“I’m sorry to hear that about Willie,” said Richard. “He’s a decent little fellow, and from what I know of him, I would say that he has been ensnared by some siren. And now they are talking of giving women the vote! Did you ever hear of anything so ridiculous? I don’t know what the world is coming to, Hilary! There is that two-faced Lloyd George, only a few months ago promising to bring those responsible for the war to justice, including the Kaiser, and where are his promises now? The Kaiser enjoys his days cutting up wood and living like a country gentleman at Doorn in Holland, living on the fat of the land! As Castleton in the Trident keeps on trying to bring home to everyone, ‘They’ll cheat you yet, those Junkers!’”
Hilary found his elder brother’s emphasis a little trying, and made an excuse to take his leave. Part of Phillip’s trouble, he thought, was that he had a stick for a father; while the boy’s dual nature was due to Jewish blood, from that old reprobate, Thomas Turney.
*
When Hetty asked Phillip how he had got on with his uncle, he replied, “Oh, he was much the same as usual, asking a lot of personal questions.”
“He is interested in your future, Phillip, now that you have done so well in the Army.”
“Maybe. But the primary rule of good manners is surely that one does not ask personal questions.”
“He is your uncle, Phillip, remember.”
“I find it more interesting to talk about things, rather than people. By the way, will it be all right if I pay you thirty bob a week while I’m at home?”
“It’s far too much, dear. Are you sure you can afford it?”
“Oh easily, I’ve got a pension, you know. And Austin Harrison is considering one of my sketches of the Saschenfeste at Wytschaete for The English Review.”
*
Walking down the High Street one morning, striding fast while breathing deep to expand his lungs, Phillip saw Julian Warbeck outside the Roebuck, talking to a poor man with a barrel organ in the gutter. He crossed the road to avoid him, but curiosity made him hide behind a vegetable van, and watch Warbeck, who wore khaki trousers and R.A.F. tunic, with wings and rank badges removed. Evidently some deal had been made, for the man touched his decayed bowler hat and set off to haul the wheeled box behind Warbeck.
Phillip followed them, past the Obelisk and over the Randiswell river bridge. They turned up Mill Lane, and stopped outside the Rat Trap. When Warbeck went inside, the man turned the handle, tinkling out the overture to Cavalleria Rusticana. Phillip decided to follow Warbeck, and going into the tiny bar, was greeted by him like an old friend, instead of a rival, as he had feared.
“I met your cousin Willie in Folkestone,” Warbeck said, in a jovial yet mocking voice. “He was one of the pack after La Belle Amie. Quite an education knowing that woman. Let me see”—he began to count on fingers the more stubby with their bitten nails—“between the daffodil and the swallow there were, to my limited knowledge, ‘Naps’ Spreycombe; Jay Double-u—the nickname of my unrepentent self; your most respectable Self”—he bowed ironically—“that makes three of us in the Paragon pack. Patrick Colyer, the bogus knight-of-the-air, now doing a well-earned stretch in the glass house; your cousin Willie with the large soulful eyes—five; ‘Sandhurst’ White, six; Aubrey de la Hay, an actor with no talent whatsoever, seven; and finally Lord Spreycombe, who returned to take the pool after the youngest puppy, Peter White, had given her the supreme satisfaction of shooting himself with her name on his—I won’t say bloodless—lips; for as a fact the bullet passed through the roof of his mouth. Quite an achievement, don’t you think, for La Belle Amie? You have gone pale, my friend. Why not have a drink?”
Phillip said, after a few moments to steady his voice, “Are you serious?”
“I am always serious. What are you drinking—the only question that really matters.”
“Did somebody really commit suicide?”
“He did indeed, Phillip. Your cousin, with the soulful eyes—‘Willie’—was not there when they asked for him at the inquest. He was there when Peter White shot himself, but had in the meantime crossed over to Boulogne, emulating Oscar Wilde in another connexion. A curious, indeed a remarkable chap, ‘Willie.’ He told me that his ambition was to write a Fifth Gospel, proving, among other things, that the Galilean meant something quite different when He said what he was supposed to have said. But at least ‘Willie’ believed in the dead burying the dead, for he skipped over to France on the next boat. What are you drinking? May I call you Phillip, by the way?”
