That palmist …
How they all loved promising one mysterious men; God alone knew which of my crew of raggle-taggles if any she must have been alluding to or when he had supervened and passed! She had very nearly taken me in, too, with her positive manner and hints about paternal care. But that father-manner was an old trick; it paved the way, was always vilely done and never lasted beyond one evening. It offended me more than any other form of approach, being a travesty of what could and should be one of the beautiful relationships of humanity, and being – to me, at least – ideal element which might well enter into associations more intimate. And that curious insistence of all our shoddy seers that two children marked our hand.
And it was over-time to return to Palace Green. I pulled the rug over my knees. Organdie fal-lals went ill with London in November. Men were sweeping leaves in the park and covert-coated children being led home to warm nurseries. One would like to be a child again. Swaddled in perfect ignorance.
CHAPTER XX
I
AND after all, my suggestion to the uncles about mother and Lalage was received in a way that upset the lot of my carefully bright approaches, and left me uncertain of my victory. The thought of having their sister under their roof – a guest – to stay – filled both Stuart and Julian Vallant with an astonishment they were too naive to conceal. Uncle Stuart positively chuckled at the notion, with a wrinkled, sardonic smile which instantly recalled our grandmother.
‘I don’t think Anne would care for that very much,’ he muttered, and brusquely turned right away.
Uncle Julian, always more easily identified by his thick-lensed glasses, was at once more human and articulate. It is possible that he remembered having once ventured into our Campden Hill home. He was vague obstructionism incarnate, misleadingly ready to consider the idea, and blocking all avenues with disparagements.
‘Well, you see … the maids mightn’t like it.’
‘Oh, damn them –’
‘The old place is really shockingly uncomfortable. No modern conveniences …’
‘Mother wouldn’t mind –’
‘The Mater would never have electricity put in …’
(Me: Charm of lamps, interesting shadows cast by incandescent burners.) I was brazen. There was nothing to lose by it, here or hereafter, and I think I won.
‘Well … Anne and whatshername’d have to amuse themselves…’
(Why, why, why? you inhospitable old devil! Why the hell don’t you and your blasted old brother pull yourselves together and put in light and behave like Christians?)
‘… she’d have to take a cab from the station. The road’s very bad and Masters wouldn’t like the trap used … oh … come if she’s set on it. …’
And, having introduced the subject to mother, I left the pair talking to each other, mother faintly flushed as she worked at the old man. Wonderfully soon she had got him (like a crab) out of the major portion of his shell and I left them, with a mental picture of uncle Julian bashfully chuckling over remote, mutually-shared and remembered catchwords and jokes. I realized then that the maddening, time-wasting depreciation by him of all that was his was not sheer cussedness, and certainly not oriental etiquette, but plain, downright inferiority complex. And you battered it with brazen persistence, it seems.
I crushed my way across the room to find James. Outside the door aunt Sophia plucked me absently by the arm and shouted, ‘Sly puss! In granny’s carriage. How I laughed! We must find you a nice little husband, next.’
I ran James to earth in the library, a room which had, so to speak, long lost its character and never recovered it, as the perusal in it of books was entirely subordinated to aunt Emmeline’s capricious preference for ‘doing’ the flowers there. For years and years she had arranged blooms and filled vases all over uncle Bertram until he had been driven elsewhere – the house was large, and could stand it.
James, Helen Seagrave, Barbara Verdune and Dolly were sitting at ease, the girls in their spreading skirts, their Victorian-bonneted heads engulfing whiskies and sodas. I added my bonnet and flounces to theirs and stacked my bouquet with the others upon a side table.
‘Really, Dolly! You ought to be upstairs in tears, assuring aunt Emmeline that although she has lost a daughter she has gained a son – whoa, Jamesey! Don’t drown the sperrit.’
Dolly grinned. ‘One doesn’t want to rub it in. And mother mayn’t have lost me entirely, after all.’
‘I see. No. There’s always that. Well … bless you, m’dear, whatever.’
