by Alec Waugh
He spoke in part pontifically, in his bored, superior Oxford manner; in part with the fretful impatience that had come into his voice at Fernhurst. Clearly, we were talking at cross-purposes.
I changed the subject.
‘What are you going to do when you come down?’ I asked. ‘Take a flat in London and look round till I find something that really suits me.’
He spoke with an airy confidence.
That evening I made inquiries about him at the College of which I was the guest. There was a titter when I told them how we had nicknamed him at school.
‘The only ambitions he’s shown any signs of here are social. He’s the most crashing snob that ever walked,’ they told me. ‘He’ll only know peers and honourables.’
‘Does he know many?’
‘A good few. It’s not difficult in a place like this. If that happens to be your racket.’
With this information I felt better equipped to deal with Bevan.
When we met next morning, I directed our conversation into a social channel. He expanded, readily. A society columnist could not have been more full of gossip.
I nodded and smiled and interjected an occasional remark. It was easy now to realize what had happened. Bevan was a provincial; with a provincial’s anxiety to mix in the great world, to make a name for himself, to be a figure. He had naturally regarded a small school like Fernhurst as a stepping-stone. He had avoided friendships that might prove a hindrance to him later, concentrating upon the classics, recognizing that to have been head of his school and a scholar of Balliol would make an effective start to a career at Oxford. But that start once made, he had found it possible without further calls upon his scholarship to mix with members of the world that dazzled him. I watched his face as he spoke of his acquaintance with the aristocracy. He was sunning himself in the light of his achievements. Although he had been content to read a short course instead of becoming a Fellow of All Souls, he clearly regarded himself as unqualified a success at Oxford as he had been at Fernhurst.
He seemed, however, to be no happier here than he had been at school. His face still wore that driven look: the fear of being late for something.
I had proof of this before my visit ended.
We had gone into Blackwell’s to buy a copy of the recent New- digate. A tall, loose-limbed young man wearing an old Etonian tie came over to us. Bevan introduced me. As the introduction was one-sided, I did not learn his name. I did notice, however, how completely Bevan’s manner changed. It was hard to say in what particular. But there was a general atmosphere of constraint, of self-consciousness. A tightening up, a talking for effect.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked when we were in the Broad again.
‘That? Oh, that’s Harry Marshall, Lord George Marshall, you know. The Marquis of Patrixbourne’s younger son. A delightful fellow.’
A rich note of satisfaction like the purring of a well-stroked cat had come into his voice. Yes, I thought, you get an enormous kick out of reminding yourself that you know these people, but you’re not in the least happy when you’re with them.
What, I wondered, would happen to him when he came down? He had a private income of some five hundred pounds a year. A sum on which it is possible to make an adequate display at Oxford, but which does not see a social climber very far in London. I also knew how well-stocked London was with young men from Oxford demanding employment worthy of themselves. It would be amusing to watch the outcome. Not that I supposed I should see much of him. I was not nearly grand enough.
Nor was I. Neither should I, had not a friend of mine chosen to fall in love with him. Her name was Lucy Martin. And I can best describe her by saying that she was a typical 1917 club product. She was, that is to say, in the early twenties. She had become politically conscious during the last months of the war when Liberal opinion was turning towards the Labour Party in protest against a capitalist continuation of the war. She was pretty, in the hour’s fashion: dark, bobbed hair, be-jumpered; with the smoke of innumerable cigarettes drifting across her eyes. Her slogan was ‘personal liberty’. Politically, she was extremely narrow, angrily intolerant of every shade of opinion except her own; but in herself she was genuine, warm-blooded, open-hearted. She was in addition admirable company. She had a zest for life. She always enjoyed what she was doing. I saw a good deal of her during the first half of the 1920s.
