THERE is an idea that story-telling is a cheap and vulgar thing; that it fulfils no function; that it does not enlarge our knowledge of human character and human life. And yet who is the more distinct to us, Michael Fane or Sir Launcelot, Guinevere or Sylvia Scarlett? The character of Michael Fane has been presented to us through many thousand words of detailed analysis. Sir Launcelot is the hero of a few incidents. But we know Launcelot better than we know Michael, for all his many volumes. And do we know Jean Christophe as well as we know Saul and Joab and the son of Jesse? There are fifteen hundred pages of Jean Christophe, fifteen hundred pages of turmoil and conflict and desire; in retrospect a confused impression. But we never forget the Sabine incident, that perfect story, that diamond in a copper ring. The outline blurs; one character merges into another. But there remains the picture of Sabine sitting listlessly before her house; of Sabine pulling down the blind across the window on the night when she realises that Jean loves her; of Sabine shelling peas; of Sabine searching for a button in the disorder of her shop; of Jean and Sabine shivering on either side of the door afraid to turn the handle. Fortypages out of fifteen hundred, but the most perfect in the prose literature of the last forty years.
Turgenev never organised his thought as Tolstoi did. He did not explain himself in constructive argument. He had no need. There is implicit in his work, the most gentle, the most tolerant, the most harmonious philosophy that has been expounded by man since the Sermon on the Mount. And Turgenev was a story-teller. He knew that no language speaks more directly to the human heart than that of simple narrative. The Russians hated and distrusted him, especially Dostoieffsky, who could never forgive Turgenev for being a gentleman. But there has never been anyone less a snob, intrinsically, than Turgenev, no one who has stood more simply, less assumingly by his achievements. He was content to be an artist, a maker of beautiful things. He did not, as Tolstoi did, assume the rôle of prophet. “If story-telling is a cheap thing,†we can imagine him to say, “I cannot help it. It is the thing that I was born to do.â€
Turgenev knew that it was enough to create beauty: that it is unprofitable folly to ask a direct influence of art; that it is for the politician and the journalist, not the artist, to alter the social fabric. Turgenev was an entertainer; nothing more, and nothing less. To-day the artist has developed a sense of mission. He feels that he is here to get something done. And is in danger, consequently, of exchanging a temporal for an eternal view of life. We have come through our familiarity with the daily press to associate the written word with the statement of a case.
When we read a newspaper article on the conditions of life in Bermondsey our first question is: “That is all very well. But is it thus that the majority of people in Bermondsey exist?†And when we read a novel about Bermondsey we apply the same standard. “Is this,†we ask ourselves, “how the majority of Bermondsians live?†If we decide that it is not, we say that the novel “is not true to life.†We find it hard to rid ourselves of the idea that all writing must be a form of special reporting.
And, of course, for the purposes of a novel it does not in the least matter whether the lives of the majority of Bermondsians do, or do not, correspond with those of the hero and the heroine. Universality is not obtained by cataloguing the routine of a number of uninteresting persons. It is unlikely that many dairy-maids have been the victims of such a disconcerting series of adventures as befell Tess of the D’Urbevilles. But Tess is true to life. It is true to life because Thomas Hardy is a novelist and not a journalist. If he had intended his book to be an “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,†if his creative impulse had been inspired by a wish to improve the lot of the Wessex farm-hand, the critics would have been justified in saying: “This is a piece of special pleading based on a particularly unusual combination of circumstances. We therefore consider it to be untrue to life.†For the journalist the word “life†implies the external conditions under which the majority of people live; for the artist, life is the reality behind livelihood, and for the revelation of that reality the choice of subject is comparativelyunimportant. The same moment of reality may be presented equally effectively through the most diverse mediums.
The appreciation of the temporal quality of life, of the approach of age, the sense of weakening power, is found in the work of nearly all great writers; but it is expressed by each writer in terms of the phenomena with which he is most familiar. Anthony Trollope would find relief from such a mood in the study of a kindly, ineffectual parson. George Moore would tell the story of some butterfly of the Nouvelle Athène, some Marie Pellegrin. Neville Cardus would recall the fleeting splendour of Tom Richardson. To the journalist there would seem little in common between these three studies. But the artist would see that the subject was in each case the same. In “La Terre,†Zola told the same story that Shakespeare told in “Lear.â€
It is only the best sellers nowadays who are writing stories, really writing stories, stories for their own sakes. That is why they are best sellers. They may be bad stories that they are telling, or rather they may be telling the stories badly. For there is no such thing as a new story—it is the treatment that is all-important. But they are stories; and most of their authors, if they chose, if they thought it worth the doing, could write the sort of novel with three hundred readers that would get half a column of serious consideration in the cultured weeklies.
Berta Ruck, for instance. I do not know if her books are ever reviewed in the sixpenny weeklies; I should be inclined to doubt it. But I have not theslightest doubt that her books are a great deal better than the majority of novels that are so honoured. She writes very jolly stories about very jolly people. They begin with a highly improbable situation. A woman persuades a man to become her husband in name so that she can attend to her business unbothered by the attentions of a crowd of suitors. A financier, to pacify his match-making parents, engages a secretary to act as his official fiancée. A girl dresses up as a boy and becomes a chauffeur. Highly improbable occurrences, undoubtedly. But it is permissible to open on a situation of any degree of improbability, provided the characters subsequently behave according to rule. And Berta Ruck’s characters do. They are real people. And what is more important, they are very jolly people. One has a genuine affection for them, which is more than one can say of most modern novels. How often do we come across a hero and a heroine that we really like, that we really want to see in the last chapter happily married to the right person? We do in a Berta Ruck novel, and we will pardon any stretching of coincidence if it allows that fortunate encounter on the last page. To be able to do that, to be able to write a jolly book about jolly people is very much more worth while than.... But we will be neither personal nor malicious. Let us be content to state that it would be certainly more charitable, and probably more accurate to assume that a book sells on account of its qualities rather than its defects.
One envies, sometimes, the people who were born a hundred years ago. It must have been so easy towrite then, when all the plots were new and there were so few writers. To-day everyone is writing novels. One is cultivating a soil that has yielded many harvests. One begins a story: for a week, a month, a fortnight one is happy and excited, and then one loses interest suddenly. It isvieux jeu, one says. It has all been done so many times before. One is not good enough to make an old thing new. Or, again, it may be that one can find no ending to a story, an ending that has not become banal through other people’s exploitation of it. This, for instance, this scene in a Soho restaurant: a small, unobtrusive, unsensational, but very excellent foreign restaurant in Dean Street, where I used to dine occasionally, in days when I had a bungalow beneath the Downs, after a day’s football, before the last train down to Sussex, when I was tired, when I did not want to be disturbed by music and noise and laughter, when I wanted my eyes to rest on quiet wallpaper and quiet dresses, when I knew exactly what I wanted, and exactly where to find it; there: this one dramatic episode of which it has been my fortune to be a witness.