“Please do.”
“I am Julian. My respected father, who has retained many of the ideas of his adolescence well into middle age, still had a high opinion of the works of Byron when the midwife presented me to him, my unhappy mother having died of puerperal fever meanwhile, chiefly owing, my father has repeatedly told me, to the size of my head, which may well have been a euphemism for a part of his own anatomy. Oh yes, Father has been quite a chap in his time. What are you drinking?
“Just a glass of mild, Julian, if you please.”
“Mild? My dear chap, you! Our local hard-shell hero drinks swipes! Perish the thought!”
“But not the stomach! Just half a pint, thank you, Julian.”
“Certainly, Phillip! Every man to his taste! I will join you in one moment.” He raised a pint of Burton and drained it in what appeared to be a gulpless pouring down the throat. Then turning to the landlord, in a voice of extreme courtesy he said, “One small glass of mild for this gentleman, and the same again for me. I have a musical friend outside, would you be so good as to send him out a pint of the same excellent liquor? He has a long uphill future life before him.” To Phillip, “It is my respected parent’s birthday, and a little music will, I hope, lessen his chronic concern for my so-called working career—in other words, he wants me to find a job in order to save him from forking out the dough. Well, it’s a poor heart that never rejoices——” And lifting up his fresh pint Warbeck poured it down his throat. “Ah, that’s better! Landlord, the same again, if you please!”
“Have this one with me, Julian!”
Warbeck gave him another slight bow. “I am glad to see some light returning to your eyes, even if it is only a pale ray from swipes.” He rubbed his hands together, and expelled a lungful of air. “Yes, it’s a poor heart that never rejoices. Now tell me, how does it feel to be a local hero? Do not mistake me, I am serious! Your fame has spread from the pages of The Kentish Mercury, ‘the boy is father of the man.’ You were a Boy Scout, if I recall rightly? The patrol leader of the Bloodhounds? Your photograph, dimly reproduced among the leaves that strew the brooks of Vallambrosa, was next to an advertisement urging the constipated to Take Carter’s Little Liver Pills. Fame indeed! Seriously, Philip, your praises were sung in all the old clichés of mid-Victorian journalism! How about a pint of Burton, you look quite pale, my dear fellow!”
Phillip, to get away from the grindstone of the other’s manner, changed the subject. “Did you see that photograph of a masked ex-officer in The Daily Trident the other day? I thought at first that you had hired the barrel organ, for the same purpose.”
“Good God no! Still, it’s an idea!”
After another pint, Warbeck got the landlord’s wife to cut out a rough mask in black cloth, with a piece of elastic garter sewn on; and leading the way through the lane where Phillip had walked to and from school many times, they went up the street to the Hill, the barrel organ following until the man stopped, exhausted.
“Let’s give him a hand, Julian.”
They helped to push the thing up the steep slope to the crest.
There, behind the garden of the lavatory, Warbeck put on the mask, and with the borrowed broken bowler perched on the top of his large head, got between the shafts and hauled the outfit, head held low, towards the shelter where the old men were sitting. The man remained behind, according to instructions; Phillip walked along the crest, to cross the allotments on the old tennis courts and so to approach the shelter
from behind.
He saw Julian stop in front of the shelter, and slowly turn the handle, while Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey issued like a dirge from the faded green cheese-cloth covering the tired strings of the instrument. When the last tremolo had stopped, Julian, with a bow, went forward, bowler in hand.
“What foolery is this?” growled Mr. Warbeck.
“I’m trying to turn an honest penny, Father, as you have been urging me to do daily for some months. Come, Father, it’s been a long pull up, on this occasion of your seventieth birthday anniversary. Or is it your seventy-fifth? Don’t frown so, Father, it makes you look even older.”
“You’re drunk again, you scoundrel!”
“On the contrary, Father, I am sober, but it is a good idea, all the same.”
“Where did you steal that damned thing?”
“I hired it for the day, Father. You see, I have got a job.”
“You are a ne’er do well, a waster! Do you call this exhibition of arrant nonsense a job? You have never looked for a job, unless it was emptying beer down your gullet while leaning on a pub counter!”