She regarded me as a kind of father-confessor. She had, however, the habit of describing her acquaintances by their Christian names, so that I had no means of identifying the ‘Raymond’ of a long, inconclusive, unsatisfactory saga. For weeks she had told me about him: how handsome he was, how brilliant, how misunderstood. ‘He could do anything, but anything; only in the way that society’s constituted now there isn’t anything for him to do.’
I asked her what he did do.
‘Nothing, as yet. He’s waiting till he finds work that’s worthy of him. He’s bound to, soon, of course. But in the meantime you can’t be surprised at his being rather bitter, when he sees third-rate people succeeding everywhere.’
He lived in a maisonette flat in Bloomsbury, spent his mornings in the Museum Reading-Room, devoted his afternoons and evenings to a round of parties. ‘He thinks that the best way of finding the kind of work he wants. It’s degrading for a man of his talents to be forced to that kind of strategy. It’ll be different when the Socialists are in power.’
None of which particularly predisposed me in ‘Raymond’s’ favour.
‘Is he very much in love with you?’ I asked. She shook her head.
‘No. That’s what makes it all so wretched. There’s someone else.’
‘Who is she?’
‘I’ ve never met her. But he’s got her photograph all over his rooms. She must be the explanation. There couldn’t be any other. I think you ought to come and see him.’
It was not till I was actually inside his rooms that I identified ‘Raymond’ as my old friend, ‘Ambition’ Bevan.
It was three years since our Oxford meeting. But Lucy’s account of him, a glance round the room so typical of Bloomsbury with its long rows of bookshelves, its Van Gogh reproductions, its Wyndham Lewis etchings, its bright striped curtains, gasfire, many-cushioned divan; a quick survey of the physical change in Bevan, the loose collar, and tie, the long hair, the sneering expression of the mouth, the pitch of voice, mannered and supercilious, told me what had happened in those three years.
He had come down from Oxford with his inherited income of five hundred pounds. He had no job. He was going to look round for one. And that is a bad platform for a young man in London. A young man earning four hundred a year can have a better time in London, which is a man’s city, than anywhere in the world. A man with four thousand a year and no profession can have an exceedingly amusing time in London, spending it. An independent income of four hundred pounds can be of incalculable value to a young man of industry and ambition, at the start of a career. But the one fatal combination is no job and a small unearned income. Particularly in the case of a young man from Oxford with ambitions, but undefined ambitions. Before Bevan had been long in London he had been forced to realize two things: that jobs are not easy to find, and that he himself with no job and very little money counted for nothing in the large vortex of London’s interests. It was not surprising that he had grown bitter. He was, in fact, the most vindictively bitter person under thirty that I have ever known.
Lucy had said that it exasperated him to watch the success of third-rate people. It would be truer to say that he was obsessed with the desire to prove that all success was of a third-rate nature. Before I had been talking to him five minutes he had provided me with an example of his resolve to disparage and diminish the value of the most mild good fortune.
‘By the way,’ he said,‘I saw a story of yours in some magazine the other day. I should imagine that that kind of thing brings in a lot of money.’
‘No. But it clothes and feeds me.’
‘Really? That’s most interesting. Ju
st what I’d have thought. Now, a writer like Ronald Firbank would not have made enough out of all his books put together to buy a cabinet of cigars.’
‘I should doubt it.’
‘Strange, isn’t it? And there’s not the slightest doubt that in twenty years’ time Firbank will be recognized as the one really important writer of this decade.’
The only writers for whom he had a good word to say were those with three-figure circulations, who could not win a footing in such periodicals as paid contributors.
His interest in the social racket was as keen as ever. When we discussed any former acquaintance, one of his first questions invariably would be, ‘What kinds of people does he go about with?’
We happened to mention a certain Soho restaurant. I told him that I liked it, that I went there often.
‘Would fashionable people go there?’ he asked.
I told him that I did not imagine so.
‘Who do go there then?’
‘It’s hard to say. Quite a number of my friends.’
‘Writers and that kind?’
‘More or less.’
‘Quite, quite. You are very wise to move among the people with whom you feel at ease.’
