical business of sex. She thought her thoughts rather, too, like the crew of a retreating tank, huddled in a vulnerable and by no means swift vessel, as she ascended the stairs, pursued by his blandishments, bombarded by his bark. He barked at her, delightedly and repeatedly. It impressed her very much. 'What a funny laugh!' She dreamt of it.
He took the rooms, paid in advance, and left to bring his things round without delay. That night he was scrubbed by
Misrow in Mars Villa. He also kissed Titsy when he came in after dinner, she pressed against the wall, her face tastefully averted, her hands clutching his in an evidently not unfriendly spasm.
'Don't! Mr. Beresin! Please! you mustn't kiss me.'
Tets' languor welled into his room when she brought his tea. He concluded that his first impression of retrospective smouldering must be due to race: by some accident a clear and unimpeded descent on one spot or town. Everything that she felt had been felt in precisely the same way so often before by her ancestral replicas (same conditions, same chemistries and atmospheres) that its mean point of energy was considerably displaced into a past not properly hers: and also her own combustion was grown mechanical and unconvincing. But still she brought with her into the room something like a rich aura of generations of passion. When he kissed her he felt as though he were at play with a fat and sceptical ghost. She blushed in a heavy sudden way, her wet lips expanded and closed, and expanded again on her lips, like some strenuous amoeba. If he looked into her eyes they appeared to open and receive him like some extremely remote stranger. Any part he attacked, then, awoke to half life, with gentle and deliberate responsive spasm. He felt that she could lie on his breast for hours or months as naturally as a plum on its stem against a wall, without restlessness. For he still had the sensation of her consuming herself constantly. All that happened when their bodies were pressed against each other was that she appeared burning away rather more quickly.
Meantime, as regards conversation, which they had when he was not playing at the sun, or more local agency of heat, they talked very much as he had talked on the window-ledge of the West Berks office. When she came in at seven o'clock to light the lamp, he would say, 'Tet, come and sit on my knee.'
Titsy, as she was called, was a diminutive of Lutitia. Tets, appeared to Beresin to sum her up.
She would look at him with a smile and slowly shake her head.
He displaced himself and put his arms round her waist. She immediately became the plum on the wall, hanging heavily and ripely. The fruit of her breasts, which were large, was like a symbol of her entire flesh, hanging warmly and idly on the wall of her body. When his hand pressed these, her eyes fluttered and grew heavy. They were much more the essential part of her than anything else. And his enterprise was confined to that.
'Why do you kiss me?' she said one evening. 'I don't like those French kisses.'
'Are those French kisses?'
'Yes.'
'I kiss you because I don't believe too much in individuals.'
'Gohon!'
'I want to know what you taste like, and I want to keep fat.'
'You're quite fat enough.'
'Kisses take one back six thousand years. It is a delicious journey.'
'Don't be so silly.'
'But I promise you—! That's it. Kiss a woman and you become naked at once.' His talk of the crab's shell and the swooning nudity had got no farther. 'You are running wild once more and light-hearted.'
'You do say funny things sometimes.'
'Kiss me now; you will find that you are no longer in this room! It takes you much farther back than it does me.'
'Are you often taken like that?'
The 'finest story in the world' took him no further. The cheap sententious mysticism of the imperial bard recoiled before the deaf reality of this rather psychic, rather Eastern, young lady. So far did the brave Beresin get and there he unaccountably stuck. Just as the jolliest romances are apt to draw up abashed before too naked realities, so presumably his light-hearted lechery had been damped and cowed to its nursery by the contact of a full being. Then came the bolt from the blue of his marching order. He was to leave Paynes camp all at once, and to be hurried with his battery to Pitport, a two hours' journey the other side of London. They were for the East. It was the time when Batteries were rushed out before their scheduled training was complete, and before the final push overseas, they were hurried from spot to spot, saw much of England, the routine displacement retained.
Before leaving he arranged with Tets that they should meet in London if possible on the following Saturday. The next Saturday, turned out, in the event, not to be possible. Beresin had camp orderly officer to do for the week-end of his arrival
. The following week they met.
Now the quickened pace, the uprooting process, the quickening of military duties, caused a change in Richard Beresin. He clung to his exquisite habits, burnished his contempt every day and held it coldly up to his fellows with politeness when he considered they had appeared mentally untidy before him. He said his daily prayers to his deities; but even a philosopher should be in some way efficacious. He was going very soon now back to War. How had he spent his spell of leisure? It was not enough of a figure that he had filled this space with to satisfy him. Not conscious of it, the animal things had their way. Why had he not Miss Brunker to his account? His apathy in Mart Villa, following on his empty-handedness in the Hotel, what compensated for the blank canvas? He became more ostentfe tiously the jeune seigneur that all spirited youth should be' the natural man within swelled and concentrated itself, on the contrary, in equal measure.
The kettledrums and violins gulped and stuttered, 'Coma along with me, and have a Jubilee,' in the restaurant in which they ate. The members of the orchestra whistled, gave cat-calll and in some instances sat on their instruments and yelled 111(4 drunken babies. The chef d'orchestre dominated this disorder with his sharp protruding stomach and nose that never allowed you to see both his small pink-brown eyes at once. After a lawless performance, repeated three times, the band retired to eat.
'Nice place, isn't it?' Beresin said, in the rather exhausted silence that followed.
'Yes,' Tets said, 'It was nice,' her eyes directed at furs and queer female dresses.
He had to make her drink. He looked with leisurely satisfaction at her brown curls, brown eyes, brownish dress, white flower, white teeth, white gloves, and hard, bloodless face. Her beauty was as formal as a playing card, as neat and clean as a fish. Her red lips stuck out in a pulpy abstraction. She drew herself up from time to time free of her stays and sighed. They both guzzled. Bronx and Beaune, the war-wine that appears on tap, brought the right weighty cheer into their hearts.
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