CHAPTER III
"The Round Adventure" was published in mid-October.
It sold seven hundred and thirty-two copies, counting the colonial sales. A few reviews, closely packed between brimming columns of war-tidings, mentioned the book in terms of "promising" "whimsical charm" "pleasant fantasy"; others dismissed it as "inadequate"; one critic remarked caustically that "Kay Rollinson" might with profit have been sent for awhile to the front-line trenches.... "In these times, when men are not afraid to face death every minute from every quarter of earth and air and water, we have small patience with these morbid self-analytic heroes beloved of the lady novelist. Gareth Temple—of whom, despite the masculine pseudonym, one strongly suspects the sex—must learn that there are many different names for 'funk'; but nowadays, only one cure for it."
Mr. Campbell congratulated Gareth, absently, on the appearance of the novel; said he would read it—and forgot. One elderly lady in Somerset wrote to the author, saying what a beautiful and helpful message the story had held for her. Locker and Swyn were not encouraged to do more than advertise "The Round Adventure" inconspicuously for a month; and then resigned themselves to the comparatively slight financial loss. Unlike Campbell, however, who in all cases would rather exploit himself as a good publisher than prove his client a bad author, Forrester was careful to inform Mr. Temple that they were depressed over the sales.
And there was no perceptible increase of respect in Jimmy's manners.
As Patricia had remarked, these were times of war, and books had temporarily ceased to matter.
So many dreams ... so much of exultation, of strife and heart-sickness and envy, of sacrifice, and of rebounding hope ... all of life's issues since a year and a half hooked on to the single obsession of a book written and a book published.
And—"Is thisall?" Gareth could not bring himself to believe that this was indeed all.
"I shall never dream again...."
He was resentful of this over-toppling unheeding weight that had fallen athwart his frail creation, and crushed it, and crushed it out of sight and out of existence. The more resentful, since all about him were real sufferings, real flesh-and-blood losses; pain and suspense; and in comparison, the failure of his book counted for much neither in his own sight nor in anyone else's. One could not even feel noble about it; merely ... tepid.
He was not employed upon war-work. There was still sufficient to occupy him as reader to Leslie Campbell. Books about Germany were being published by the score; exposing German militarism and German ethics; reminiscences of English governesses who had resided in Germany; translations from the German writers.... People were curious to understand this apparently civilized scientific philosophic folk who had so startlingly revealed themselves savage and of insensitive honour.
Plenty for Gareth to do. Sometimes he almost succeeded in deluding himself that this was indeed war-work, or meritoriously akin to it. The first rush to active service was over; had crashed over his protesting tenacity like a wave, leaving him still as a limpet adherent to the rock. He also discovered, to his relief, that there were other limpets on the rock. He did not much like the look of them ... but who was he to complain? Now that the roar and foam and sputter of the wave had died down, the limpet no longer felt seriously uncomfortable....
It would have required a very strong reminder of external circumstances to reanimate Gareth's once flaming visions of all mankind bonded to unity. One could not run about clamorously in an atmosphere already adapted, still, settled, to the new conditions. If he had begun earlier——
Gareth remained where he was.
In the spring of nineteen-fifteen he had the pleasure of assisting in the publication of Pat O'Neill's volume of vivid impressionistic jottings—"The Log-Book"—actual experience, veined by brilliant humour or fiery pity. Published at half a crown, it sold over twenty thousand copies, of which Ferguson's Ambulance Corps reaped the entire benefit. Patricia did not even return to England to savour her success. "... I'm only the gramophone needle," she scribbled to Gareth; "without me these incidents would not be recorded on the wax; but I've created nothing!"—This in answer to the letter of congratulation which he had written at the prompting of one of his best and sweetest impulses; a letter which was generous and sincere, and altogether charming.
It was another whole year before she eventually permitted herself a short holiday in England. She was doing strenuous and useful work with the Corps, and could very hardly be spared from any of her capacities, to which time and emergency had added nursing and first-aid surgery. A second volume of "The Log-Book" had recently been published, and was already humming through its ninth edition ... Leslie Campbell forgave that little matter of "The Reverse of the Medal" withdrawn; he was very pleased with Pat O'Neill. So were Campbell's Young Men—such of the band whose various leaves happened now, for the first time since the outbreak of the war, to coincide. Vincent Alexander had been killed at the Dardanelles; and young Burnett had lost a leg in the same sorrowful expedition; Graham Carr was in London, convalescent from a light attack of typhoid; Ran Wyman, on the other hand, was suffering from nothing worse than a startled discovery of that especial form of Deity that is born and bred solely in Russia, and whose divine simplicity is badly damaged by import into England.