I had only just taken my seat and begun my examination of the menu when the double-doors of the restaurant swung open and a young girl paused there in the doorway, looking round her with the expression of perplexed embarrassment that the faces of young people assume in a strange place. She made a pretty picture as she stood there, a fur cap fitting tightly over the head, pressing the brown hair into a thick wave about her ears; a small hand raised towardsthe throat, keeping in its place the woollen scarf that was flung across the shoulder; a slim ankle protruding beneath her skirt, a “tweazy†looking little thing; and if her features were not beautiful, she had the prettiness of all young girls whose figures are slim and graceful—the charm of the green leaf and the bud, that fascinates a man more than beauty does, but that passes quickly and lasts rarely into womanhood.
She stood there, looking round her for a moment, then the perplexed expression left her; she smiled and walked down the centre of the room.
A man rose from a table in the corner and came to meet her. He was one of those men whom it is almost impossible to describe, so much did he resemble the rest of his sex in his dress, his manner, and the general carriage of his person. He looked, and probably was, a gentleman; he was about thirty years old; he had a small dark moustache, and he showed no signs of baldness. Beyond that I could tell nothing. He was hidden in complete security behind the technique of an upbringing.
I could not hear how they greeted each other, but in the way in which he helped her off with her coat there was implied, I fancied, a suggestion of uneasiness. “They do not know each other very well,†I said to myself, and, moving my chair a little further to the right, I arranged myself so that I should be able to watch them without turning my head.
The suggestion of uneasiness was repeated as he leaned over the table towards her with the menu. “He is a little too eager,†I told myself. “He isanxious to make a success of it, and he is overacting. He is confoundedly uncomfortable.†And, calling the waiter, I ordered a dish of which the preparation would take, I knew, a good twenty minutes—and settled myself to enjoy the little comedy.
He had ordered an expensive dinner—champagne, a fried sole, a pheasant and a Japanese salad, and a mushroom savoury. He was desperately anxious to make it a success, and, to avoid awkward pauses, he was talking most of the time: amusingly, too, I gathered, for she often smiled at what he said, and once she burst out laughing—fresh, clear laughter; and that laugh, which came about half-way through the meal, revealed to me what indeed I should have seen before, that, while he was enduring agonies of self-consciousness, she was solely concerned with the natural enjoyment of a good dinner in pleasant company. “The plot thickens,†I said, for this discovery ruled out the possibility of the pleasant little romance I had been considering—their parents had forbidden their marriage, they had decided to run away feeling very brave when the scheme was only under discussion, but now that the moment had come they repented the splendid resolution and would give anything to be in their respective homes sitting before the fire, thinking pleasantly of bed. That solution would have to go; for, if this was the case, she would certainly be as nervous, and probably more nervous, than he, unless—but that was a contingency of which I refused to consider the possibility. The elopement idea would have to go, and, besides, there was not the leastsuggestion that they were lovers; they had not once looked into each other’s eyes; they had not been even silent together, and silence is the beginning of love. They were not man and wife; they were not avowed lovers; they did not even seem to be potential lovers.
And yet this dinner was for him certainly a big occasion. She meant something to him. But what? It was possible, of course, that he was in love with her, and not she with him. But that was no cause for shyness. Courtship is a leisured and, on the whole, pleasant business; and surely the young man was not so foolish as to be contemplating a premature proposal on the way home. For there is nothing more fatal than a hurried courtship. A moment comes when a girl expects a man to take her by the hand and tell her that he loves her, and would be angry with him if he did not. But it is disastrous to anticipate a climax. And this the young man knows; being a man of thirty such moments must have often come to him before. “And yet, perhaps,†I said to myself, “he is contemplating this folly. Why?â€
And, putting down my glass, I began to frame a story. He had been an officer in the war, and after demobilisation had gone up to Oxford to take his degree. That was quite possible, and would make him twenty-eight years old to-day. Yes, he had gone up to Oxford, and had decided to go in for the Civil Service; he had wanted a post in the Home Civil, but he had not been able to make up for the years he had lost during the war, and he had passed into the IndianCivil. In a fortnight he would go abroad for several years, and there was this girl whom he had met perhaps at tennis, and with whom he had fallen in love, fascinated by her delicacy, her frail grace, her suggestion of the butterfly. She was young and inexperienced, and had regarded his love as comradeship, for he was undemonstrative, and talked about dancing and the cricket championship; and now he was going away. He had asked her out to dinner, and was desperately anxious to bring things to a head before he went. And of all this she knew nothing.
An interesting situation that could be developed into a good story. In the man’s failure to pass into the Home Civil Service there would be just a hint of the sad position of the ex-soldier; he had served, and had been passed over in favour of someone who had not. And on this failure hung the significance of his romance. He had prepared himself for a slow, quiet courtship, and now found that he had to compress into a few days the campaign of several months—and, of course, he had not been able to. He was not the man to capture a young girl’s heart by storm. If he succeeded in making her fall in love with him, it would be only after many weeks of growing intimacy. She would begin by confiding in him—that would be the first step; and then—but it would be a slow business, and, at any rate, it was impossible now. In three days he would have to go to India.
It was really a capital story, and I began to plan it out: the meeting at a tennis tournament; the news of his failure at the exam.; the dinner party in therestaurant; and then the journey home in the taxi. I could see it so clearly.
They would sit in silence for a while. Then he would lean forward and whisper her name, and she would turn her head and look at him with surprise.
“Yes,†she would say.
And he would not know what to do in the unaccustomed situation; and, as he had over-acted in the restaurant to hide his nervousness, so would he overact now. Without any warning he would take her in his arms and kiss her awkwardly and say: “I love you.†It would be a horrible failure. Very likely it would be her first kiss, and she would have her own romantic conception of what a first kiss should be, and she would be angry with him for his clumsiness. The kiss will have given her no pleasure, and that she cannot forgive him. She will push him from her, will probably say: “Now you’ve spoilt it all,†for at these moments it is the ridiculous that occurs to us, and she would speak out of her recollection of book and magazine heroines, and he would try and explain, but she would shake her head angrily.
“Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Can’t you see that you’ve spoilt everything?â€
And, when they reached her home, she would jump out of the taxi and run straight up the steps without turning to say good-bye to him, and he would sit back in the cushions reflecting dismally that in three days he would sail for India, and would not see her again for three—perhaps four—years.
A good story! I would sit down to write it as soonas I got home, not waiting for the morning to blur my impression of her startled girlhood. And I should not find it difficult to end this story. While he was away he would write to her and ask forgiveness, protesting that he loved her, had always loved her, that he was sorry for his rudeness; and that, when he came back, might he hope—a trite letter it would be; but then, if it were anything but trite, he would be a writer of much talent, and that I did not propose to make him. No; he would write her an ordinary love-letter, and she, being an ordinary woman, would be moved by it, and, with the distance hiding her blushes, she would write, saying that she had been young and foolish, but was now wise, and would gladly wait for him. And during four years they would create slowly, letter by letter, an illusion of each other out of the enchantment of things remote. He would become her Prince Charming, and she would be for him a creature of infinite fragrance. And then, when they met again, she would find herself in the arms of a prosaic Anglo-Indian, with thinning hair, and he would find that a girl had become a woman, that her pretty features had grown petulant during the years of waiting.