‘Hear, hear,’ assented James. We clinked glasses and I told them what I’d done about the uncles. Helen, sipping cup, looked at me brightly in that way an audience waits upon the traditionally humorous utterances of the low comedian, and it was Barbara whose gaze became fixed, taking in the true inwardness of the event, and Dolly who ejaculated ‘Lor!’ We were all making rather a noise. Discussion of the family seems to invite it, among the younger branches. And then aunt Sophia passed, looked in and droned ‘Cranford! All those naughty bonnets!’ and to Helen, ‘… all the men looking for you!’ and vanished. Her place was immediately taken by Aunt Emmeline, tall and lamenting. Her eye took us all in.
‘You must go upstairs at once and change, Dolly.’ Then, tragically, ‘How much longer will they all stay? I mean, the servants are getting rather restive … such a bore. Better take the bouquets off the table, they’ll mark the polish.’
We rose at once. The party was over.
II
That evening James and Lalage and I went out with a young brother officer whom I had liked on sight, quite apart from James’s private testimonial (‘He’s quite one of us’). He had first met me with the remark, ‘I have to tell you that my Christian name is Claude. You will want to go away and practise it quietly.’
He was, we all thought, a most dear person and the most unselfconscious; his inconsequence of thought, about which mother once tackled him, was astonishing. Like myself, he was unable to take anything for granted, and, looking like the more preposterous of west-end revue ‘dudes’, he would eagerly fall upon any triviality and put it under the microscope, or discuss the most solid social questions with a sense and fairness of outlook for which, owing to his appearance, he got no credit at all. With regard to the charge of inconsequence he said quite simply, ‘I know what you mean, and I think it’s France that does it. I like arguments and ideas, and when you never know from one minute to the next whether you’ll be alive or not you have to get everything said as it occurs to you. I wonder why the words “Holy Ghost” are so funny? I once woke up laughing my head off at it.’
He was often with us at home, and called our outings ‘trying to get the point of view’. The trenches had left his critical sense completely untouched; he could never accept as infallible the current scale of values on humour, morals, the cost of pleasure and its bearing on value received or the frightfulness of Germany. He even failed to lose his head over the daylight raids which began, that November, and when a baby was killed in its pram in Folkestone and the newspapers had hysterics, said that the bomber wasn’t aiming at a baby but at an English town.
We came by our good times in ways many and strange. Claude was fond of us all and from the first I had had to exert no vigilance over his expenditures. He would come to fetch me, announcing, ‘I’ve got thirty shillings for the day, if we go beyond it we’re sunk. That’ll mean decent booze at a dive, or a refined meal and undrinkable catlap. There’s a waiter in Soho who told me he’d reckoned the distance he’d covered in twenty-four years of service. He makes it just under five hundred miles, in a room twenty-four by sixteen.’
One Sunday night we had suddenly followed a Salvation Army band, and Claude was so worked up over it that by the time our third pitch was reached he was singing with the best of them and calling out Praise the Lord! Another pitch and he would have testified. James headed him off in the nick of time and Claude was as sincerely relieved as any of us. ‘They’re such fine drama
tic stuff, but I dare say one couldn’t stand the pace. And personally I’ve only got two sins to confess, and one of them’s pretty old-fashioned for these days – I mean, they’d get to know them too well at street corners.’ He smote his thigh. ‘That’s why you have to be such a sinner! It’s for the repertoire! Where do we eat? I say, I wonder what the first woman who accidentally made scrambled eggs thought? I’ve often imagined how alarmed she must have been, because even when you know what to expect, the eggs are rather an uncouth spectacle.’
I discovered very soon that everything interested Claude, and I think he cultivated people in every rank of life and of most occupations through an unconscious necessity to feed his avidity. Once or twice I nearly gave way to the temptation to talk to him about Lady Vallant, but one mustn’t take advantage … Claude must be allowed by James and me to be himself, untouched, for the leave that remained to him. Also, I’d given a badly misplaced confidence, before. Men didn’t want one’s troubles … I wasn’t prepared to give the old woman another opportunity to break a friendship.
