It is impossible not to grow a little fond of this sentimental, whimsical, and poetic lady. She conforms so beautifully to type (I picture her in rather old-fashioned mauve with a whalebone collar): Christian, but only in the broadest sense, emotional, uninstructed, and a little absurd, as when she writes of the Garden of Gethsemane: ‘Here I had the greatest shock of all. For the Garden was not even weeded!’ She is serious about Art (‘Try a little experiment. Hold up your hand in front of your eyes so that you bisect a picture horizontally’) a little playful (‘Dürers so great that you felt you must walk up to them on tip-toe’). She loves dumb animals, and hates to see even a field mouse killed (‘One mustn’t let oneself wonder if perhaps the mice were building a house, which has now been wrecked, if perhaps Mrs Field Mouse was going to have babies, which will be fatherless’) and in their cause she shows considerable courage. (‘On more than one occasion I have created useless and undignified scenes at theatres in a vain protest against the cruelty of dragging terrified and bewildered animals to the footlights for the delectation of the crowd.’) This almost masculine aggressiveness is quite admirable when you consider the author’s timidity, how nervous she is in aeroplanes. (‘It is with the greatest difficulty that I refrain from asking the pilot if he is sure about the tail. Is it on? Is it on straight? What will happen if it falls off?’) and how on one occasion, climbing a pyramid, she very nearly had what she calls a ‘swooning sickness:’.
But what engaging company on these foreign cruises and excursions a maiden a lady of her kind must have been, exhilarated as she was by her freedom from parish activities. (‘All that matters is that we are alone and free, free. Nobody can telephone to us. Nobody can ask us to lecture on the Victorian novelists. It is beyond the realms of possibility that anybody, for at least twenty-four hours, will ask us to open a chrysanthemum exhibition’), and hilarious with the unaccustomed wine (‘We are, beyond a shadow of doubt, Abroad. And not only Abroad. At Large. And not only at Large but in a delirious haze of irresponsibility, and white wine’). Her emotions are so revealing: she weeps, literally weeps, over Athens. She disapproves of women who don’t grow old gracefully (‘I also thought how very much nicer and younger the average woman of forty-five would look, in this simple uniform, than in the stolen garments of her daughter’), she feels tenderly towards young people (‘The silvery treble of youth that is sweeter because it is sexless’), her literary preferences are quite beautifully commonplace: ‘What a grand play Galsworthy would have written round the theme of Naboth’s Vineyard.’ Excitable, sound at heart, genuinely attached to her brother and the vicarage. ‘The old dear,’ one exclaims with real affection, and I was overjoyed that she got safely home to her own garden before – but I mustn’t spoil her closing paragraphs:
There they were, dancing under the elm, exactly as I had planned them.
I was in time for the daffodils.
1936
FILM LUNCH
‘IF ever there was a Christ-like man in human form it was Marcus Lowe.’
Under the huge Union Jack, the Stars and Stripes, the massed chandeliers of the Savoy, the little level voice softly intones. It is Mr Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and the lunch is being held to celebrate the American Company’s decision to produce films in this country. Money, one can’t help seeing it written on the literary faces, money for jam; but Mr Mayer’s words fall on the mercenary gathering with apostolic seriousness.
At the high table Sir Hugh Walpole leans back, a great bald forehead, a rather softened and popular Henry James, like a bishop before the laying-on of hands – but oddly with a long cigar. Miss Maureen O’Sullivan waits under her halo hat . . . and Mr Robert Taylor – is there, one wonders, a woman underneath the table? Certainly there are few sitting anywhere else; not many, at any rate, whom you would recognize as women among the tough massed faces of the film-reviewers. As the voice drones remorsely on, these escape at intervals to catch early editions, bulging with shorthand (Mr Mayer’s voice lifts: ‘I must be honest to myself if I’m to be honest to you . . . a 200,000,000-dollar corporation like the Rock of Gibraltar . . . untimely death . . . tragedy’); they stoop low, slipping between the tables, like soldiers making their way down the communication trenches to the rest-billets in the rear, while a voice mourns for Thalberg, untimely slain. The bright Very lights of Mr Mayer’s eloquence soar up: ‘Thank God, I say to you, that it’s the greatest year of net results and that’s because I have men like Eddy Sankatz’ (can that have been the name? It sounded like it after the Chablis Supérieur, 1929, the Château Pontet Canet (Pauillac), 1933, G. H. Mumm, Cordon Rouge, 1928, and the Gautier Frères Fine Champagne 20 ans).
