Their kisses in the taxi on the way to the Alhambra partook of the disordinate character of the orchestra in its last bout. She arrived there in physical disarray, her eyebrows raised, eyes staring, lips in reminiscent uncontrol. She wept with laughter at the Bing Boys. Robey, with his primitive genius, flattered the mood of the evening. She did not deny the Bacchanalia its culmination. As they drove through the black streets afterwards they lay in each other's arms and sealed their unwisdom with the ultimate convulsions of love. The eating up of the pennies and the yards on the taximeter was an intense and palpable symbol of time.
The next morning Beresin found a warm mass beside him in bed, and realized, as he would have done at the presence of a pool of blood or a dead body, that the preceding evening had been marked by a human event. The mass stirred, and a cumbrous bestial scented arm passed round his body. In the middle of a thick primitive gush of hair, he found the lips with their thoughtful pathetic spasm. He looked with curiosity and uneasiness at what he found so near to him.
The corpses of the battlefied had perhaps cheapened flesh? Anyway, realities were infectious; and all women seemed to feel that they should have their luxurious battles, too; only they were playing at dying, and their war was fruitful.
'Willie, do you love me a little bit?'
What should he say? He loved her as much as he loved a luscious meadow full of sheep, or the side of a tall house illuminated by a sunset, or any pleasant sight or sound that he might meet. But that is not what women mean by 'do you love me?' He understood that. They mean, 'Do you think that perpetual intercourse with me for the rest of your life would be a nice thing?' That was hardly a question to put to a sentimental theorist of nobility, a dealer in hardness. Was the mink to inquire of the panther whether he would always kiss so nicely, while he was giving the mink a preliminary lick before devouring his prey?
However, he answered softly enough, for he was sentimental in more ways than one, although more dangerous in love than in theory!
A woman was for him a conventional figure, and an inferior, to be treated like all other inferiors. When the moment pointed to a display of chivalry she changed at once to a figure of romance, and she became your superior. But social standing again controlled the scope and likelihood of this vacillation. He remembered Nietzsche's useful dissection of Thomme passionne' and what the world called 'passionate'; and that he had said that a fine woman was undoubtedly finer than a fine man, but was much rarer! He had chuckled at this big-browed old German fox's finesse.
Had he been an artist, and Corot, he would have attached himself to a series of valleys, and a certain delicate-tinted tree. But his woman, deflected from abstraction by her human admixture, would not have been Corotesque. That is clear.
It will seem, nevertheless, that this young man could not afford, as a Corot could, to disregard the results of his love, and its animal raison d'etre. Corot might feel that Corot could not be improved on and display a certain large indifference as to where he scattered his seed; seeing that, however great the care he took, he was a culmination, and not likely to produce another Corot; and equally unlikely to cause women to bring forth Daumiers or Daubignys! Had Beresin reasoned too much, he would probably have been an ardent theorist of a more sifted hygienic stock.
Back in Pitport, he forgot his week-end with Tets in exactly the same spirit that the majority of men forget their dreams. He was imbued with a sense of the speed of events. There was a whirl behind him and there was nowhere time to look steadily at anything. Time had become as material as a taxicab. The batdefield was his destination, wherever he was for the moment. Death was extremely busy and he was in the ten-league queue,
pass or not pass. He shifted and shuffled nearer.
He wrote to Tets and arranged meetings. She wrote nice and quite literate letters, with a stereotyped nonchalance of tone.
Two weeks later he felt a desire to exhaust a little more his idyll with Tets. The rawness of his raptures jarred on his memory. He wished to continue if not complete their miniature love. Tets had to be seen.