Claude had a quality of social moral courage which was my perpetual admiration. If he didn’t catch a name on introduction he would say so and ask for it to be repeated; I have heard him ask a head waiter ‘I say, does one tip the wine-wallah as well as one’s own?’ and he had none of that queasy fear of ridicule which causes so large a proportion of the world to shy from approaching policemen as to the locality of famous buildings or exclusive clubs. I was told he said to a bishop visiting G.H.Q. in France, ‘I’m frightfully sorry, sir, but I don’t know how to address you. Is it “Bishop” or “Doctor” something?’
III
I took him to a cocktail party; I too wanted to ‘get the point of view’. Such affairs don’t come my way very plentifully; also, for some time, I had had no social fish to fry, with Hugh safely hovering over Lalage and James in France.
The party, in some mews, smelt of petrol and lipstick, and was full of an atmosphere which we both agreed we couldn’t do very much for. Always the victim of my surroundings, I was willy-nilly forced into the rôle of Gummidge. We arrived at our conclusions by divers routes, I, through the instantly-sensed fact that these girls and boys and intermediates of both sexes and of none had left their personalities elsewhere. They said things as variously, reliably and slickly as the well-kept gramophone, and like the gramophone seemed compelled to keep within the limits of the record album. I relapsed into helplessness at once where Claude investigated.
A stayless skeleton in henna and cretonne looped up to him and said affectionately, ‘My trouble is that I cannot give up fornication’. He regarded her civilly. ‘Fornication … I always mix it up with adultery and incest. Oh, yes, I get you. Well, of course, I daresay you’ll find that if you put your shoulder to the wheel you may shake it off in time, what? But how did you get like that in the beginning?’ The woman, who was not prepared with reasons, but only with long-respected sexual identity discs, looked haggard and glided away.
By the window, the names of Proust, Havelock Ellis and Freud were in circulation.
‘Too final. The only writer, don’t you think so?’
‘I’ve never read him, I’m ashamed to say,’ answered Claude.
‘What! My dear lad …!’
‘Awful, isn’t it? Is Ellis an essayist or a scientist or a philosopher?’
No definite answer, except that Ellis was extremely frank and rather ‘difficult to get’.
‘What nationality is Proust?’
Nobody knew. That, somehow, wasn’t the point about Messrs. Proust, Ellis and Freud. The discussion flickered and went out.
In another corner screeches of laughter and cries of exceeding great joy went up as the names of Ethel M. Dell, Berta Ruck and Elinor Glyn were tossed into the air.
Claude took another drink. ‘Well, I liked The Bars of Iron,’ he said. ‘She can tell a story, you know.’
For a second the listeners wavered, uncertain.
‘So did I!’ plunged a six-foot wraith in blue.
They joined her. The ayes had it. Confession and laughter resounded. They revelled in their apostasy, searching their very souls for praise and reasons.
Going home, Claude was plucking at his chin.
‘Go on. Say it, we shall probably agree,’ I remarked. We pounded on.
‘It isn’t the lies I bar, Vere, or even the attempts to be daring; after all, that shock complex is the earliest instinct of kids who chalk up dirty words on fences: it’s that that lot isn’t being itself, or any self. These people mayn’t have many guns, and probably what they’ve got are the wrong pattern, but they must positively learn to stand by them. Isn’t it a mercy that there’s nobody recording our conversation for the future? “At a Cocktail Tea: Double-sided ten-inch record. Red label,” my God!’
‘Some people believe that conversation is recorded, Claude,’ and then, to make my point, I had to tell him about Hampton Court and Henry. He fell on it voraciously.