‘No one falls in the service of M.G.M. but I hope and pray that someone else will take his place and carry on the battle. Man proposes and God in his time disposes. . . .’ All the speakers have been confined to five minutes – Mr Alexander Korda, Lord Sempill, Lord Lee of Fareham, and the rest, but of course that doesn’t apply to the big shot. The rather small eyes of Mr Frank Swinnerton seem to be watching something on his beard, Mr Ivor Novello has his hand laid across his stomach – or is it his heart?
One can’t help missing things, and when the mind comes back to the small dapper men under the massed banners Mr Mayer is talking about his family, and God again. ‘I’ve got another daughter and I hope to God . . .’ But the hope fumes out of sight in the cigar smoke of the key-men. ‘She thought she’d like a poet or a painter, but I held on until I landed Selznick. “No, Ireen,” I’d say, “I’m watching and waiting.” So David Selznick, he’s performing independent now.’
The waiters stand at attention by the great glass doors. The air is full of aphorisms. ‘I love to give flowers to the living before they pass on. . . . We must have entertainment like the flowers need sunshine. . . . A Boston bulldog hangs on till death. Like Jimmy Squires.’ (Jimmy Squires means something to these tough men. They applaud wildly. The magic name is repeated – “Jimmy Squires’.) ‘I understand Britishers,’ Mr Mayer continues, ‘I understand what’s required of a man they respect and get under their hearts.’
There is more than a religious element in this odd, smoky, and spirituous gathering; at moments it is rather like a boxing match. ‘Miss O’Sullivan’ – and Miss O’Sullivan bobs up to her feet and down again: a brown hat: a flower: one misses the rest. ‘Robert Taylor’ – and the world’s darling is on his feet, not far from Sir Hugh Walpole, beyond the brandy glasses and Ivor Novello, a black triangle of hair, a modest smile.
‘He comes of a lovely family,’ Mr Mayer says. ‘If ever there was an American young man who could logically by culture and breeding be called a Britisher it’s Robert Taylor.’
But already we are off and away, Robert Taylor abandoned to the flashlight men. It’s exactly 3.30 and Mr Mayer is working up for his peroration: ‘It’s midday. It’s getting late. I shall pray silently that I shall be guided in the right channels. . . . I want to say what’s in my heart. . . . In all these years of production, callous of adulation and praise . . . I hope the Lord will be kind to you. We are sending over a lovely cast.’
He has spoken for forty minutes: for forty minutes we have listened with fascination to the voice of American capital itself: a touch of religion, a touch of the family, the mixture goes smoothly down. Let the literary men sneer . . . the whip cracks . . . past the glass doors and the sentries, past the ashen-blonde sitting in the lounge out of earshot (only the word ‘God’ reached her ears three times), the great muted chromium studios wait . . . the novelist’s Irish sweep: money for no thought, for the banal situation and the inhuman romance: money for forgetting how people live: money for ‘Siddown, won’t yer’ and ‘I love, I love, I love’ endlessly repeated. Inside the voice goes on – ‘God . . . I pray . . .’ and the writers, a little stuffed and a little boozed, lean back and dream of the hundred pounds a week – and all that’s asked in return the dried imagination and the dead pen.
1937
THE UNK
NOWN WAR
THERE are legendary figures in this war*1 of whom most of us know nothing. Secretly, week by week, they fight against the evil things: against Vultz, the mad German inventor, against Poyner, preparing to unleash plague-stricken rats on India, and the sneering sarcastic Group-Captain Jarvis, who was really Agent 17 at Air Base B. Billy the Penman; Nick Ward, heroic son of a heroic father; Steelfinger Stark, the greatest lock expert in the world, who broke open the headquarters of the German Command in Norway; Worrals of the WAAFs; Flight-lieutenant Falconer, with a price of 20.000 marks on his head, ‘framed’ as a spy; Captain Zoom, the Bird Man of the RAF – these are the heroes (and heroines) of the unknown war. This can never at any time have been a ‘phoney’ war: from the word go, these famous individuals were on the job.
