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That last day came, and with it the descent to natural levels—a curious deflation of mood that was easy to interpret as sadness at leaving a place where they had been so happy.
The marriage was finally fixed for October. Charles took Kitty to dine at Kettner's again
one night in late September, and for some reason the same mood came upon them as during the journey back from Switzerland five months before. She suggested that, on his side, it was due to news in the evening paper—a big stock-market crash in New York, with inevitable repercussions in London.
But the laugh they rallied themselves into failed to shift the mood that made him, as soon as dinner was over, confess that he felt tired and would prefer an early night in bed. He dropped her at Jill's new house in St. John's Wood, where
his restlessness increasing all the time, so that at last he walked out and paced up and down the thronged pavements till past midnight, longing suddenly for the sun and snow of the Jungfraujoch, yet knowing that it was only a mirage of what he would still long for if by some miracle he were to be transplanted there.
It had been delivered by hand early that morning, and contained, in effect, the breaking of their engagement and an announcement that she was leaving immediately to join her stepmother in Luxor.
long. She married a man she met in Egypt —she was quite happy—and he was a man I liked when I met him, but I didn't meet him till after she was dead. He had plantations in the F.M.S. and she went out with him there and died of malaria within six months."
I married a lady who had become quite indispensable to me in this struggle for fresh fame and fortune—Miss Hanslett, the quiet girl. That again turned out to be an astonishing success. You never know what these quiet girls can do. From being quiet, she became one of the busiest and cleverest of London's hostesses—and the miracle is, she's STILL quiet —you'd hardly know the machine's running at all."
charming. I love her more than most men love their wives. She's
"Always provided he's completely satisfied to be a man like me." "And aren't you?"
Is this all there is to it?
but something else was not QUITE as usual—and I don't know how to describe it except as a faint suspicion that the world was already swollen with destiny and that Stourton was no longer the world—a whiff of misgiving too delicate to analyse, as when, in the ballroom of an ocean liner, some change of tempo in the engines far below communicates itself to the revellers for a phantom second and then is lost behind the rhythms of the orchestra.
Within a few weeks the same misgiving, many times magnified, had become a headline commonplace; trenches were being dug in the London parks; the curve of the September crisis rose to its monstrous peak. Rainier lived at his Club during those fateful days and we were both kept busy at all hours transcribing reports, telephoning
the fact that all seemed to depend on the workings of one abnormal human mind gave every amateur psychologist an equal chance with politicians and crystal-gazers. And behind this mystery came fear, fear of a kind that had brought earlier peoples to their knees before eclipses and comets—fear of the unknown, based on an awareness that the known was no longer impregnable. The utter destruction of civilization, which had seemed a fantastic thing to our grandfathers, had become a commonplace of schoolboys' essays, village debating societies, and after-dinner small talk; for the first time in human
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acceptance of doom in all our eyes as we sat around, in restaurants and at conference tables and beside innumerable radios, listening and talking and drinking, the only three things to do that one could go on doing—paralysed as we were into a belief that it was too late to act, and clinging to a last desperate hope that somehow the negation of an act might serve as well.
more from his presence than from words, that the years he no longer talked about were still haunting; that he was still, as two women had said, vainly searching for something and never at rest. Yet outwardly, and to others, there were few signs of it.
"These are the last days,"
even those of us who can see the danger ahead can do nothing to avert it—like
And we are doing NOTHING— caught in the net of self-delusion and self-congratulation. We don't realize the skill and magnitude of the conspiracy—the
the attempt to reverse, by lightning strokes, the whole civilized verdict of two thousand years."
Once I said to him: "Leaving sentiment out of it, you haven't done so badly. You saved the family inheritance, you rescued the money of hundreds of outsiders, and you kept intact the jobs of a whole army of workpeople. You did, in fact, everything you set out to do."
"There's only one thing more important," he answered, "and that is, after you've done what you set out to do, to feel that it's been worth doing."
I've made this place bombproof. So you see, SOMETHING'S been worth doing." He walked me round like an
estate agent. "Comfort, as well as safety,—there's an independent heating plant,—because it's no good saving people from high explosive just to have them die of influenza. And another reason—the greatest man of the twentieth century may have to be born in a place like this, so let's make it as decent as we can for him. A steel and concrete Manger—sixty feet below ground... that's why I've had to keep it a big secret, because you couldn't expect the investing public to swallow THAT."
it! Meticulous little people attending meticulous meetings, passing meticulous votes of thanks for meticulous behaviour!"
Even at the bottom of the charge-sheet I could quote Santayana's remark that the world never had sweeter masters. SWEET—a curious adjective —and yet there IS a sweetness in the English character, something that's almost perfect when it's just ripe—like an apple out of an English orchard. No, we're not hated altogether by logic. It's more because the world is TIRED of us—BORED with us—sickened by a taste that to some already seems oversweet and hypocritical, to others sour and stale.
A time may come when a cowed and brutalized world may look back on the period of English domination as one of the golden ages of history..."
"Madame, we are NOT cold—it's merely that we have to be warmed up, especially on wet Saturdays. So I beg you to make allowances for us during the rest of your stay here."