In and out of the office, as in pre-war days; the same arrogance of freemasonry; the same disregard of persons outside the temporarily predominating subject; the same eager brilliant discussions, confident laying down of the law, flippant esoteric allusions; rather more of manliness and common sense, perhaps, and less of windy theory.
And the reader sat at his desk and listened, with the same wistful sense of being entirely superfluous. It did not add any strangeness to the scene that Pat should now be One of Them. She merely occupied the vacant space into which he had always dreamt his own person; and seemed quite at home in it. He had seen practically nothing of his wife during her week's nominal stay at Blenheim Terrace. She was claimed incessantly, and seemed to enjoy the whirlwind holiday; though the old contradiction was visible again between sad dead eyes and mocking up-curve of the lips.... Patricia had received the stamp of war.
"Until your advent, I was the only feminine element in these sacred offices," said Mona Gurney, whom Graham Carr had just introduced.
The latter put in: "And even now we only accept her ladylike little person for the sake of her books' sturdy uncompromising masculinity. Candidly, Pat, did you expect anything like this to be the author of 'Rust on the Plough'?"
Mona Gurney's fists flew up to her huddled shoulders, with a funny little gesture of anger all her own: "Graham, you ask everybody that.—It'ssillyto expect me to wear straws in my hair and yellow clay on my boots, just because I get good reviews in the 'Agricultural Monthly.'" She turned a small pleading face towards Patricia: "Mr. Campbell is quite as bad. For weeks he couldn't make head or tail of me; then he had an inspiration: invited me to spend a day in the country, led me into a field ... and waited for me to get excited. When I didn't cast myself headlong on the earth and bite it, he was disappointed, and took me back to town."
"If I were to make head or tail of you," Pat exclaimed laughing, "it should be a fuzzy furry grey tail that was cocked upright ... and between your wee paws I should just love to pop a nut! I'm delighted to meet you, Miss Gurney; and since Graham has started us on odious personalities, let me confess that never in my life have I encountered anyone quite so fascinatingly like a squirrel!"
Mona's hands flew up again, accompanying a laugh that was midway between a squeak and a gurgle: "Oh dear!—and Alex always used to call me a Puritan."
"A Puritan squirrel expresses it exactly." But a lull fell upon conversation at the mention of Vincent Alexander. He had been popular among these of his friends who had pierced beneath his extreme outward decorum.
The lull was broken by whir of the telephone bell.
"Let me answer it!" Guy Burnett exclaimed, who had that instant hobbled in with Ran Wyman. "It will be like a taste of old times." For he was still in his blue hospital suit; and far too weak and white to think just yet of returning to the firm; though rumour whispered that presently his father intended to buy him a partnership with Leslie Campbell.... "Hello! Hello!... Come back, you blighter—what d'you want to run away for?... Hello-o-o-o!... Carr, there was a time when I could have betted on this being an order for 'Piccadilly.'"
"Yer can bet yer shirt it's fur the 'Log-Book' now," put in the Heart-breaker, raising a damp crimson face from his parcel-packing, and speaking in tones that were husky with pride and passion. "It's that bloomin' 'Log-Book' 'ere all day long, till we're fair fed up with it. Really we are, Miss O'Neill."
"... Hello!... Yes—yes.... All right. By to-morrow?—certainly, nothing easier.... Hi! no! wait a minute...." Burnett turned to Campbell who had thrust a head round the door of his sanctum. "'Evening, sir—I say, I'm not up-to-date any more in these matters. Hale's are asking if the hundred copies of 'The Log-Book' are ready for 'em yet, according to promise?"
"Nay, we can't get the edeetions through at that pace. Enquire if they happen to ken there's a European War in prawgress!" with terrific scorn.
Burnett did so; and then with a cordial "good-bye," replaced the receiver.
"It's really rather a miracle to find any sort of book-interest surviving after two years of topsy-turvydom," Ran Wyman commented, from the table on to which he had swung himself beside Pat. "We're a marvellous nation; I expected a landslide in literature; and here we are, flourishing!"