“Looking for a job is a job in itself, and requires some thought, as I have explained to you on many occasions, Father.”
“What did you pay for this nonsensical object?”
“Five shillings for the day, Father. On credit. I hope you will advance that sum, on the principle that you cannot accumulate unless you speculate. Come, Father, do not let the lack of a mere five bob abort a good intention to add to the gaiety of nations.” He went back to the organ, and turned the handle rapidly; then seeing Thomas Turney feeling in his pocket, stopped to go forward.
“Here you are, m’boy. Ah, two of you, eh? Well, Phillip, what are you going to do with that thing?”
“A mere spectator, sir.”
Julian pocketed half-a-crown. “Choose your tune, sir. I can produce an approximation of Cavalleria Rusticana, Out Went the Gas, The Arab’s Farewell to His Steed, The War March of the Priests, After the Ball Was Over, Goodbye, my Bluebell, or Floradora.”
Thomas Turney chose Floradora, with its memories of Charley and his wife humming the gay, romantic airs when Sarah was still alive, and the world had not changed. The remote, sad-sweet tinkle was followed by The Arab’s Farewell and a memory of Dickie’s voice on summer evenings coming through the open window next door, while Hetty sat at the piano.
The concert came to a premature stop with the arrival of a stout park keeper, who said that all playing of unauthorised music was forbidden by the by-laws of the London County Council which were displayed at every entrance; so the barrel organ was taken down the gully, to be played outside No. 11, and again outside the flat, from behind the upper window of which the face of Mrs. Neville wagged about with laughter.
*
After handing over the organ in Randiswell, with an extra five bob for the man, Phillip suggested that they take the tram so far as Cutler’s Pond. It was by now closing time, a relief, with the thought that he might walk off the cloying effects of two pints of beer. They went up Whitefoot Lane, and through the woods, meaning to cross the Seven Fields to Brumley; and coming out beyond the trees, by Shrofften Farm, Phillip saw before him a great heap of stones, with standards of timber, tin roofed sheds, and other gear, near a notice board with the name of a London firm of contractors. A reservoir was to be made at the highest point, for a new housing estate to cover all the Severn Fields. Thrown oaks and elm trees gave the place a look of desolation.
As they crossed over the condemned green fields, where once flocks of lapwing and fieldfares had gathered, the voice of Julian became tedious, and Phillip felt the front of his head beginning to ache. Julian strode a foot or so in front of his left shoulder, talking away, either about his favourite poet, Swinburne, or one or another of the literary figures known from his immense range of reading—words, words, words, too often delivered in a scoffing manner as he declared that every source of art was materialistic, that all artists were decadent, that all ‘musings and hopes for the ideal derived from mere idle sentimentality, having a basis in masturbation.’
“Even Swinburne?”
“Certainly! Likewise Dostoieffsky, Tolstoi, and Beethoven. The slight hollows at the sides of the temple, to be seen in their portraits, show this clearly. But what does it matter how poetry is written, so long as it is written? The oriental races simply cannot understand most of our romantic Western love poetry.”
“Then you think that love is entirely based on sex?”
“What else? What free man would want to write of love, when he could enjoy it naturally? Herrick wrote his best verse when deprived of his mistress. He certainly didn’t want to write it when he was in bed with her!”
“But the great writers——”
“Mere folie de grandeur! Consider Nietschze, and his masterpiece, Thus Spake Zarathrustra. It’s great prose, but it would never have been written if Nietschze had not been syphilitic, nor would Dostoieffsky have written The Brothers Karamazov without the condition of his epileptic fits! As for Francis Thompson, whom you believe to be a great poet, but I know has only a streak of genius, neuralgia and laudanum were the agents which induced him to write. Thompson was also sexually impotent; his Sister Songs, with their fawning love for the Meynell girls, Monica and Viola, proves it. But nevertheless he wrote some great stuff.
Forlorn, and faint, and stark,
I had endured through watches of the dark
Th’ abashless inquisition of each star,
Yea, was the outcast mark
Of all those heavenly passers’ scrutiny.
