“Pleasure of life what is’t? the good hours of an ague.”
“Pleasure of life what is’t? the good hours of an ague.”
“Pleasure of life what is’t? the good hours of an ague.”
We used to croon the words over to ourselves and endeavour to arrive at some stoic standpoint from which we could completely objectify ourselves and our ambitions.
The wearisome sameness of the days, the monotony of the faces, the unchanged landscape, the intolerable talk about the war, all these tended to produce an effect of complete and utter depression. This was far and away our worst enemy: whole days were drenched in an incurable melancholia. The continual presence of sentries and barbed wire flung before us a perpetual symbol ofthe intelligence fettered by the values of the phenomenal world. Life resolved itself into a picture of eternal serfdom: sometimes the body was enslaved, sometimes the mind, but there was always some bar to Freedom. It was all so much “heaving at a moveless latch.” Purposeless and irrevocable.
It is easy enough to laugh at it all now. But then it was a very real trial. Those doubts and uncertainties, which at some time or another assail all men, and with a great many form a silent background or framework for the events of their mournful odyssey, were with us continually present; and however gloomy a view one may take of the universe, one wishes to be able to escape from it at times. And the only remedy was work.
Indeed confinement must have been a very real ordeal to those whose temperaments were not self-sufficient, and who depended on the outside world for their amusements and distractions. It has been said times without number that the dreamer loses halfthe pleasure of life, and that he lies bound up by his own fantasies and wayward creations: that he has no eyes for what Pater has called “the continual stir and motion of a comely human life.” Well, Pater wrote that of Attic culture, of the light-hearted world that is reflected in the pages of theLysis, and perhaps modern life presents none too comely an aspect. Certainly in place of “stir and motion” we have bustle and excitement, a clumsy fumbling after sensation. Perhaps the dreamer has not lost so very much, and he does at any rate carry his own world with him: he is self-sufficient; within the sure citadel of his own soul he can always find those pleasures which alone have any claim to permanence. Flaubert is always the same, behind barbed wire as in the shadow of a Wessex garden: the change of environment makes no difference there.
But on those who preferred action to contemplation, prison life bore very heavily, and there was something rather pathetic in the various attempts that were made tofight against the growth of listlessness and apathy. To begin with, of course, every one entered his name on the roll of the Future Career Society; no one took less than three classes; there was a general rush to attain knowledge which lasted about three weeks.
After that, life resolved itself for a great many into a laborious effort to kill time, and here the Germans showed their commercial instincts. TheKantineauthorities catered for this hunger for novelty, and from sure knowledge of the depression of markets gauged the exact moment when each particular craze would begin to ebb.
The first hobby was wood-carving, an affair so hazardous that the first day numbered about ten per cent. casualties. It demanded enormous delicacy. Boxes of all descriptions were on sale, on which were traced patterns of labyrinthic intricacy; one could cut photo frames, cigar boxes, paper cutters, and to accomplish this labour there were provided small knives of a razor-like sharpness, which under the influence of theleast overweight of pressure flew off the box at an alarming angle, to bury themselves in the palm of the other hand. It required enormous patience, and to me appeared one of the most monotonous occupations. It took hours of work to complete the smallest job.
This, of course, was not at all what theKantine Wallahsdesired. They wanted a hobby which would require a lot of material and very little time. Wood-carving took much too long, and the profits arrived much too slowly, and so they accelerated the slump in wood-carving by the innovation of satin-tasso, which was in every way a far more noble craft.
To begin with, it gave the personality of the artist a fuller freedom. In wood-carving individual preference was hopelessly bound down by the laws of pattern. As in the cast of certain modern painters who having once conceived a “stunt,” proceed to pour the most unlikely moods into one artistic mould, the individual was a slave to shapes. Againstthis, liberty was driven to revolt, and satin-tasso provided the necessary outlet.
Even here, of course, there were, it is true, laws and patterns, but there was full scope for the peculiarities of taste. The satin-tasso box had on it simply the bare outline of a picture. This one cut round with a sharp knife, and then proceeded to colour in with special paints; and in the employment of these paints any extravagance was permitted. Mediæval costumes offered superb opportunities for splendour and pagan gold. Across a pearl-flecked sky emerald clouds could fade into a wash of scarlet. It was truly a noble craft, and the whole business only took a few hours, which was most advantageous both for the suppliers and the supplied.