And in the morning I should have to decide whether or not they should marry; probably they would, from a lack of the courage that looks at itself in the glass and says: “You have failed, my friend.†Yes, it would be truer to make them marry, and perhaps she might be happy in her children, while he found pleasure in the society of another woman. But, at any rate, a dream would have been passed, and that would be theobject of my story: to tell simply how everything changes, everything passes; not a new philosophy and one that occurred to Heraclitus, but true nevertheless.
And looking across at the couple in the corner, I thought with real sympathy on their sad fate. They were just getting ready to go; the waiter had brought the bill neatly folded upon a plate; the girl had turned towards a large photograph of the Royal Family, and was endeavouring to arrange her hair from the blurred reflection in it.
She was smiling and happy, ignorant of the disaster that awaited her. Within five minutes she would have been embraced clumsily, would have assured her lover that “he had spoiled everything,†and the curtain would have descended on the first act of the tragedy. Could nothing be done to save her; it was cruel—so young, so fresh and with so brief a springtime.
I was indulging myself in this soft, sentimental reverie, for a story-teller always runs in great danger of confusing his own reality with that of the world, and of regarding everything that happens to himself and to his friends as chapter headings in a novel. I was just, I say, indulging my pet weakness to the top of my bent when suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was the witness of a real dramatic incident.
The girl had turned to arrange her hair in the blurred reflection of the sheet of glass that protected the Royal Family from dust, and, in order to brush a little powder from her chin, she had taken her pocket-handkerchief from her bag. The bag lay open on the table, its mouth pointing to her companion, and, to my amazement, I saw the man lean forward, glance round the room to see if anyone was looking, and then quickly take from the bag a couple of pound notes; these he placed on the plate under the bill, added another note of his own, and called the waiter’s attention to the plate. Then, a minute later, the plate returned; the waiter received a substantial tip, in return for which he helped his clients on with their coats and bowed them out of the restaurant; all of which I watched in dazed, though intrigued, wonderment. I suppose I ought to have risen from my seat and called the girl’s attention to the theft, but it is hard for one who has chosen for himself the rôle of onlooker to decide on violent and sudden action. And besides, I have learnt that interference is invariably unwise, that I cannot expect other people to mind their own business until I mind mine. At any rate, whatever was the right thing to do, I did what it was natural for me to do under such circumstances: I sat where I was, and in five minutes became lost in a vague and wistful speculation.
The reasons for the man’s embarrassment were now clear; all the evening he had been waiting his opportunity to steal his companion’s money—that much was obvious. And to think that for half an hour I had been concocting an absurd story after the manner of Turgenev, about an Indian Civil Servant and “the girl he left behind himâ€! Impatiently I called for my bill, tipped the waiter, and walked out into Dean Street.
The cool air did me good in restoring my self-confidence. It was a mistake, I told myself, thatanyone might have made. We do not expect to meet thieves outside the Stock Exchange and the pages of the police reports. And it was quite a good story that I had invented—a slight debt to Turgenev perhaps, but then every short story that is written owes something either to Turgenev or de Maupassant or Tchecov. And I had, besides, the material for another really first-class tale. I could see it so clearly: the young girl prattling away pleasantly and the man getting more and more worried. “Will she never powder her nose?†he asks himself, and tries to hide his anxiousness beneath a series of amusing anecdotes. And no doubt I could make them discuss the modern girl, and she will say that she hates the girl who powders and paints; and he will have to agree with her, seeing that her complexion is her own, although he is, for the first time in his life, hating the fresh bloom of her cheek and praying that she were another sort of girl—a delightful situation. And then, at last, when all seems lost, I could make her lean forward to smell the flowers on the table, and a speck of yellow pollen would attach itself to her chin, to which he would, of course, call her attention.
“Is there really,†she would say, and, opening her bag, she would take out her handkerchief, turn to the photograph beside them, and give him his opportunity.
Up to that point it would be quite simple. But beyond it a lot of thought would be required. So good a motive must not be flung away, and all the way down the Charing Cross Road I turned the incident over in my mind.
Fifteen years ago I could have made him an agent in the White Slave Traffic. It was a popular theme then; every young girl who came up to London looked round at Paddington apprehensively for the kindly old lady who would ask her if she was new to these parts. Yes, fifteen years ago it would have been a moving story. But, during the last fifteen years, Villiers Street has become placarded with shilling descriptions of “Why Girls Go Wrongâ€; and the Bishop of London has written a great many prefaces and preached a great many sermons. The White Slave Traffic isvieux jeu. Still, there was something in the seductionmotif. “Yes, certainly,†I said to myself, as I presented my season-ticket at the barrier at Victoria and walked down the platform in search of a corner-seat; something might be made out of it: and by the time we had reached Selhurst a story had begun to form itself in my mind.
She had come up from the provinces for the day, and had met an old friend of hers who had asked her out to dinner; she had intended to catch the last train home. The man is smitten by her beauty and wonders how he can best possess it. Should he steal her money she will be unable to buy a ticket back.
The picture grew before me. I could see them at the booking-office. I could see her fumbling in her bag, searching every pocket, and then turning to him with a despairing look.
“I’ve lost the money.â€
“Oh, no; surely not,†he would say. “It must be in one of your pockets. Have another look.â€
And she would make another long, careful search which would, of course, be equally vain. And she would turn to him with tear-filled eyes.
“But what am I to do? I can’t get home. I haven’t any money to buy a ticket.â€
And in her voice would be the suggestion that he should lend her some, and, of course, he would say that he had none with him, but that if she would come back to his flat.... And she would thank him effusively and they would leap into a taxi, but when they arrived at the flat, which would be at the top of four flights of stairs, with the flat below unoccupied, he would discover that he had no money after all, and that the porter had gone, and that there was no one from whom he could borrow any; she would sink down on the sofa, her hands clasped before her knees, while he stood behind her wondering at what exact point——
But at that moment the train stopped at East Croydon, where I had to change and wait twenty minutes for a connection; and, while I stamped up and down the platform trying to keep warm, a swift dissatisfaction with my story overcame me. What did it matter what he said next, or at what exact point he ... for whatever he did, or whatever she did, the story as I had elected to tell it could only end in one way—a row of dots, and a short concluding paragraph: “Next morning, her dark hair scattered across the pillow, she woke in a strange room....†And how often that has been done. In how many novels has not that dark hair been scattered acrossthat pillow? It was theatrical, vulgar, the sort of plot that occurs to one as one sits in the smoking-room of one’s club after a heavy lunch and half a bottle of Pommard, and I walked up and down the platform of East Croydon station in a state of cold and miserable self-contempt.