She came up from Paynes obediently. Her retrospective ardour now appeared, flatteringly, to apply to him. He did not have any longer to imagine dying indigo queens. He found her above his expectations as he met her on the platform. He had not had a very distinct negative of her. He approved of his fellow animal, and rapt her into a hectic bluster of cheap music, excessive food, bad drink, purse-proud spectacles, dominated by some small ape, specializing in comic hysteria. With her, he deliberately chose the vulgarer sites and scenes contemptuously, to keep her in her place. That she should in any way be appearing to share his finer life would have been inappropriate. He liked relegating her a little more than he would, in any event, unconsciously have done, to the places where coarse things prevailed.
For two days they wallowed breathlessly. She appeared perpetually in a sort of mesmerized inattentiveness. She hurried, excited and a little unhappy, along with him, her eyes staring away, clouding, crying, dark rings coming under them. His eye fixed on her person like a small blasting flame, and he did not leave her till the end of the second day, when that illumination had burnt itself down and grown normal. His train left before hers, and he left her crying, sitting like a child sideways on a seat and shaking.
His equanimity gave way to discomfort as he watched this sight. Had he really been immersing in a harsh, seething brutality what was fundamentally a child? Objectively men are so small, and startle each other by pictures of weakness. This last picture, as he left the Tets show for good, remained an emotive key in his mind as regards this last sweetheart.
A fortnight later Beresin sailed for the East. He did not go into action for some time. He was lucky when he did. He was away for eighteen months. Letters from Egypt reached Tets, short notes describing odds and ends of life in war time. Her second letter announced a complication. Tets must expect a child. Slowly growing, henceforth, from a speck, until it became an appreciable human cloud of new being, Beresin was faced with a complex and weird monument to his parting licence. Something had been started that nothing could arrest, in Tets' case, and with him away so far. From what he knew of her, he accepted the girl's indication of him as father. He wrote her what he considered with reason a plain and friendly letter; he enclosed a cheque for ten pounds, which he recommended her to husband.
'I cannot marry you when I get back. But I will keep the child. Write me what money you need.'
He saw the figure sitting sideways on the seat and crying. It was to this figure he wrote. That had been a sort of foreshadowing of the child. The moving adult mass in the bed, so much larger and more formidable, had cast up, as a parent does, the little dressed derelict crying on the platform, a temperate atom of everyday life. Tets was small and pathetic. He was patronizing with his larger manifestation (an equivalent of which Tets equally possessed) Tets' smaller physical manifestation.
Beresin derived acute satisfaction from the sight of this diminutive pathos: the small, in fact, in this case, almost synonymous with the Beautiful. So no virtue can be alleged on account of his pity. The letter brought not much consolation to Tets. She divined a very tough self-preservative instinct behind the promises, pity and ten-pound note. She shrank herself up into a child again and wept, although there was no one (except perhaps her more mature and formidable self) to see it. The burning-away process that Beresin had conceived as characteristic of Tets, now set in no longer as the visual preserve of the perspicacious. Everyone near Mars Villa could note her diminishing on the one hand, as she grew on the other. From two sides now, retrospectively and ultrospectively, she guttered away. She was sent to London for the most scandalous stage of her pregnancy.
In Africa Beresin found that he had more than singed himself in contact with the peculiar flame that gnawed away at Tets. In the form of Tets herself he began to be devoured by it in turn. The big white scented mass recollected, made a Thebaide of his dug-out. He was snug as a beetle in the midst of a trencher ful
l of dough. His enthusiasm for particularity did not stand out against the eloquent attacks of his animal spirits. Extreme homesickness, in the first place, was a thing he was as susceptible to as anyone could be to sea-sickness. The distance intervening between himself and his attachments made him giddy, as though the troop-ship had mounted to Egypt, instead of laterally progressing through the waves. Tets also dominated and engulfed the composite picture of his harem—of Caroline, Maisie, Maud and Billie. What a pass to have come to! He goes out on the female hunt; lodges in his trap, incidentally: now he is being slowly devoured by his prey. He finds himself toying absentmindedly with—what is this? A marriage ring! He calls in Paris, with its painted sweetmeats, to his aid. Entire cafes full of boon-companions and of women are emptied into his dug-out. Then again he looks round at the Black and the Brown. They, as we all know, help you along with the White. But much more than that, this caviare of a dark and acrid skin is the test, surely, of whether your palate is a noble, an adventurous palate, or a plebeian one! This was perhaps the bitterest pill. Beresin could never bear to think of that failure! Without the presence of mind, ever, when in face of this discomfort, to reflect on the quality of the 'mets' and therefore the extent of his disgrace, he was simply blackened in his own eyes for ever, ethiopianly blackened.