It is not surprising in some of these cases that we know little or nothing about it: even his fellow schoolboys are still unaware of the identity of Billy Baker. His biography records one occasion when he was rebuked in class for an untidy piece of dictation. ‘The Headmaster would have got a shock if he had known he was scolding the boy who was known as “Billy the Penman”. the hand-writing genius of the British Secret Service. That was a secret shared by few people indeed.’ (It was a fine piece of work which enabled Billy the Penman to substitute 500 ‘lines’ – ‘I must do my best handwriting’ – for the details of a new anti-aircraft gun before the Nazi plane swooped down to hook the package from a clothesline.)
On the other hand only the extreme discretion of his schoolfellows can have prevented news of Nick Ward’s activities reaching the general ear. Nick Ward, because of a certain birthmark on his body, is considered sacred by Indian hillmen, and periodically he visits the Temple of Snakes in the Himalayas to gather information of Nazi intrigues. (To Ward we owe it that a plot to enable German bombers to cut off Northern India failed.) Unfortunately on one of these journeys he was spotted by enemy agents. ‘It was because he had been recognized and because the Headmaster wished to protect him that all the boys at Sohan College had been ordered to wear hoods over their heads. It had thus become impossible for the Nazi agents to pick out Nick from the others. Later, Nick discovered that the local Nazi leader was Dr Poyner, the school medical officer.’ Only a school medical officer was capable of conceiving the dastardly stratagem that nearly betrayed Ward into enemy hands. Hillmen crept up to the dormitory with pegs on their noses and blew sneezing powder into the room, so that the boys were forced to take off their hoods. (The pegs on their noses prevented the Indians being affected.)
Perhaps the spirit of these heroes is best exemplified by a heroine – Worrals, who shot down the mysterious ‘twin-engined high-wing monoplane with tapered wings, painted grey, with no markings’ in area 21-C-2. Her real name is Pilot-Officer Joan Worralson, WAAF, and we hear of her first as she sat moody and bored on an empty oil drum, complaining of the monotony of life. ‘The fact is, Frecks, there is a limit to the number of times one can take up a light plane and fly it to the same place without getting bored. . . .’ Boredom is never allowed to become a serious danger to these lone wolves: one cannot picture any of them ensconced in a Maginot line.
But the man who inspires one with the greatest admiration is Captain Zoom the lone flyer who beats away on his individualistic flights borne up on long black condor wings, with a small dynamo ticking on his breast. Even his mad enemy Vultz could not withhold admiration. ‘For a pig-dog of a Briton, he must have brains! This is a good invention. By the time I have improved it, it will be fit to use. Ja!’ Vultz, it should be explained, was engaged in building a tunnel from Guernsey to Britain. ‘The Nazis, since their occupation of the Channel Islands, had thought out a a new scheme for invading Britain. They were tunnelling from Guernsey to Cornwall using an entirely new type of boring-machine invented by a brilliant engineer named Vultz. This machine made tunnelling almost as quick as walking. Vultz, a fiend in human form, had a fixed hatred of RAF men, and for this reason employed them as slaves in the tunnel.’ No wonder Nick Ward on another occasion exclaimed that ‘the Nazis stopped at nothing. They did not mind how foul were the tricks they tried or how helpless victims died.’ Listen to Vultz himself:
‘It is here we must finish our tunnel,’ he croaked. ‘Portland Bill is the place. I don’t care what the High Command says. If they want me to help them they must listen to me. It is the shortest distance across the Channel from here.’
‘Ja, that is right, Herr Vultz, but they say –’ began a red-faced colonel.
‘Bah, I will hear no more of it,’ screeched the greatest engineer in Germany. ‘I don’t care what they say. You can tell them I will build my tunnel to Portland Bill or nowhere. It will be finished one week from today – if only they send me some more prisoners of war to work for me.’
The second man spoke up.
‘We have hundreds of thousands of prisoners of all kinds, British, French, and Polish. We send you thousands of them, but you demand RAF men. Not enough RAF men are being captured to supply you, Herr Vultz. Why will you not use someone else?’