But warmth revives us, and when I was again in the corner-seat of a smoker, down the window of which the heat ran in long, straggly trickles, I began to think that, after all, though I had to wash out the seduction motive, there might be something in the idea of the lost return-ticket, and the last train to Anerley. Suppose now that the young man had for a long time besieged unsuccessfully his fair companion, and that on the refusal of his third proposal he had decided that he would never secure the hand of his beloved unless he managed to compromise innocently her honour?
Yes, that might work out. He would steal her money at the restaurant; they would reach the booking-office where the scene which I have already described would be enacted. There would be the return to the flat and the discovery that the porter was out, and that, after all, he had forgotten to cash the cheque he had written out that morning.
“But what am I to do?†she would say.
And, with well-simulated confusion, he would mutter something about not minding a “shake-down†on the sofa, and that if she would take his room ...
“Oh, but I couldn’t! How could I? What would mother say?â€
Just a little touch that would place the mother atonce before the reader’s eye—a plump, heavy woman with a small, unsatisfactory husband. A woman of strong passions, that have focussed themselves on a rigid observance of the proprieties.
“But what else are you to do?†the young man would exclaim, and he would stammer something about giving her his key. And, in the end, she would consent to pass the night there, and next morning they would arrive at Anerley together with the milk, and be received by the mother in the front-parlour, a cold, melancholy room with the fire smoking dismally. She would receive them with her hands on her hips, and she would say one word, “Well!†and then listen while the young man stammered his explanations. Of course she would not believe him: he had never expected her to, and would have been miserably disappointed if she had. He would listen to her threats and tirades, and then, at the right moment, he would draw himself up to his full height.
“Madam,†he would say, “your accusations are untrue; the door of the room in which your daughter slept was locked all night. I slept on the sofa. But to prove my honour, and to vindicate hers, I am prepared—and shall be proud—to marry your daughter.â€
A slow smile would spread across the mother’s face. Honour saved, a daughter off her hands; and at last the daughter, moved by his chivalry, might even fall in love with her knight-errant.
I considered this solution during the two miles’ walk from Hassocks station. It was original. I had neverseen it done before. Such a situation is common enough in modern fiction. But the mistake is usually genuine, and that scene in the dismal parlour is the prelude to long years of married misery. Occasionally the affair is arranged by the girl, if she can trust her lover’s lack of enterprise. For a girl is more interested in marriage than a man, and proposes it indirectly more often than the admirers of the strong man would have us think. But for a man to plan such an escapade—that would indeed be new. And I went to sleep contented, thinking that the next day would pass pleasantly in congenial work.
But there is a poem by a poetess, now little read, which contains the lines:
“Colours seen by candlelightDo not look the same by day,â€
“Colours seen by candlelightDo not look the same by day,â€
“Colours seen by candlelightDo not look the same by day,â€
and when the sun shone next morning through my bedroom window my plot seemed less original than I had thought it the night before. What was it, after all, but a conceit? It said “black†to someone else’s “whiteâ€; it turned an old coat inside out, and though it would no doubt cause surprise if I were to walk down the village with my coat inside out, it would not be a particularly original act, and it would be the same coat.
That is not the way to make a good story—to tack an old situation on to a new one. I should have to find a different ending somehow; it was no good setting out to write it yet. For want of anything better to do, I walked out and began to weed the garden. But though I weeded the flower-beds in front of the house,and did valiant work with a hoe among the cabbages, no idea had come to me by lunch-time. And, though I spent the whole afternoon before a jigsaw puzzle, the most restful of all pursuits, tea-time found my mind a blank, and in this state it remained until a friend, to whom I had related the incident, made a most pertinent remark:
“Why, if the girl could see her face reflected in the photograph, did she not see the young man take the money from her purse?â€
I sat in surprised silence. Why had I not thought of that before?
“Yes,†I said, “but if she saw, why didn’t she say something?â€
“That’s for you to find out.â€
And for the next three days I searched my mind for reasons for her silence.
At last I began to see the glimmerings of a tale, the fifth that I had constructed about this romantic couple. And this is what I saw: a shy young man from the provinces comes up to London with an introduction to some wealthy friends. There is a daughter whom he thinks very beautiful, and with whom he thinks that he might in a short while find himself in love. And he suggests very timidly that it would be nice if she would show him “round the sights,†for he wants to see London, and has no other friends in it. And, as these wealthy people have advanced views, or perhaps because the daughter has succeeded in impressing her views upon her parents, his suggestion is accepted; the result is a lunch at the Criterion, a theatre, and teaafterwards. As they seem to be getting on rather well together, he suggests a dinner-party. He would like to see Soho.
“Oh, but I must go back and ask mother first,†she says.
“Really?â€
“Of course; it’s very nice of her to let me out at all. I must go back and ask her.â€
And he admires this sense of duty, which is probably only an excuse for a change of frock. And so she returns home to tell her mother how well everything is going, while he goes to the little Soho restaurant to engage a table; and then, while he is waiting for her, he makes a horrible discovery. He has only a pound left; what is he to do? He picks up the menu, and sees that it will be impossible for him to dine in anything like the way he wishes for less than thirty shillings. He is a stranger; the restaurant will not give him credit. There is no one to whom he can go to for a loan; he cannot ask the girl, on their first day together, to lend him money. And so, all through the dinner there hangs over his head the menace of that piece of folded paper. What will happen to him? He remembers seeing once in Manchester the proprietor pitch an impecunious client headlong into the street. They could hardly do that to him. He would be too big, but he will be disgraced in the girl’s eyes. He has not the presence to carry off such a scene with honour. He will stammer and mumble, and try to explain, and look foolish; probably in the end he will leave his watch in bail, while thegirl will stand by him, ashamed of him and contemptuous.
He tries to make the meal last as long as possible; they have coffee and two liqueurs and endless cigarettes; but the moment comes at last when she begins to button on her gloves and collect her things.
“I really must go now,†she says, “and it has been such a lovely evening. Thank you so much.â€
And he looks in misery at the piece of folded paper. Then, just as he is preparing to signal to the waiter and ask for an interview with the patron, the temptation comes: her bag lies open facing him; she is looking the other way. He sees money. Here is the way out; perhaps she will not notice that she has lost it. She is rich. At any rate, he must run the risk. And, as she tidies her hair in the glass, she sees him take her money.
She is shocked, terribly shocked, but it is easy to understand her silence; her curiosity is whetted, she is interested in the young man, and guesses that one day it may very well be that she will feel more than interest for him. Money is of no great concern to her.
Yes, I could see the scene clearly enough; it would provide me with excellent opportunities for dramatic dialogue; the growing uneasiness of the man with the girl’s gradual appreciation of it and wonder at the cause of it, the hope, perhaps, that it is the beginning of love. A good scene, but it would be impossible not to write a good scene with such a setting and such an episode. But, even as I saw it, I knew that it would be no good. To what climax would it work: to nothingbut the oldcliché—“I knew it all along.†It would be kept as a surprise, of course; the reader would not be told that the girl had seen the theft reflected in the looking-glass. The story would describe the progress of their courtship; the heart-searchings of the young man. “If I tell her, will she despise me?†How the machinery would creak, how often it has been done before; and at last the stage would be set for the confession.