"Publishing is awnly being carried on under enormous deefficulties," Campbell announced cheerfully; "dearth of paper—dearth of labour—dearth of railway faceelities—dearth of reviews—dearth of the public's money——"
"Dearth of everything except authors. Behold us in rich quantities, gladdening to the eye. And surely no dearth of material, either; consider with what an infinitely fresh store of possibilities the war has equipped our jaded brains."
"Yus—Ran thinks I left a leg at Suvla Bay, so that he should write eight hundred pages on the theme of 'God's in his Russia, all's right with the——'"
"Shut up!" Wyman's narrow black eyes were wet, and he blinked them rapidly. Confronted with the boy's crippled condition, he was absurdly ashamed of the luck which had carried him unscathed through eighteen months of impudent exposure to all hazards.
Graham Carr put the general question as to whether they considered it legitimate to use the war for purposes of fiction?
"What's your objection, Carr?"
"Life-and-death is a bigger thing than pen-and-ink."
"Dinna say that, laddie. In some cases, pen and ink has sur-r-rvived life and death."
"One in every thousand. The nine hundred and ninety nine are merely ... impertinent."
Patricia murmured reminiscently: "'... And when he came back to her, he wore on his breast a little piece of metal inscribed: For Valour.... He had made good, after all!'"
"That's the stuff. The editor of the 'Blue Sky' told me that in the first month of the war he received uncountable short stories in the line of 'Was He A Coward?' 'Coward V.C.' 'The Girl who Chucked up the Man who Funked for his Brother who Didn't' ... and so on. It's all very well in peace-time to pander to a certain maudlin moral hysteria in the reading public. But the war's real enough and raw enough—and ought to be immune from cheap serial exploitation." Carr spoke with the authority of one who since the fourth of August, 1914, had not once been betrayed into print.
"But the kind of penny serial stuff you mention is not real," Patricia argued; "it's about a quite pretty little war—a war in muslin with a light blue sash—the sort of war one could invite to tea with one's children and know it would not set a bad example. Far enough removed from the actual thing, to make it harmless. It's the sort of war in which the heroine is always a Red Cross Nurse without any previous training; with an adjustable face that can remind each and every wounded officer in the ward of his girl at home.... Did any of you ever stumble across that priceless gem: 'In spite of his lameness, he embraced her passionately!'?"
"That's the rank and file of war fiction," Carr said; "the next grade annoys me more, because it ought to know better: The pre-war psychological problem presented, with the war conveniently lugged in towards the end, asdeus ex, to solve all difficulties, cut all strains, adjust all quarrels. Then, for want of definite conclusion, the Woman watches the Man (not the hero and heroine in this grade) depart for the Front, with a queer uplifted premonition in her heart that he will come safely through the Supreme Test—just he,ausgesucht—as we say in the dead languages."
Campbell cried indignantly: "Ye're unjust, Carr. This is truth ye were quoting. For in every single case all over the world, wasn't the war just bound to tumble unexpectedly into some seetuation or other, and deeslocate it?" Pat and Gareth exchanged a quick look; while Campbell went on: "It's far more unnatural to work oot the problem to its logical conclusion of what would have happened if the war hadn't happened."
"It just depends if you look upon the war as the sum total of what each individual's acts and feelings went to make it, and are still making it; or as a complete descent from the Absolute, regardless of atomic contribution?"
"Monism or pluralism—what does it matter?" cried Pat, impatient as usual with unprofitable theorizing. "The answer makes no practical difference either in the conduct or the result of the war."
Carr immediately accused her of pragmatism.
"The war has killed 'isms,'" declared Ran Wyman. To which Carr replied curtly: "Till the day when the 'isms' shall kill war."
"All the same, the sort of modern novel that tries to ignore the war, smells fusty—like a station cab. I've read a few: the author makes no allusion at all to the fact of the war; but at the same time his characters are rather inexplicably inclined to cold-shoulder Germany; almost to cut it dead ... instinctive second-sight, I suppose. General impression of: 'I know something about you, Mr. Germany, but I won't tell, 'cos this isn't a war-novel!'—intensely irritating. Also an occasional careless remark on the lines of: 'Yes, I want my son to learn how to box a compass—it may be of use to him in the far-off eventuality of European war, which I somehow think is not so far off as it seems now!'—Clever fellow!"