It would be difficult to convey the exact note of patronizing contempt on which he made that comment. He placed side by side my capacity to sell stories to the illustrated magazines and my preference for the company of such people as frequented the Café X. By this standard I was judged and was dismissed.
It was extremely difficult to remain in his company for long and keep one’s temper. It was absurd that a girl as nice as Lucy should have chosen to fall in love with anyone so sour.
‘I can’t imagine what you see in him,’ I said.
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘I don’t know. He’s so unhappy, he’s such a mess. And it’s such a pity. It’s all so unnecessary. Such a very little thing is needed to put it straight.’
The remedy was not destined to come from her, however. Bevan let her come to his flat, curl up on a rug before his fire, smoke innumerable cigarettes, read his books, make Russian tea for him, argue about politics and the new world. But his attention was entirely focused on the girl whose photographs adorned his room. I knew her slightly. She was one of those bored, listless, amoral creatures of whom the novelists and the playwrights of the period made such fertile copy. Her hair was cut close about her scalp; she walked as though she had no backbone; her voice was so low-toned and drawled that you felt that she would never have the strength to carry a sentence to a full stop. She was well calculated to make supremely wretched any man who pursued her with ‘honourable’ intentions.
‘Why not chuck it?’ I advised him. ‘You won’t get anything that’s worth having there. And there’s a really nice girl who, for some incomprehensible reason, thinks a lot of you.’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Yes. I know. Poor little Lucy. But … oh well, one can’t get mixed up with somebody like that.’
‘What do you mean, “somebody like that”? And what do you mean, “mixed up”? Lucy isn’t the kind of girl to start running you into a registry office.’
‘I know, I know, but … oh well, we really haven’t anything in common. And in a thing like that, it has to be the real thing or no thing.’
The old Bevan: with his insistence on the two worlds; and his resolve to get the one ticket in a lottery.
But I did not see very much of him. He was too acid a companion. It was pointless to subject one’s self-confidence to the incessant pinpricks of his irritation.
I preferred to keep track of his movements through Lucy Martin.
So that it was indirectly, from her, that I learnt of the disaster that in terms of poetic justice was an appropriate corollary to his career.
Weary of doing nothing, acutely conscious of the low level at which his social stock was standing, he had sold out his War Loan and invested the resulting capital in a motor business with young Barlow as his partner. He had hoped to kill two birds with one stone. With Barlow’s connexions he would at the same time make money and move in the world from which his lack of prominence was rapidly excluding him.
To a certain extent and for a time his hopes looked likely to be fulfilled. Barlow did bring clients, the majority of whom were listed in Debrett. Unfortunately, they bought their cars on credit. When a slump came, they handed their cars back. Bevan was not the man to litigate against a peer. A day arrived when he was forced to recognize not only that his capital had vanished, but that on certain of his transactions a most unpleasant construction could be placed in a court of law. He was advised to leave the country.
In a fine fever of indignation Lucy brought the news to me.
‘He’s been swindled, that’s quite obvious. Those fine friends of his are making him their scapegoat. I’ve told him so, but he won’t believe it. Instead of showing them up, he’s saying how grateful he is to them for having got him a job with the police. With the police, indeed! That’s what they’ve done for him, a job with the police: a man like that. In a place like Malaya too! That’s where they’re sending him; they would: they want him out of the way. It’s disgraceful. What a waste of talent. But it’s no good telling you. You never liked him. You were never fair to him. But … oh, it’s tragic to think of a man like that being sent to a place like that. It proves that the world wants turning inside out. The way things are run now, a man of real talent doesn’t stand a chance.…’
Fumingly, the flood of words poured on. ‘It’s good luck for you,’ I thought. ‘You’re well rid of him.’
That was in ‘26.
During the next four years I don’t suppose I thought of him three times; and one of those times was when I read the announcement in The Times of Lucy Martin’s engagement to an exceedingly eligible young stockbroker. I had actually been in Malaya a couple of months before it occurred to me to ask whether anyone had heard anything of a man called Bevan.