There was one, only one, thing he could remember with equanimity from this time: one little flash of the true stuff. It was when at the moment of perhaps his supreme discomfort— the second chronologically—he seized his cane and beat the vociferous young negress who was the cause of it.
'You nasty black baggage! Take that on your horrible hide! And that and that! I don't like you! You're all dressed up and nowhere to go! How dare you! Take that!'
Except for that masterly gesture, even at the moment when he was being ignominiously certified as possessed of bourgeois
senses, and with grave disabilities for inclusion in the ranks of the elect, except for that it was a period of complete eclipse of his self-esteem. Then, he was at present associated with two or three genuine dooks, as an officer. One of these nobles did not like him, and abused him to the other younger nobles. What could it be? Beresin wondered. Was it a further judgment on him, like the discomfort of his senses at the hands, or hps, of the Negroid and the Nautch? Was it now the turn of Blue Blood itself, as it had been a moment before of Black, to turn him down; or for him to be unqualified to mix with? Beresin in the presence of the real thing was shy. The actual breathing, walking flower to which so many doctrines, Nietzches and Gobineaus, reverently point: this magical, masterly thing? Gould the flesh and blood of the disciple be expected to support that sight with equanimity? He was awed at the polish and purity of the vocables, of the exquisite vowels, when two of the nobles were talking together. Ah, but his middle-class enunciation—? Then the attitude of mind—so free, so cynical—how well calculated to allure the Philosopher, and make him place Truth somewhere where she could learn such beautiful manners! The short, scrubby physique, the thoroughly villainous stupidity of the noble, who was also his colonel, and 4 enemy, appeared to him in the highest sense, peculiarly, attributes. The stupidity, which he also saw, was the divine stupidity of the Noble! The physical commonplace—which he noted— how characteristic, paradoxical, and in fact the 'real thing'!
Here were fresh despondencies, then, that threw him back more yet upon the female presence which was the twin domination in his life. And these two masters that destiny had bestowed on him were at war. Or rather, was it not a Master and a Mistress? The Mistress did not also move in quite the same circles as the Master, the prancing noble; friction ensued, therefore, where possession of Richard was in question. Billie and Caroline had been other forms of Tets. But Tets was enthroned; for although one of several, she was softly sculpting a Totem, whereas others had not had that art—or craft.
He wrote her a sort of love-letter. It was a sort of one because it was wrung with repugnance as well as passion. Oh, why was
not the Home-girl a Haristocrat? Then she would have been as likely, as well as vigorous, a nymph as could be found on the banks of an English stream. No, nothing but a sort of a love-letter could be written; a tentative, shame-faced, blowing hot and cold missive. It blew hot in parts, where the endearments came to be written. He told her what a romantic bore the Desert was; that Suez was a sink of ennui. He wished that she were there! He could do with—he divagated and dreamt almost obscenely. So much amassed idleness, heat, and the staring red inflammation of youth! He tied the letter up with the others and it went on its nebulous errand.
In return, he got a letter from Lutitia's parents informing him in injured and more or less injurious terms that their daughter was dead.
He received this bitter communication in his dug-out, on the North-west frontier, while he was engaged in censoring the men's letters. They could be summed up in the hackneyed type of man's letter, 'Dear Ma, this war's a fair bugger,' with the interminable, piteous 'in the Pinks.' The one he was actually looking through kept referring to Kate's apparently well-known penchant for soldiers. Kate was certainly the writer's sister and he seemed strongly to dislike the thought of her frequenting any man of the same calling as himself and friends. Beresin was wondering if Driver Lawrence had some past English guilt on his mind, or whether it was from sheer dislike of and a form of vengeance on his comrades. Ma, even, too, was addressed fiercely, and would seem to have been not quite free from similar tendencies.