"And even granted," said Pat, "that the best authors—top-grade—wait for a focussed perspective of all this scurrying muddle——"
Unceremoniously Guy Burnett interrupted her:
"Why should they? It's just this scurrying muddle, as you call it, that ought to be chronicled by any writer whose brain is sufficiently nimble to catch it. We can trust to historians for the eventual consistent balancing and summing-up; but just the slippery, shifting, sliding kaleidoscope of the war, as filtered through this personality and that——"
"Let me point out, Guy, that you can't filter a kaleidoscope ... at any rate, not in the presence of Leslie Campbell. We owe something still to the prestige of the firm."
"Nobody wants an impersonal and godlike summary of the Great War as yet.Thatwould be impertinent, if you like!"
Patricia said lightly: "I beg of you not to apologize; I began a sentence about ten minutes ago; it's not of the faintest interest to anyone save myself—but allowing that, I'd like to finish it."
Burnett apologized profusely; and the company hushed their tongues, and gazed with admiring expectancy upon Pat O'Neill.
"Take it for granted that a professional writer feels like Mr. Graham Carr on the impertinence of nibbling at such a giant subject; take it also that the said writer is anxious to satisfy the public's yearnful plea for distraction from the one topic;—does Mr. Graham Carr realize the petty difficulties that beset such a writer from the outset? A novel that does not deal with the war, must presumably not be laid in times of war; because the war, if once mentioned, inevitably occupies the foreground—as it has in all our lives. Therefore the writer, even if he or she wishes to be up-to-date, must break the tale off sharply at the end of June, nineteen-fourteen. And if the characters are to spread themselves and grow old, he must either let them disport themselves in a wholly problematic after-the-war period—in which God help the prophetic instinct!—or else reckon all his dates and everybody's ages backwards from the last chapter, so as to be correct in a false assumption that modern times ended two years ago ... which mathematical callisthenics will probably land him in a bag of anachronisms——"
"Heavens, child! it's not at all necessary to do all that; there are surely millions of old books to satisfy that section of the reading public who require distraction from the war."
"Then if WE—the literary fraternity—are neither to express ourselves on the subject of the war, nor on the subject of otherwise, with what do you suggest our busy pens shall be occupied?"
"With nothing, for the duration of the war. Let 'em rust. Nobody will miss 'em; and there's plenty of emergency work to be done. I can safely make this statement, as none of us present are squandering our energies on irrelevant fiction."
Mona Gurney broke down, and shed tears.
"My darling! my precious!" Wyman leapt to her side, and attempted ineffectually to console her. "What is it? What has the nasty man said to upset you? Don't you believe a word of it——"
"It's such a beautiful book!" she sobbed. "And I thought I was keeping the lamp of civilization trimmed and burning—I did, truly.... I said so every time I sat down at my desk. It's two hundred and twenty thousand words, and only five more chapters to write——"
"Two hundred and twenty thousand wur-r-rds, and not finished yet!" Campbell was aghast. "But what may be the theme of this—this paper-eating monstrosity, my dear?"
Mona broke away from Ran's cherishing arms, and sat up on her haunches with spasmodic fidelity to Patricia's simile of a wee furry creature about to beg: "Oh, it is, itisa lovely book!" screwing up her eyes and mouth in an ecstasy of remembrance. "It's all about the Wars of the Roses!"
A shout of laughter greeted the announcement.
"But what's wrong withthiswar, Mona?—what's wrong with it? Why be prehistoric?—drag up these far-fetched relics from the ruins of time, when the genuine article is in the next room, so to speak?"
"Because it's inthisroom—and a little too genuine," Mona explained. "I do agree with Graham in wanting to let the pudding get cold before I dig in my spoon—but I can't write quite inconsequent novels on heredity orla femme incomprise, either—-just at present. And I can't put out the lamp altogether, Graham; I can't! I can't!"
"Puddings and lamps ... surely one of the minor evils of the war is the abundance of bad metaphor to which it can give rise even in this picked assembly!"
Burnett enquired seriously: "Nothing amiss with the soil of Sussex, is there, Miss Gurney, that you should abandon it? We like you when you're agricultural ... you influenced me to start growing mignonette in a window-box, once."
"You don't understand—I had to express myself about war—war in the generic sense. The inner psychology of war always remains the same, whether it's York and Lancaster—North and South America—the Assyrians and the Babylonians—or the Allies and the Huns. There's not a problem connected with the war which can be raised now, which could not have been equally contended in any one of those campaigns."
"Thousands, Mona."