The face of the mad engineer became twisted like that of a demon. He thumped the table.
‘Because my boring-maching kills those who work in it. It shakes them to pieces. I have reason to hate them. I will have RAF men or none. If they cannot capture enough, they must do so in some other way. I want five hundred RAF men.’
In fact, Vultz lost even the men he had: they were rescued by Zoom, and the Guernsey tunnelling camp was pounded to pieces by the RAF. ‘The Birdman had succeeded in his biggest job, the saving of Britain.’
But Vultz, one assumes, escaped. None of the leaders in this war ever dies, on either side. There are impossible escapes, impossible rescues, but one impossibility never happens – neither good nor evil is ever finally beaten. The war goes on; Vultz changes his ground – perhaps in happier days he may become again only a Pirate sniggering as his lesser victims walk the plank: Falconer, the air ace, is condemned to the firing squad, but the bullets have not been moulded that will finish his career. We are all of us seeing a bit of death these days, but we shall not see their deaths. They will go on living week after week in the pages of the Rover, the Skipper, the Hotspur, the BO.P., and the Girl’s Own Paper; in the brain of the boy who brings the parcels, of the evacuee child scowling from the railway compartment on his way to ignominious safety, of the shelter nuisance of whom we say: ‘How can anyone live with a child like that?’ The answer, of course, is that he doesn’t, except at meal-times, live with us. He has other companions: he is part of a war that will never come to an end.
1940
GREAT DOG OF WEIMAR
MY title is not, I must explain at once, a disrespectful reference to the great German poet, but to another inhabitant of Weimar, equally interesting but less well known. Perhaps I should have heard long ago of the unbearable Kurwenal, the companion (it would be inaccurate and flippant to call him the pet) of Mathilde, Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, but if I had not opened by chance a little book called When Your Animal Dies, written by Miss Sylvia Barbanell and recently published by the Psychic Press, I should have remained in ignorance that dogs had ever spoken – not only Kurwenal, the dachshund of Weimar, but Lola Kindermann, the airedale, and her father Rolph Meokel, of Mannheim. I have always suspected dogs: solid, well-meaning, reliable, they seem to possess all the least attractive human virtues. What bores, I have sometimes thought, if they could speak, and now my most appalling conjectures have been confirmed.
Miss Barbanell’s is – let me emphasize it – a serious book: the unbearable Kurwenal could have no place in a humorous one. He is here a minor character: Miss Barbanell is mainly concerned with the afterlife of animals towards which she gently leads us by her stories of animal intelligence – an afterlife not only for the unbearable Kurwenal and his kind but also for cats, pet pigs, and goats. We hear of two pet frogs materializing, and of Red Indian ‘guides’ who answer evasively – in language oddly unlike Fenimore Cooper’s – embarrassi
ng questions about bugs. (The lesser – undomesticated – creatures, it appears, join a group soul: there is a group soul for every species and sub-species, but nobody seems worried at the thought of how the group bug grows every time a Mexican crushes one with his toe: as for roast chicken, in future it will seem to me like eating a theosophist.)
But to return to the unbearable Kurwenal. Nobody can question his claim to immortality, with his strong moral sense, his rectitude, and his little clean clerical jokes. Perhaps I should have explained that the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (with a name like that she must have been a friend of Rilke) taught him to speak a language of barks, and the appalling dog was only too ready to learn. Five hundred investigators investigated him, including Professor Max Müller, but he seems on the whole to have endured them with exemplary patience. Only once did he rebel, and that momentarily, against a young neurologist of Berne University, exclaiming, ‘I answer no doubters. Bother the asses.’ It is the only recorded instance when this vile dog behaved other than well; there is no suggestion that he ever buried a bone, and the imagination boggles with embarrassment at the thought of the intimate scenes that must have taken place between Kurwenal and the Baroness when he was being house-trained. He would have done nothing to make the situation easier. ‘To me’, he was in the habit of saying with priggish self-approval, ‘learning is a great happiness’, and to a young scientist who visited him, he said, ‘I like to have you here. You are more sincere than most people.’ He was that kind of dog: one pictures the earnest melting brown gaze between the ears like ringlets.
Collected Essays Page 34