“I have something terrible to tell you, dear.â€
He would blurt it out and then hide his face in her lap for shame, and she would stroke his hair softly and smile.
“Silly old dear,†she would say. “I knew it all along!â€
How trite it would be, how banal! And the fact that it might be very likely true would not in any way redeem it. We are plagiarists in life as we are in books, and there are certain motives that are now impossible in a story, although they occur in life. They have been used too often. What a weariness overcomes us when we discover in a novel of matrimonial dispute that the wife is about to become a mother, and that in consequence the hero cannot run off with his secretary.
No doubt it is an affair of frequent occurrence; impending maternity frustrates an impending honeymoon. Autumn lays waste the spring. But no self-respecting novelist would allow “the little stranger†to extricate him from a difficulty. And, in the same way, no self-respecting novelist would allow a heroine “to know itall along.†It is a motive that has served its purpose well enough in its time, but when a coin has passed through many hands the signs and figures on it are worn away; it is valueless and is returned to the Mint; which is the proper place for “the little stranger†and “I knew it all along.â€
And now, having attempted five different stories, all of them unsatisfactory, I know that it is my duty to provide a conclusion that shall be unexpected and that shall ridicule my previous conjectures. I know that I ought to meet in the restaurant at a later date the hero or heroine, or both of them together, and learn from them the true story; there should be—I know it—a punch in the last paragraph; but that is exactly what I cannot give, for I do not know the real end of the story and have been unable to invent one. Unsatisfactory, perhaps, but intriguing all the same. In a world where so much is ordered by the inviolable laws of mathematics, it is pleasant to find something that is truly incomplete. For the first time in my life I was the witness of a dramatic episode, the sort of thing that one would not see again in a thousand years. It was a fragment in the lives of two people, and it must remain a fragment, a baffling, fascinating fragment. And, on the whole, I am glad to have it so. Such another moment will never come to me. When the voice of the lecturer begins to fade, when the sun beats down upon the mound at Lord’s and the cricket becomes slow: at all times when the mind detaches itself from its surroundings I shall return in my imagination to that evening in the restaurant. It will be atreasure for all time, a book in which I shall read for ever without weariness. Perhaps one day I shall hit upon the meaning of it; but I hope not. I prefer to keep it an enigma, to be able to shut my eyes and watch the growing embarrassment of a young man who is planning an unnatural theft, to see a young girl stand in the doorway of a restaurant, a fur cap fitting tightly over her head, a gloved hand raised across her throat.
CERTAIN motives, I said, after a while get written out, and must be sent like coins for renewal to the mint. And so of a particular technique, of certain ways of narrative, the chronicle novel for example. In 1911 everyone was telling the story of a generation’s passage through youth to middle age; it had become the fashionable medium for social satire; it seemed the destined channel for the main stream of early twentieth-century narrative. But already a dam has been placed across its path, the dam of the years 1914-1918.
The novel reader, I suppose, knows no greater weariness, no sensation of more profound misgiving than that which comes over him when he realises on page 173 that the action of the story is about to land him in the year 1913. He loses interest immediately. What does it matter, he asks himself, whether Jane becomes engaged to that rascal Harry, or Arthur elopes with the designing Marjorie? August 1914 is coming, and from whatever manner of fix into which, between now and then, they may contrive to place themselves the author will have no difficulty in extricating them. The reader feels that he has been deceived. He has no use for thedeus ex machinâ. He feels as the smallboy did who flung theIliadin disgust across the room, and exclaimed: “Rotten! they never had a fair fight once. There was always a god on one side or another.â€
The war, in the average novel, is an effect without a cause. It is unquestionable that a great many homes were absolutely turned inside out by “the great interruption.†There is no doubt that a great many difficulties were removed by this heaven-sent intervention, even as a great many simple situations were made interminably complex. All over the world there was effect without a cause, but in the novel, which is an essentially artificial thing, a thing that one makes with one’s own hands, there can be no effect without cause. And the conscientious novelist gazes in dismay at this tear across the fabric of life. He can, of course, start his story earlier; but there can be no real conclusion to a chronicle novel that ends in 1910. The reader knows that, in four years’ time, the happy home on which the curtain has so tenderly descended will be in chaos and that the hero will have to set out again on his travels. He can hardly begin it in December 1918 with the picture of a young man walking out of his tailor’s, in a grey tweed suit. A chronicle novel can barely get started in five years. And it is equally difficult for a writer to take the war in his stride. There have been one or two attempts; but, with the exception of “The Forsyte Saga,†they have been failures. For that type of novel one wants a clear ten years on either side.
Or it may be that the generating force of the movement is already spent; it may be that the reader hasgrown indifferent through repetition to the fortunes of the shy, sensitive young man who retired into a corner and read Keats while his companions were playing football, and to whom one of the masters would deliver himself of some such portentous prophecy as: “You are not for the middle way. You will rise or you will sink. The stars for you, or the depths.†And there was certainly a singular similarity about that young man’s early amatory adventures; the wanton with the heart of gold; the pure girl and the unhappy marriage; the splendid heroism of infidelity. It seemed very daring and original in 1912 to end a novel with a divorce instead of with a marriage. But was such an end any more conclusive than the Victorian wedding bells? In the Victorian novel the young man gets engaged to the wrong girl, but meets the right girl in time to marry her. In the Georgian novel the marriage to the right girl is preceded by a divorce, instead of a broken engagement.
Fashions pass quickly nowadays, there are so many novels and so many novelists. One man starts a movement; a whole host of lesser writers follow him, prejudicing him with their imitations. This romantic movement of Michael Sadleir’s: ten years at the most I give it. “Desolate Splendour†is a good book, but it is the forerunner inevitably of a positive cavalcade of melodramatic barons and pornographic duchesses. As a publisher’s reader I shiver to think of the fare with which these next few summers will provision me.
We have too many books: that is the whole trouble. And it is not from the commercial point of viewthat I am complaining. I am not saying the supply is greater than the demand. It isn’t. The number of novelists has increased, but so has the reading public. Commercially the writer has a pretty good time of it nowadays. The big men, Wells and Galsworthy and Bennett, must have made more money out of writing than Dickens and Thackeray ever did: and we others, life is materially easier for us than it was probably for our brothers of the 1820’s. At any rate, I know no other profession in which a man of twenty-five can afford to play cricket three whole days of a working week. It is not on the commercial side I am grumbling. What I am trying to say is this: that it is harder to-day for a writer to produce good work now than it has ever been before.
The pace is too fast for one thing. A novel a year. “You must keep your name before a public.†That is what agent and publisher are continually dinning into the author’s mind, and it is true, of course. That is the commercial line. Spring and autumn fashions. And only a few can last. A novel a year would be no hardship to a man endowed with the ebullient vitality of a Dickens or a Balzac; but there are not many such. In five novels and a few short stories Flaubert said all he had to say. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Richardson together, they do little more than reach double figures. Maupassant had written himself out at forty-three.