IV
It was on the evening of the Verdune wedding that we were still hard at the topic of the resuscitation of lost scenes and voices. Claude, waving a fork upon which a small sausage was impaled, said that it could be done through the wireless. James said it would always remain uncontrollable and capricious, ‘because the ether is already so overloaded with material.’ He leant forward, arms on the table. ‘It would only become more possible, less liable to overlapping with previous scenes, by localization … allotting each conversation to its known venue. I mean that supposing we wanted to re-hear the trial of Catherine of Aragon, we should obviously have to shift to Blackfriars Hall … and that’s long been demolished (that’s another snag).’
‘Not a bit,’ I chipped in, ‘it’s the site that probably counts. The point is that even if Blackfriars Hall is pulled down and covered with warehouses and shops, the four walls of the hall weren’t the chief factor, but the air-space, and it’s that space which must still be saturated with the voices of the Cardinals.’
‘But … the four enclosing walls must have been a conserving medium. …’
‘Not necessarily. When a “haunted” house is pulled down, in quite five cases out of a dozen the hauntings continue, because the trouble is deeper than just bricks and mortar. You can’t destroy the air in which it happened.’
James agreed. ‘An additional proof of that is that there are plenty of houses in England whose hauntings are only to be seen and heard on the anniversary of the tragedy; in other words, the air is subject to the time-limit; it lies fallow for three hundred and sixty-four days, then functions … receives some stimulus … the condensation of remembered evil, and history repeats itself.’
‘Then, Jimmy, you mean that when you saw the Tudors at Hampton Court, say on the third of January, it was on a third of January that Henry made that remark about tennis and his bad leg to Edward?’
‘What I think doesn’t count, granted that the laws governing this sort of thing aren’t understood. But on the available evidence, I’m inclined to suspect that the time-factor only applies where there has been violence or tragedy, and that these – shall we say – humdrum, domestic flashes-back may turn up at any time. Look at Versailles and the Petit Trianon. Marie Antoinette was so much in evidence all the time making her butter and what not that trippers got cold feet, and the window has been boarded up.’
‘But, about the wireless. How would you work that?’ I asked.
‘Wait till all stations are closed down for the night, then tune in,’ answered Claude, promptly.
We never tried, in those War days; first, because then the privately owned wireless was by no means as common as it has since become, and second, because life was too full and leave too short for patient theoretical experiments – incidentally, the military authorities were too suspicious of strangers hanging about in the small hours with heavy square boxes.
But since that day, James and I have pursued our intermittent investigations. Thanks to friendship or influence, we
have sat overtime in a huge deserted cinema built upon the site of a famous Victorian music-hall, and there in the darkness, our portable in the gangway, we have re-heard the voice of Dan Leno, the fainter one of Jenny Hill singing ‘The Coffee-Shop Girl’; at Hampton Court tuned in to a feast eaten four hundred years ago, and hum the minstrels’ music to this hour (and didn’t think much of it, it was thin and monotonous and a little repetitious, and gave the effect of being slightly off the key), and once we heard a quarrel in the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall, which (infuriatingly) we were unable to ‘place’. Scraps … one burned for more.
‘Sire, it is impossible!’
‘Heh? No one says “impossible” to me.’
Then crackling from the machine, and
‘She must learn.’
A dispute which probably never penetrated the textbooks: just some royal huff, so infinitely more revelatory if one could return night after night to hear it all!
I believe that this, one day, will be possible and free to all, and that if we do not precisely win through to the touch of a vanished hand, at least we shall repossess for our life the sound of a voice that has been hitherto, and quite avoidably, ‘still’. Meanwhile, we must muddle along with such rare extra senses as we have developed, or which have elected, arbitrarily, to lodge themselves in us.
It was inevitable that as we sat in the little eating-house and argued, the sick memory of Myra should wash over me and leave me raging; inevitable that our elementary gropings into the possibility of tuning-in to the past should immediately have, for me, but one value and purpose, and though James and I were never to approach the miserable business in exactly that way, the insertion of the Hampton Court episode into our discussion suggested another line of enquiry. And I suppose it was then that I guessed what I must do.
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 18