Stood bound and helplessly,
For Time to shoot his barbèd minutes at me …
Oh, it’s great stuff, Phillip! I shall live only for great poetry, by God! Let’s get a ’bus, it may be market day in Brumley, and the pubs open all day.”
Eight hours later the two, with wet feet and muddy shoes and trousers, were back in the Randiswell, Phillip drooping wearily beside Julian as he talked to Dr. Dashwood, who stood, his face the colour of magenta, before the mahogany counter of the saloon bar drinking the last of his nightly bottle of whiskey. Ten minutes before closing time Phillip went outside with Julian, who after mixing nearly a score pints of beer with whiskey, port, sherry and gin—drinks paid for by others in the bars the two had visited—was obviously going to shoot his bundle. Holding to the iron rail between white-painted oak posts, to which ponies and horses had once been hitched, Julian bent over towards the ditch three times in rapid succession. As he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, Phillip—who had drunk little, and then only mild beer—said to him with sympathy, “I know how you feel, Julian. I’ve often felt like that. You’ve had too much, old boy, that’s the trouble.”
Straightening up, Julian replied, “The trouble is I haven’t had enough!” and went back into the bar. Phillip slipped away home, to let himself in with his key, and tip-toe silently to his bedroom, which was now the end room, facing the garden and the early morning sun. By the window was a card-table, its green baize covering blotted and blotched with ink shaken from an old army wooden pen with a relief nib which he had used when acting as assistant adjutant at Landguard nearly a year before. He was secretly writing a novel with a setting in a far, imagined countryside, with imagined characters derived from memories of his boyhood with Percy Pickering and his village friends at Beau Brickhill and others of his own boyhood, including Cranmer, a ragged boy he had befriended. The foolscap sheets of this romance were hidden under the mattress of his bed, in the fear that if anyone in the house saw them, especially his sister Elizabeth, he would not be able to continue in what he was believing and living in with nervous exaltation as an escape from real life. It would be equally fatal, he thought, as he lit the candle, if Julian knew of what he was doing.
If night was a friend, day was worse than an enemy in its emptiness. With renewed optimism he sought Julian; and after one Saturday mid-day meeting at the Roebuck, when Julian
did most of the talking, recounting his amorous and other adventures while with the R.A.F.—most amusing story-telling marred at times by derisive arrogance—they hired another barrel-organ and dressed in pre-war civvy suits, Phillip with his top-hat stove-in and broken umbrella, Julian in a grey frock coat and bowler taken from his father’s cupboard and worn with long sheepskin flying boots, hauled the thing on the Hill the next morning, and played it in mockery of the after-church parade with a few silk hats bobbing here and there in the streams of mainly elderly people walking up and down the path along the crest. Inevitably they were turned off by one of the keepers, who said that if they brought back the vehicle, as such it was within the meaning of the by-laws applicable to Open Spaces and Recreation Grounds of the L.C.C., they would be summoned.
Richard heard about this incident, but said nothing to either his wife or his son.
Tues. 4 Nov.
Mother, Doris and I went down from Euston for Polly Pickering’s wedding. I wore the suit of khaki barathea dyed navy blue, which I had made in Folkestone (and haven’t paid for), with a yellow silk tie bought in the Burlington Arcade. George Turney, her cousin twice removed, appeared after supper, and hung or rather lay about in the billiard room afterwards, a dazy look in his eyes as he slumped back in an armchair with Polly across his knees, fondling her before everyone as though we weren’t there, sprawling on the small of his back and murmuring endearments as though he were half tight. I thought it was pretty bad form.
I asked Polly when he had gone off on his motorbike, banging harshly with tappets not properly adjusted, if she had expected him. No, she said, adding that he had not got any friends left, and did not get on very well with his father, and so had come to see her, feeling lonely. I felt like U. Hilary. I asked her, Did she love G.? She said she was fond of him, but did not ever expect to find true love. I asked her if she had been hurt by my behaviour, after Lynmouth in 1916. “I wasn’t aware of any particular behaviour on your part,” she replied. Later I realized that she had something of the quality of ‘Spectre’ in her: a clay-like strength. S.’s father was a Gaultshire man.
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