And then because there are so many novelists, each writer is expected to cultivate a particular province. His name on a book is like the label on a bottle of wine. “Ah, yes,†says the library subscriber, “ComptonMackenzie, a story of sound and colour; a little naughty: many alluring ladies; a smooth, ornate, sentimental style.†Should he discover instead a grey, political study of the effect of Trade Unionism on the commercial prosperity of the Tynemouth, he would be as disappointed, and would consider himself as ill-used, as Professor Saintsbury would if the Chateau Margaux he was offering his guests should reveal itself as Clos de Vougeot. An admirable Burgundy, but he had ordered claret. The novelist is not encouraged to make experiments. He is asked to rewrite one book indefinitely, till the material is watered down and a new entertainer has appeared.
And there have been so many novels. Every obvious situation has been used. The simple themes of love, jealousy, parenthood have been exploited till there is little new to say. The broad field has been ploughed so often. There are only a few dark spots by the hedge, under the shadow of the trees, where there is little sunshine and plants grow weakly, crookedly, different from their fellows, dank places where the few may specialise. “This, at least,†they say, “we can make our own.â€
And whatever else may be urged againstUlyssesno one could deny it is James Joyce’s own. An amazing work. A book without grammar and without coherence; like a boat that is launched from an aeroplane in mid-ocean, without oars, without rudder, and without sails. Sometimes I seeUlyssesas a literary Thermopylae, a desperate stand against insuperable odds. “I will transcribe life,†he said, “as it is. I will omit nothing.Everything that passes through the mind shall be set on record. By setting everything down I shall achieve proportion.â€Ulyssesis, perhaps, the most splendid failure in literature. But it is a failure. And when I hear ecstatic praise of it, I remember the five weeks or so during which I was the slave of jigsaw puzzles. For six hours a day I worked at them. I assorted and reassorted ridiculous pieces of coloured wood; I acquired a second sight for the dimensions of lozenge shapes. Gradually, bit by bit, there emerged from the discordant masses of detail on the table, a scheme, a pattern. Gradually, what I had taken for a turnip was revealed to me as a cockatoo, and what I had thought to be a beetroot became a face. Till, at last, the final piece was fitted, and there stared up at me from the table the sort of picture that I used to paint with water-colours in the nursery: a young girl feeding a rabbit with a lettuce; an old man filling a pipe before a fire; a dog crying for its master in the snow. But I had no eyes for the thing’s futility. Out of chaos had I achieved this symmetry. “Wonderful,†I said, “simply wonderful.†It was the picture that I so apostrophised. But it was myself that I was really praising. How wonderful of me, it was, I felt to have produced this thing. And in the same way when, after an hour’s battle, we have restored to sense and English a passage of Joyce’s shorthand, we have not the heart to consider the intrinsic value of the thing restored. We are so delighted with ourselves for having done it. “Wonderful,†we say, “wonderful,†and actually believe it is.
I rather suspect that the year 1922 will be a landmark for the literary historian of our day.Ulyssesis a sign-post. It will he hardly possible for the two styles of writing, the analytical shorthand and the narrative any longer to imagine that they are hunting together. James Joyce has worked out on the blackboard the piece of algebra over which his pupils have been so long puzzling.Ulyssesis the answer.
“Life with a big ‘L.’â€Every generation has its own pet hobby-horse to ride to death, and that’s been ours: still is, I think. We are all in search, each of us in our own way, of this strange quality of living that our own existence lacks.
The young poet walks down the steps of the stately mansion where he has been reading his poems aloud to bright-eyed admiration in a softly-lighted, softly-cushioned drawing-room. He hails a taxi, and as he sinks back into the padded seat he ponders the arid monotony of his existence; one day is so like another. Where is the thrill, the mystery of life? He will return to his flat. His clothes will be laid out ready for him. His man will ask him if he will have his bath at once. He will nod. He will undress slowly, will finish reading that review book in his bath; he will linger over his dressing. He is dining with Mrs Spurway. Just such another dinner-party as yesterday’s was and to-morrow’s will be. Lady Mary will be there and he will have to find occasion to whisper that he loves her as desperately as ever, though he knows too well how rapidly his ardour is cooling. She is like all the rest. And through thewindow he contemplates the firm, resolute back of the taxi-driver. How he envies him. That is life. He is not tied to a circle of social obligations. He lives outside the conventions. He is free.
The thoughts of the taxi-driver are not dissimilar. He, too, is pondering the monotony of his existence. How the London streets resemble one another. He has promised to take Mary Gubbins to the pictures that evening; and he remembers that he is getting rather tired of Mary Gubbins; she is like all the rest. He envies the gilded persons whom he bears all day long from one scene of revel to another. It is human to envy the conditions of another’s life. The young girl who looks from her bedroom window on to the street below is wooed by its sense of mystery and adventure, and the inspector of omnibus tickets pauses on the top deck to gaze wistfully at the lighted window. It is the hunger for experience, for variety, for a fuller life. We should all like to live a hundred lives, to enter into the heart of every mystery, to feel every human emotion of happiness and sorrow. That is a natural instinct. But its present manifestation is unfortunate. There is a deep-rooted conviction that life is only intense when it is bitter, that waitresses and dustmen and crossing-sweepers have seen deeper into the human heart than bank clerks and school-mistresses and lawyers, that life is only real when it is raw.
Some years ago a mixed vermouth at the Café Royal resulted in my inclusion in a general invitation to a studio party. An obscure musician was celebratinghis wife’s elopement. There were prodigal promises of gin and whisky. Everyone would be there, I was informed. I had nothing to do that evening. I went, in search of life.
It was a surprise. We all have our illusion of Bohemia; all of us, that is to say, who study modern fiction and frequent the cinema. At the back of our mind there is a vivid picture of Bohemia as we would have it; an affair of half-lights and perfumes, and cushions and clinging draperies. Perhaps such a Bohemia exists somewhere. It may do; certainly it ought to. But it had no counterpart in that studio party.
By the time I arrived the party had been in progress a couple of hours. The atmosphere was thick. The floor was covered with cigarette ends and the splinters of broken glass. In various corners of the room partially inebriated couples were lost to the world in amorous abandon. An unwashed, unshaved Italian was strumming on a fiddle. There was a little dancing. A number of loose collared Americans were talking in art jargon at the tops of their voices. In a deep armchair, his nose broken, his forehead and eyebrows cut and swollen, a man slept. Whether he had disputed a brother artist’s claim to some lady’s favours, or whether his legs had been unequal to their task and he had collapsed upon a broken bottle, I was unable to discover. At any rate, he slept. He was a loathsome sight; and, for that matter, the whole party was a pretty loathsome sight. But I was impressed. I was just free from the shackles of military discipline andetiquette. Here, I thought, was life. Here was a society that had won to freedom, that was divorced from all preconceived opinions, from every super-imposed tradition of taste and conduct. It was, indeed, somewhat of a shock to me that the only man in the room who appeared to possess a razor should say in a dry voice, “What a show. Look at all these idiots pretending to be Dostoieffskies.†He was right, of course. London is full of people trying to be Dostoieffsky, nursing secretly the grief that they are not epileptic. Dostoieffsky preached the gospel of suffering, and because he spent his life in poverty, the modern idea would appear to be that the only real suffering is material privation, that the man has not lived who has not starved. It is the new snobbery. Once everyone was anxious to establish his descent from a baron. Now everyone is grieved if his pedigree does not contain a dustman.