What is the life of a concert artist nowadays? Nobody cares—there is no musical life as it used to be—in Berlin, in Leipzig, in Wien. Only in America they pay an artist well, but I do not want him to go there again."
we were the cynosure of every eye, as novelists in those days used to write —because it wasn't at all the kind of place a Church of England dignitary would normally take his schoolboy nephew to, and my uncle, with his white hair and flashing eyes
Rainier's last and rather preposterous effort to tease a way into self-knowledge, and that the climax, though completely accidental, was yet a fitting end to the attempt. I realized also, even if never before, how near he was to some catastrophic breakdown—partly from overwork, but chiefly from the fret of things that could not be forgotten because they had never been remembered.
increasing randomness of acts and words.
that she was a sadly disappointed woman, getting little out of later life that she really craved for, without a home, a wanderer between hotels and casinos, listening to the same old Brahms and Beethoven in half-empty concert halls, tied for the rest of her days to a flabby maestro, yet alive in her illusion that the world was still gay and chivalrous as a novelette.
The war was over... but now what? The dead were still dead; no miracle of human signature could restore limbs and sight and sanity; the grinding hardships of those four years could not be wiped out by a headline. Emotions were numb, were to remain half-numbed
for a decade, and relief that might have eased them could come no nearer than a fret to the nerves. A few things were done, symbolically; men climbed street-lamps to tear away the shades that had darkened them since the first air raids in human history; shop windows suddenly blazed out with new globes in long-empty sockets. The traffic centre at Melbury was like a hundred others in and around London that day; the crowds, the noise, the light, the fog. Beyond a certain limit of expression there was nothing to say, nothing much even to do; yet the urge to say and to do was self-torturing. So, as
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and if it came out that he'd escaped from a mental hospital, the authorities would certainly send him back there, at least for tests and observation, and if he WERE sent back, even for a short time, he felt terribly certain he would get worse again. There was nothing for it but to stay where he was and be thankful for such a sanctuary;
and gradually returning to the world of ordinary awareness.
There came a day when he could open a newspaper and face whatever catastrophe the turn of a page might reveal; another day when he could pick up an exciting novel without perilously identifying himself with one or other of the characters. He was recovering.
war. Matter of fact, they 'ad 'im locked up in that big guv'ment hospital at Melbury till the poor chap got away. I reckon that's a fine joke on them guv'ment busybodies—a feller they make out is off 'is chump goes and thinks up something that wins a hundred quid!" And the more the Biffer contemplated this extremely ironic circumstance, the more he repeated and elaborated it over a period of several hours and before changing audiences.
He could hardly believe that certain things had happened at all, that she had so comforted him throughout that long night of Armistice. There had been no other nights like that, there never would be, neither in his life nor in the world's. He could not expect
The Forest was very beautiful, and something in him was beginning to respond to beauty, as to anger and indignation also. He sprang to eagerness as he saw her approach, carrying bags and parcels. They stood still for a moment, while she regained her breath. "It's all
"US?" "Well, of course. We're going together, aren't we?"
he kept waking up with a start whenever express trains screamed by, but somehow he did not mind that kind of panic; it was the inner kind that paralysed him—or rather, could not quite paralyse him any more, since he had fought it, alone and so terribly, after she had gone. How comforting, as well as fearful, that word ALONE was; he wanted aloneness, because it was the hardest training ground for the kind of strength he also wanted; and yet, once he had that strength, he knew he would not wish to be alone. And he knew, too, that his feeling for Paula was no longer an eagerness to submit, like a
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It was as if his memory existed, but was submerged; as if he could lower a net and drag something up, but only blindfold, haphazardly, without the power of selection. He could not stare into the past; he could only grope. But by some kind of queer compensation, his eyes for the present were preternaturally bright; like a child's eyes, naïve, ingenuous, questioning. In such a mood he sat in the third row at the first house of the Selchester Hippodrome that night and looked upon a show
reply: "We're just a low vulgar crowd. Rogues and vagabonds, they called us in Shakespeare's time—am I right, Lanvin? We have no homes, we live in dingy lodging-houses in every middle-sized town in England, we know which landlady counts the potatoes, which theatre's full of fleas, and which has a roof that leaks on the stage when it rains. None of your high-class West End stuff for us—we lure the coppers, the orange peel, and the monkey-nuts, and we spend our one-day-a-week holiday chewing stale sandwiches in Sunday trains."
And so it went on. Not till weeks later, when he had got to know them as human beings, did he realize that they had behaved with extra extravagance that evening in order to put him at his ease, and that the insults were a convention in which they took particular pride—the more horrific and ingenious, the warmer the note of friendliness indicated.
Margesson took Smith aside and said: "Well? Can you stand us?" Smith answered with a laugh: "I think so. I'm having quite a good time, anyhow."
Paula walked with him to the corner of the road. He said: "I'm really glad I came—they're a warm-hearted lot, and it's nice of them to expect me to see them off in the morning."
"Now don't begin to argue. Maybe I've bungled again—you've only got to say so, and the whole idea's dropped. But there's a job for you if you want it. In fact it's just about a hundred jobs rolled into one— you'll find that out, if you take it on, and if you don't like it or something better turns up, then you're free to go like a shot."
it. I think it was probably because they could all