There is nothing that pleases the craftsman more than the sight of a finished article, and there is nothing that gives more pleasure to the tradesman than the swift return of gigantic profits, and both these wishes were granted. TheKantinedid a roaring tradein satin-tasso, and the portmanteaus of the artisan grew heavy with trophies and souvenirs.
But all the same it was rather a pathetic sight to see a man of about twenty-eight, in the prime of life, sitting down every afternoon and evening, fiddling about with a piece of wood and a box of paints. He derived no pleasure from it: it merely served the purpose of a narcotic. As long as his hands were employed his brain would go to sleep, and he need no longer see the tedious procession of days that lay before him. He was symbolic in a way of the Public School Education that deliberately starves a boy’s intellect for the sake of his body. The type of clean-limbed Britisher, that Public Schools produce, is all very well in its way, and is infinitely preferable to the type produced by any other system, either in England or France. Of that there can be no doubt whatsoever. But the schoolmasters who adopt this line of argument, forget that they are dealing with a material refined uponby the breeding of centuries. The question is not, “Is the material good?” because it is. The question is, “Does Education make the best of this material?” and I am very certain that it does not. Every man should have sufficient part in the intellectual interests of life, to be able to keep his intelligence active for eight months in surroundings that provide no physical outlets. For after all, it is the mind, or, to use Pater’s phrase, “the imaginative reason” that counts.
“Thank God that while the nerves decayAnd muscles desiccate away,The brain’s the hardiest part of menAnd thrives till threescore years and ten.”
“Thank God that while the nerves decayAnd muscles desiccate away,The brain’s the hardiest part of menAnd thrives till threescore years and ten.”
“Thank God that while the nerves decayAnd muscles desiccate away,The brain’s the hardiest part of menAnd thrives till threescore years and ten.”
And it is surely a severe condemnation of any system that its average products can derive no sustenance from the contemplative side of life, that the moment they are out of the theatres, they have absolutely no resources left. It would have given me the most acute satisfaction to have been able to escort there some of the many schoolmasters who so fiercely defended themselves behindthe legend, “By our works ye shall judge us,” which was exactly what I tried to do.
The narrow limits of our captivity provided us with only one other craze, the last and the most decadent, for which reason, probably, it was the only one to which I succumbed—Manicure. It was really a tempting lure. One evening I went to theKantineto buy a pencil, and saw a row of beautiful plush boxes, in which reposed long-handled files, and scissors, and knives; and beside these were bottles of delicate scents and polishes and powders, strangely reminiscent of Amiens. The lure was too great, and forty marks went west.
From that day onwards our room was a sort of general manicuring saloon. Several of us bought sets, and from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. we received visitors. As our guests received treatment gratis, and the initial outlay towards the opening of the saloon was sufficiently generous, it might have been thought that our guests came out of the transaction rather well. But they paid richlyfor their adornment in pain. We were all amateurs, and the manipulation of a pair of curved scissors requires feminine skill; no one has ever yet called me neat-fingered, and those scissors were very sharp. During the operations of our first fortnight, of all those who came to us with gay step, there were few who went away without at least one finger swathed in bandages.
Asmilitary regulations state that it is the duty of every prisoner of war to make immediate and strenuous effort to escape, and as every man is at heart an adventurer, it is not surprising that our languid community was from time to time regaled by the rumours of impending sorties.
No one has ever yet managed to escape from Mainz, and even if the war had lasted for another twenty years, I believe it would have retained its impregnability. For the citadel had been constructed so as to resist the old-fashioned frontal assault, in which infantry without the aid of a barrage endeavoured to demolish vertical walls. Round the buildings ran stone battlementsusually fifty feet high. At any point where it would be possible to jump down was stationed a sentry, and between these battlements and the buildings were two distinct chains of wire netting, that were continually patrolled. At an early date I decided that, in my personal case, the possible chances of escape in no way counteracted the enormous inconvenience to which an attempt would inevitably put me. And if I did get away, it would result in the probable loss of the greater part of my library, and of all my MSS. All things considered, it hardly seemed worth while.