James Joyce is like that, I fancy: or rather I should say the stuff he writes is. And he could have been so great a writer if he had not been led astray by that reckless heroism of his, that determination at all costs to transcribe life. Perhaps, though,Ulyssesis more than Journey’s End for a certain type of fiction: it may be that it is Journey’s End for the novel as a vehicle for narrative; it may be that the novel is played out.
Since the beginning of time the world has had stories told to it. But always in a different form. There was the epic, and that has gone; the ballad, and that has gone; the drama, and that is passing; the novel, and who knows but that the novel as a medium of story-telling has served its turn, that it is through the cinema that the twentieth century will elect to have its stories told, and that the novel will become a weapon of dialectic, a glorified form of journalism, or purely a medium of psychological investigation.
IAM uncertain as to the official highbrow attitude towards the “Movies.†I am indeed doubtful whether there is one. Highbrowism is supposed to turn on all objects of popular enthusiasm a cold judicial eye, to weigh and compare the manifold futilities of each fresh expression of humanity’s imperfect reason, and to deliver a final, an irrevocable judgment. That, at any rate, is what the jaundiced writer would have us think. “A coterie of the intellectuals,†he will say. And I suppose it is all right. I suppose that somewhere, in some form, highbrowism does exist. I can only say that I have not met it. The men and women who have been described to me as “impossibly highbrow†reveal themselves for the most part on acquaintance as very simple, ordinary folk who are more interested in cricket than Russian politics, and more interested in law reports than either. This may only be additional evidence of cunning. But, as I say, I have a very real suspicion that highbrowism is nothing more than a popular conception, and that to talk about a “highbrow†attitude is about as sensible as to call seventy million people France and treat them as one person.
But whether highbrowism exists or not, a popular conception is always a useful peg to hang a chapter on.In the days when I sat at the foot of the history sixth and was driven to deploy, as a screen for my ignorance and idleness, many ingenious devices, I had resort frequently to a ruse which has no doubt in its time assisted many another harassed historian, but which I should like to think was of my own invention. I would manufacture some startlingly dogmatic exaggeration, attribute it to a writer whose name I was careful to conceal, and proceed to illuminate the quotation with historical illustrations. The answer to a question on Prussian diplomacy would, for example, open thus: “A certain eighteenth-century essayist, a writer more remarkable perhaps for the vigour than the accuracy of his assertions, once stated that to be successful it was necessary to be unscrupulous, and though there are fortunately many careers against which no such charge could be rightfully directed, there are others, among which must be unquestionably included that of Bismarck ...†etc. etc. Such an opening set a note of erudition that would, I hoped, for at least a page and a half, prevent its reader from discovering that the meal I set before him contained “a deal of sack and very little bread.â€
And so I return to my opening sentence: that though I do not know what is the official highbrow attitude towards the cinema, I should, if I had to define it in a hundred words for a symposium, write something like this. “The highbrow professes to despise the American sobstuff drama: he objects to the conversion into films of plays and novels. He searches in classical presentations for anachronisms andhistorical blunders. He enjoys, however, the gymnastics of Douglas Fairbanks, the knockabout comedies, Charlie Chaplin and the Pathé Gazette.†And were my opinion to be invited further, I should pronounce myself to be in complete disagreement with this attitude. I enjoy American sobstuff; I feel the right emotions at the right moment. I pray that the misunderstanding between the hero and the heroine may be speedily and effectively removed. It is with extreme difficulty that I restrain myself from rising in my seat to explain to the young ass that the affluent and middle-aged person with whom he saw her at the opera was in fact her uncle. In these days of infinite compression it is not unpleasant to have told one in eighty minutes a story that it would take a day and a half to read, and told on the whole, I find, more entertainingly than in a full-length novel. There are no psychological or sociological interludes; one gets on with the business. Indeed, for ninety-nine per cent. of the long films that are put upon the market, I am, I take it, the sort of person the producer has in mind when he produces them. As the dramatic critic says, “For those that like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.â€
But by the short, one-reel affairs I am, I confess, unmoved. It does not amuse me to see the Duke of York inspect Boy Scouts at Northampton, nor am I anxious to learn by what process sardines are transferred from the Atlantic to the breakfast table. Films that are described as “interest†weary me. Nor can I believe that Larry Semon is a comedy king.Rarely can a civilised people have allowed itself to be entertained by more primitive, less subtle humour. It is entirely of the “top-hat-on-the-chair†variety, and it ends like the Harlequinade, in a chase.
There is, however, one trick in the comedy film which always gets me; the trick of making you, by a reversion of the film and turning of the handle backwards, see an aged and effete man do a standing, backward, fifteen-foot jump on to the top of a narrow wall. You see a plate that has been smashed to atoms recollect itself and become whole. You see milk that has been spilt return to the pitcher. A couple of ruffians have reduced a room in three minutes to utter ruin; the handle is turned and the room restores itself. A miracle, you say. For, although you know perfectly well that it is a trick, you cannot help for the moment being swept into credulence. After all, there, before your eyes, the thing is happening.
It is a pity, I always feel, that the producers make such little play with this device. It could be infinitely diverting. There would be no need for the broken things always to be made whole. It is amusing to see a house that has been blown to atoms rise proudly out of thedébrisinto stately indestructibility. But it would be as amusing to see a team of builders slowly, brick by brick, unbuild a mansion. The end would always precede the start. This trick might even be made the vehicle for subtle satire. A maid, for instance, would walk backwards into a tidy drawing-room, and would litter the floor with cigarette ash, cover the shelves with dust, and disturb the papers on your desk. Norwould it be necessary for the producer to confine himself to material accidents. He could describe thus the backward development of the emotions and the sensations. Imagine, let us say, a day lived backwards, as the film would show it you.
You would rise from your bed at midnight, and wearily put on your evening clothes. You might discover that you were drunk, but though you would spend the next two hours at a table with walnuts and wine in front of you, the shells of the walnuts would become whole and the glass that you raised to your lips would be empty; while the glass that you replaced before you would be full. You would in fact rise from the table sober. You would pass through curious states of mind. You would sit down to read a book knowing the plot, the theme, the treatment; but, as you read, this knowledge would pass page by page from you. And you would rise from your armchair saying: “I’ve just got this new book by Michael Sadleir from the library. I think I shall enjoy it.†It might be the afternoon of an assignation. Languid and quiescent would you come to the arms of love; vibrant and eager-eyed would you leap from them. As the sun moved eastward, carrying you to three o’clock, you would find yourself sitting warm and comfortable in the Café Royal, the stump of a cigar between your fingers, an empty liqueur glass on the table. But in two hours’ time you would be refolding a napkin and telling your guest that you hoped he was as uncommonly hungry as you were.