"Not one, Ran—in its underlying human substance. I'm not referring to alterations in the method of warfare; naturally these are subject to periodic changes——"
"And the human problems are dependent on these changes." He looked round for his hat: "'Books and the War'! It's been a most illuminating discussion. Patricia, you're dining with me in half an hour, and don't forget it."
"Oh, Miss O'Neill, you must spare me an evening soon, away from all these talkative men; won't you?" Mona Gurney was not alone in always calling Pat by the name under which she wrote. They were all liable to forget, at Leslie Campbell's, that she was the wife of Gareth Temple.
"Not this side of Christmas, Miss Gurney, unless you cross the Channel. I'm off again to-night. But do send me a copy of the new book, if it comes out in the autumn. Just to remind me of this past hour——"
"Of which the summing-up——"
"No, Ran—No!" they all cried in chorus. But unperturbedly sententious, Wyman went on: "... is this: that the underlying motive power for the continual and increasing eruption of war literature, in spite of discouragement and difficulties, is neither impertinence, gold-greed, nor public demand; but rather the fact that each person feels urgently the necessity somehow to identify himself with the war, for fear of being stranded for ever upon its outer rim. Expression is one way of connection——"
"No."
It was Gareth who in a low voice had contradicted; though till the rest of the company turned and stared at him in some surprise at his unwonted contribution to the argument, he was not sure if he had spoken aloud the negative shouted by his soul.
Carr said, after a pause, remembering vaguely that he had been confidant to rather a queer outburst from the reader, some years ago: "Why 'no,' Temple? You're qualified to put us all right on the subject; you're in the thick of it here, while we've been scampering about the globe."
"'The thick of it' is hardly in a publisher's office," Gareth retorted bitterly, though the other man's remark had been made without any sub-intention to hurt. "It's the 'thin of it'—the war in words—you never grope through them to the realities going on beyond. Words that muffle suffering till it reaches here beautiful—poignant—noble—crude—restrained—oh, as anything but itself! First the war books, and then criticism of the books, and criticism of the criticism ... how are we—how am I to get past that to the very beat of the war?... The very beat of the war—that's only a phrase too—I don't know what it signifies, when I come to think about it. But expression isnotconnection. Those like you—and you—and you——" His look roamed from Carr to Wyman, rested an instant on young Burnett's drawn thin face—avoided Patricia altogether—"who have fought in the war, can you be identified with it any closer by ... writing about it?" He came to a halt; experienced a queer satisfaction in the knowledge that for once they were all listening to him intently ... then, in desperate realization that even now he was only talking about talk, rushed on to achievement of his purpose: "I intend to leave here—resign my job as reader. I can't stand it any longer, Mr. Campbell; I want things straight from the source ... it's indecent to feel as heroic as I do after reading a good war-novel ... to respond as I do to a mere clump of words. Do you remember, at the very beginning of hostilities, when the message came through: 'The Black Watch is cut to pieces!'—I've never forgotten that—the stern sombre ring of it.... I'd repeat it, and feel my face growing stern and sombre. It was all in the sound; just as bad if it had been the Second Middlesex ... but not to me. I can't get beneath the covers. Suvla Bay—that's exciting too ... though hardly to you and me in quite the same way, Burnett. I don't suppose the name matters much to you. Suvla Bay....
"And when the war is over, I shall be left with a fistful of second-hand quotations. Stranded on the outer rim. If I stop here, reading about it, hearing about it. Here—where the best emotion the Great War has to give me is a thrill out of someone else's book—and the worst thing it can do to me is to spoil the chances of my own...."
He walked blindly from the room. On the threshold the conviction was still upon him that he had been eloquent. Half-way down the flight of stairs, he wondered if he had made a complete fool of himself. Already it occurred to him that after all Campbell might not take seriously his notice to resign his job. Although certainly it was meant seriously. But the embers of feeling of the past two years had blazed up and burnt themselves out in speech. ... And now his only desire was to ascertain how his outburst had impressed Patricia. He stood stock-still, one hand gripping the iron balustrade rail ... listened intently. He had left the door ajar ... and was aware that Campbell had just said something—he could not catch what. Then clear and careless, came Pat's reply:
"Ah, but he'll be back in a day or two, Mr. Campbell. Dear old Gareth—his intentions are sincere, but rather collapsible!"
... Gareth went on, down the stairs, and into the street.
Pat knew.