But for other and more daring spirits personal inconvenience was a thing of trifling importance. They would talk of their duty, of their hatred of the Hun, of their desire to be in the thick of things again. But the chief allurement was the love ofréclame: every man is at heart a novelist; and they would picture to themselves the days of “What did you do in the great war, Daddy?” and the proud answer, “I escapedfrom Mainz,” and there was also the glory of standing in the centre of the stage. They liked to be talked about in undertones, to hear a whisper of “Don’t tell any one, but that fellow’s going to try and beat it to-morrow.” They hankered after excitement, and in consequence when their schemes began to ripen to maturity, they enveloped their actions in all the theatrical paraphernalia of Arsène Lupin. It was wonderful what they made themselves believe. Spies were lurking everywhere, and in consequence their every action had to be most carefully concealed. One officer, who thought he was being hoodwinked, disguised himself by shaving off his moustache, and wearing a cap all day to hide the thinness of his hair. Of course to those who really took the business seriously every credit is due. They spent hours preparing maps, and ropes, and many marks in bribing sentries. But to the majority an escape consisted chiefly in a bid not for liberty but for fame. For it was only with the most deep and carefullylaid plans that any one could have hoped to get away.
It is unnecessary to say that in the machinery of these enthusiasms our old friend Colonel Westcott played his heroic part. When he amalgamated into his Pitt League such existing organisations as the Future Career Society, he considered that he had taken under his wing all the imperial activities of the camp; and so one branch, and a very select branch, of his scheme included those desirous of freedom. It was quite a harmless affair, this little society, and in no way jeopardised the chances of escape. All that the Colonel wanted was to feel that he had a share in every sphere of the life of which he was the central embodiment. He liked to have these young fellows sitting round him discussing their plans; he liked to be able to drop here and there the necessary words of advice; it was an understood thing that no one was to attempt to escape without first submitting his ideas to the Colonel; and within a brief time thisamiable gentleman had led himself to believe that he was the fount from which all these alarums and excursions flowed.
The first attempt did not take place till we had been prisoners a little over four months, but its preliminaries began a good deal earlier. One of the accomplices was in the same room as myself, and for weeks he used to carry about with him an air of mystery. In a far corner of the room he would be observed tracing maps of the various roads to the frontier, and from time to time he would take me quietly aside.
“Don’t tell any one,” he said, “but I’m going to clear soon, and I’m getting the maps. I tell you, of course, because—oh, well, you’re in my room, and all that. But keep it dark.”
He spoke like that to nearly all of his acquaintances. It is all very well to talk of breaking laws just for the fun of the thing, but one does want the rest of the world to know what a devil of a fellow one is.
I remember one Sunday afternoon, at school, how I cut the cord of the weight on the chapel organ, with the result that that evening the music suddenly stopped and the choir wrecked. It was a noble piece of work, which I surveyed with a justifiable pride. But I was not really satisfied till I had told the whole house about it; naturally, of course, swearing each individual to secrecy.
“Don’t tell a soul, of course, old man. I should get in a hell of a row if it was found out.”
Suave, mari magno.... When one is perfectly safe, it is delightful to imagine all the punishments that might have been visited on one, if the Fates had been less kind; we always hunger for sensation; from the security of a warm fire the imagination gloats over the ardours of warfare and the splendours and agonies of adventure. We like to feel that danger overhangs us; we shiver with apprehensive delight beneath the sword of Damocles. We like to be told that there will be a social upheaval withinour lifetime. Perhaps it will come in five years’ time. Perhaps to-morrow. At any rate, to-day we are secure. And it was in this spirit that the glamorous web was woven round that first escape.
The efforts that were made to avoid suspicion were superb. The conspirators felt that anything might give away their secret. Had not Sergeant Cuff found at one end of a chain of evidence a murderer and at the other a spot of ink on a green baize tablecloth? and so they left nothing to chance. A loose board beneath the stove served as an admirable hiding-place for maps and plans. And in consequence our room was used as a sort of general dump.