And then you would be washing your hands. As youdried them they would become less dry until they were quite wet, and you would place them, white and glistening, into a basin of dirty water, and all the dirt from the water would settle upon your hands, till the water was clean and your hands were grubby: and when the water was quite clean you would take your hands from it and they would become instantly dry and dirty and uncomfortable. You would put on your coat and you would walk backwards out of the restaurant towards your office.
And so the day would pass. At your office you would forget matters that an hour earlier you had settled, and you would seek information of them from your secretary. As the sun sank eastwards you would grow less hungry. You would indeed feel increasingly comfortable till you found yourself at the breakfast table and were forced to watch your empty plate become filled with kidneys and bacon and tomatoes. Finally, after you had bathed and had shaved, and in the process had restored to your chin its rough, bristly appearance, you would be lying in bed, clear-eyed, fresh, ready for the day’s work; you would be watching the sun sink slowly behind a bank of cloud: “A glorious day,†you would say to yourself. You would watch the maid move quietly about the room; she would lower the blinds; the room would become dark. You would feel a little dazed, a little drowsy. For a moment you would wonder where you were. There would be a loud knock upon the door; you would find yourself in the bitter throes of a nightmare; its agony wouldpass. You would drift into a deep, untroubled sleep.
But that, you will say, is an ordinary, and on the whole rather unromantic day. It is the hour of stress, of delirium, of turmoil, that if the past is to be relived you would ask to see again. Let the operator have done, you say, with this traffic of routine. Let us be transported to something of greater matter. We must make a choice? To the hour, then, of that first dance together, to that hour of which the memory can never leave us; to that hour than which we have known nothing fresher, keener, more romantic.
So be it; you are once again in that silk-hung alcove, in your ears the sound of music and the stir of feet, in your heart a brimming ecstasy. Let the handle turn. You are sitting there alone. The grey curtain is drawn back; she steps towards you. You do not notice her partner. He bows, steps backward, leaving you together. The sound of music ceases. There is a silence. Your arms are about her neck, your lips are against hers. You draw back, you look into her eyes, deep wide eyes, hazel, below the fringe of hair: the dark brown hair that is curled in a plaited loop about her ears; you think how wonderful it would be to kiss her. Your hand slips from hers and you are talking, eagerly, happily, and she is smiling up at you and you are thinking: “If this could last for ever.†You are in the ballroom. She is in your arms. What are they playing, she asks you, although you have told her it is “Honolulu Eyes.†You have never known that a valse could be like this. Life is suddenlya very marvellous, a very precious thing. The music ceases; you stand beside her talking. You are thinking, “In a moment I shall be dancing with her. In a moment she will be in my arms.†Your hostess is beside you. Your name and hers are murmured in introduction. She is walking away, backwards, beside your hostess. You are thinking, “I am going to be introduced to her.†She is standing in the doorway of the ballroom. You are dazzled by her as she hesitates there for a moment, radiant in the black, low-waisted dress; then she turns behind the curtain. And all knowledge, all memory of her is lost. You have never met her. You are tired and dispirited; life has become a worthless, an empty thing. Nothing remains of that high ecstasy, except far down a vague resentment that no such miracle has come to you.
And you have had enough of the film. It is all very amusing, no doubt, to see one’s life lived backwards, to recover one’s old enthusiasms and prejudices and loyalties. But it is rather a cruel business, with the evening coming before dawn; friendships must end at the hour when they begin; the first kiss must always be the last; and you sit in your chair and draw uncomfortable parallels and wonder whether old age is not rather like that: the reversal of the film. Whether there will not come a time at forty-five, at fifty, or at sixty when you will find yourself sitting at the banquet, confident and happy, in harmony with yourself and with your companions, replete with the good things of life. And then slowly the wheel will turn. The scene of repose will pass. You willgradually cease to be full of good food and wine. You will grow a little cold, a little hungry. You will find yourself among strangers; you will be embarrassed and unhappy, and you will rise from the table with themauvais quart d’heurein front of you.
A far-fetched simile, and one that will, doubtless, hardly bear examination. Morbid, too, perhaps, but then it is the privilege of youth to make “copy†of its grey hairs. It is only natural that our imagination should fly like a scout before us into the country where we must travel. Age is as real to us now as our youth will be to us when we are old. It is distant, unknown: romantic therefore. How will it come to us, we wonder, this trial which must make or break us? In what words will it address us, in what shape present itself? With what armour shall we be defended? Shall we pass petulantly, resentfully, with struggles, into middle-age? Shall we cry, as does a child in the nursery impotently over a broken toy? Shall we beat our hands against the barred gates of the enchanted garden? It is inconceivable that there should not be one such moment of rage and bitterness and of frustration. But will it be slow in passing? That is the question that we ask ourselves. Shall we find it difficult to shrug our shoulders, to say: “The wine is different, but it is still good.â€
We seek our answer in the companionship of age. Venerable, white-haired gentlemen who spend their afternoons asleep in the libraries of their clubs, are messengers to us from that far country. They know the geography of the road that we must travel. Theyhave left much behind them on the road. They, too, knew once courage and danger and ambition. But it is not pity that we bring them for the loss of this rich merchandise. We do not contrast consciously their weariness with our vigour, our hope with their resignation, their weakness with our capacity. We come in a mood of humble curiosity; is there comfort, we ask them at that last tavern: Life is a bargain; you have lost much; does the exchange content you?
And they tell us so little. They brag extravagantly of their youth, of their feats and gallantries and disasters. “We lived, and fought and suffered, and life was good.†But they overact the part. They are too hearty about it. We are what they were once, and we know it to be a far less ecstatic business than they would have us think. When they appeal in contrast to our sympathies, we feel that they are, on the whole, really rather enjoying themselves. After a certain age people seem to lose the power of self-criticism. They will not place their life as they have made it beside their life as they had hoped to make it. They pretend to be something they are not. Instead of finding themselves, they lose themselves.
But occasionally, now and again, one does meet an old man who will tell you the truth about himself, who will not try and dramatise his life, who will face the past as once he could face the future, with unbandaged eyes. Such a man I have the privilege to number among my friends. We meet casually, once or twice a month, in our club at lunch. And usually we sit together afterwards over our coffee and liqueurs.And in the summer we can watch from the terrace the grey water of the river moving sluggishly below us, bearing pleasure-boats, tramps, and steamers on its muddied surface, carrying them to sea or harbour. And we find it easy to talk there of the drift and hurry, the traffic and confusion of human life, and of that abiding rhythm that makes out of discord, harmony.
He speaks always unassumingly, always confidently, as a man should who has achieved balance.
“Life is still as entertaining to me,†he will say, “as surprising, as adventurous as it was thirty years ago. I am the spectator, and that is the only difference. I sit ‘quiet handed’ in the shadow and find the answer to much that, when I was young, puzzled me.