It was in the Penang Club that I set that question. I was conscious of a stir round me of inquisitive amusement.
‘We’ ve got a Bevan here all right,’ they said.
‘If it’s the same one, I was at school with him.’
‘Would it be R.F. Bevan?’
‘R. F.? Yes, it might,’ I hesitated. ‘It sounds absurd, but I’m not certain of his intitials. We always called him by his nickname.’
‘What was that?’
‘ “Ambition”. We called him “Ambition” Bevan.’
There was a laugh at that.
‘There’s not much ambition about him now,’ they said. ‘He’s the manager of a second-grade plantation, with a half-caste wife and a couple of coloured brats. There’s not a white man between Siam and Singapore with less to boast about. “Ambition” Bevan, indeed!’ I stared at them amazed. Bevan, the man who had thought himself too grand to have an affair with Lucy Martin, married to a Malayan half-caste.
‘How did it happen? What on earth made him do a thing like that?’ I asked.
The answer was given with a guffaw of laughter.
‘His father-in-law’s right arm.’
‘Tell me the whole story, please.’
Up to a point it was a conventional enough story. Bevan had come out with a job in the police. It wasn’t a particularly good job, and it wasn’t likely to lead to much. But it was a ’pukka sahib’s job’. It was official. And in English communities men with a pukka sahib’s job have got to obey the conventions of their caste. They must not, that is to say, get ostentatiously drunk. Nor must they flaunt a liaison with a coloured girl. Which was what Bevan did: in Kuala Sumut, a smallish river station half-way between Port Swettenham and Penang.
Even then it might have been all right if he hadn’t boasted about it in the Club.
The girl’s father was a man of over sixty. He was the old type of planter: the third son of a West Country baronet who had run up debts, caused scandal, been sent to the colonies with a draft on a Pen
ang bank for a thousand pounds. He had come to Malaya in the rough days, before genteel society was established; when it was a man’s world; when women were left behind in Europe and a man as a matter of course established a native girl in his compound. ‘The good bad days,’ old Penton called them. He had made money, he had lost money; he had stood no truck from anyone. Now, at the end of his life, loud-voiced, a heavy drinker, generous and quarrelsome, he was a man that Kuala Sumut regarded on the whole as a credit to itself. He was a figure, a character; with his broad shoulders, his blue-veined cheeks, his mane of white hair, his loud voice, his great hearty laugh, his capacity to drink men half his age beneath the table.
Old Penton was too big for prudery.
He wouldn’t have minded what happened to the youngest of his Eurasian daughters, as long as the girl wasn’t badly treated. But he was not prepared to hear late in the evening, when he was quarrelsome with a succession of late nights and livery mornings, a bored supercilious voice remarking,‘I suppose I mustn’t keep poor little Sally waiting any longer. A little waiting’s good for her. But not more than half an hour.’
That was more than old Penton was prepared to stand. He rose from his chair. He lurched slowly towards the bar. He was not taller than Bevan, but because of his breadth of shoulder he appeared to tower over him.
‘You ought to think yourself lucky to have a girl like Sally waste her time on you.’
He glowered at Bevan. He had never much liked the man. There was something namby-pamby about him; something supercilious and superior. He was in a bad temper, in need of a focus for his spleen.
‘I suppose you think you are so damned important that you can keep her waiting. I suppose you consider yourself her superior?’
His eye ran Bevan up and down. He was in a mood with which every member of the Kuala Sumut Club was well familiar, which most of them had cause to dread. Bevan was nervous, but he was not a coward, he knew how to put a face on things. He replied in his most Oxonian manner.
‘Well, really, after all …’ He paused. It was said in the pitch of voice to which a monocle would have been appropriate. It increased Penton’s irritation. That a weed like this should speak in that tone about his daughter.