Beresin's irony was chastened by the arrival of his own letter.
Now the ghost that his senses had brought all the way from England to vegetate in his dug-out or hut was dead. There was an eerie feeling in it; he looked at the two photographs placed neatly on a shelf five feet above the ground. One still smiled, but he felt now that they were objects of ill-omen. They were shortly after put back in his kit-bag. He was sorry; but it did not make him reflect. That night, lying in his camp-bed, he remembered that the night before he had been luxuriating in the anticipation of sleeping with Tets again when the distant leave to England came; practically sleeping with her there, in fact, for a moment and to some extent, while all the time she was dead. The child received a little tentative thought. The parents shortly received a cheque from him for £40.
And the year passed, chiefly in Mesopotamia; when he came home he was much the worse for wear, after dysentery. At his request, Tets' mother brought her daughter's child up to London. He waited for her uneasily at his hotel. He occupied an unnecessarily handsome room, and stood in the full glory of impeccable mufti. At their last meeting he had settled up with Mrs. Stapledown for board and lodging.
The mother was surprisingly silent and looked at him in an uncertain way, several different interests and opposite emotions cancelling one another on her face.
'How do you do, Mrs. Stapledown? You don't know how upset I was. I was dreadfully upset. I loved your daughter. You don't believe me, I expect? No? I intended—Ah! this is our baby? What a jolly little baby! I don't know what to say to you! I'm afraid you—'
He took the child in an embarrassed way. The feeling of this warmth, and the weight of the springy, limp object-—warmth and weight his, like his own hands—pleased and embarrassed him still more.
'Yes; I do! I'm a mother. I loved my girl. You have done wrong, very wrong, Mr. Beresin.'
She stood rather breathless, her eyes shining.
The clumsy way she was being held increased the baby's alarm at the stranger. The face puckered slowly, and sitting helplessly on his knee she began to howl. He recognized at once in the child the Tets touch. The little convulsive crab-like being sat there on his knee like a transfigured Tets.
He shyly and slowly pedalled it up and down on his knee. There was a moment full of embarrassing innuendoes when he had to give it back to Mrs. Stapledown.
'Never mind, my precious, then!—there—!' The grandmother also appeared to be substituting Tets for the infant.
Beresin helped regularly with the rearing of the child, an
d saw it fairly often. For the first year and a half it was, with its reveries, its dead white face and beauty of minuteness, very affecting. It had the same unusual interest at that stage as Tets promised when he first saw her. The horrible gift of speech had not descended on it.
He got it called Veronica, for it to have a name similar to Lutitia's. But when Veronica grew big she lost her beauty. The pulpy and stormy little totem became a dull human being, with whom decay set in early. She was unnecessarily robust with a mania for exploiting the beauty of smallness! She would attempt to stimulate interest, cause pity, or induce amusement, by mincing or conducting herself in babyish style, to mesmerize you into seeing her 'en petit'.
From Beresin's point of view it was lamentable. It was as though she had divined, in the telepathy of her infant state, the cause of the father's infatuation, and his more distant emotion at her mother's helplessness, and attempted, with a coarseness not even elephantine, and a bitter lack of tact, to perpetuate it.
The whole of their future relations, beyond the first years of babyhood, were struck by what seemed like a blast of God's irony. Also she was the homeliest description of woman. No aristocrat could have had a less appropriate child!
CONCLUSION
The New Guy who's got into the Landscape
Conclusion
We now come to 1926. I was practically always underground by then—buried in the Reading Room of the British Museum or out of sight in some secret workshop. And then, on top of the General Strike, was published the first of my non-fiction books, The Art of Being Ruled.
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