It was a great nuisance; they would do the mystery stunt so very thoroughly; and it was such a noisy business. To open their underground cupboard a few nails had to be abstracted, and a few wedges applied. The resultant noise would have woken not the least suspicion in even the most distrustful Teuton, and would have played avery insignificant part amid all the accumulated turmoil of the day. But no risks must be run. And so while the cupboard was being prized open, an operation that would sometimes take over ten minutes, one of us had to be detailed to go outside and break up wood so as to disguise the noise. It was a deafening business, that occurred two or three times each week; and it did not seem as if the contents of this cupboard demanded such strict secrecy. I once asked what they kept there.
“Only a few papers,” was the answer, “a compass and provisions for the journey.”
That a compass, being contraband, should be carefully concealed, I could well understand. But the papers consisted of a field officer’s diary and a few maps abstracted from the backs of a German Grammar; while the bag of provisions contained only those delicacies that we received in parcels, of which chocolate formed the greater part. And a more unhealthy place to store it, it would be hard to find.
“Look here,” I said one day, “what’s the idea of keeping that chocolate there?”
“To escape with, of course. Splendid stuff for giving staying power.”
“But why can’t the fellow keep it in his room?”
I was immediately fixed with that sort of look that seems to say, “Good Lord, do such fools really exist!”
“My good man,” he said, “how could he keep it there? It would give the whole show away at once. What would you think, if you were a German officer, and found a big store of chocolate in one of the cupboards? What would you think of it?”
There was only one answer to that.
“That the ass didn’t like it, I suppose.”
But my remonstrance was useless, and soon I began to regard these noises and secrecies as part of the inevitable machinery of prison life.
The first attempt savoured, it must be confessed, very strongly of the ludicrous. The protagonists were three colonels who had managed to provide themselves with German money and with suits of civilian clothes, made, so it was reported, out of dishcloths. They chose as their headquarters a room situated directly above the main gate. It was a drop of some forty feet to the ground, and a sentry box was stationed immediately underneath. The chances of getting away were in consequence very small, but there was, at any rate, no need for preliminary manœuvres among the meshes of wire netting. The gallant adventurers relied solely on the somnolence of the sentry. It was a cold, rainy night, and their experience of guards at depôts might well have led them to expect a certain lack of enterprise and enthusiasm on the part of their warder. Nor were they disappointed.
It began to rain heavily, and after a fewdeprecatory glances at the heavens, the sentry sat down in his box, and within a few moments appeared to be unconscious of the external world. From the window of Block I a rope made out of a blanket was immediately lowered, and the colonel began his precarious descent.
And then the rain stopped.
The sentry, roused apparently by the sudden cessation of sound, blinked, rubbed his eyes, and cast them heavenwards, and saw midway between earth and sky a figure swinging from a rope. Well, he must have been something of a philosopher, that sentry: he was in no way perturbed by the apparition. He rose languidly to his feet, blew his whistle to summon the guard, and waited patiently at the foot of the rope.
It must have been a very amusing spectacle. Very slowly and very gingerly, hand under hand the colonel descended, and when he was within reaching distance the sentry helped him very gently to the ground and escorted him to the guardroom. The other
Image unavailable: A GALLANT ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE. [To face page 162.A GALLANT ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE.[To face page 162.
conspirators, seeing the fate of their chief, hastened bedwards with all possible speed, and when the orderly officer came round they imitated with considerable ability the righteous indignation of a man who is woken up after a three hours’ sleep.
This attempt was the signal for frequent and repeated excursions. The lead once given, there were found many ready to follow it; and there was considerable comfort in the assurance that the sentries had orders not to fire unless they were charged. And so for the remainder of our captivity the camp buzzed with rumours.
No one ever got away. Occasionally the first strand of netting was penetrated, but nothing more; and it must have been a poor form of amusement. For the desperadoes always chose a night of rain and wind in the hope that the sentries might have sought consolation within their huts, and it can have been no fun crawling on one’s stomach, over sodden gravel, getting soaked and cold; and as the night of capture was always spentin the guardroom, it was a sport that can have held out few inducements.
For the cowardly, however, it did add a spice and flavour to existence. On these nights of danger we used to lie awake patiently listening. The hours would drift by. Twelve o’clock, one o’clock, it looked as if they had got away after all; and then, sure enough, would come the alarm, two whistles would shriek loud above the drip of the rain, there would be a scurry of feet; and then a few minutes later we would see the unfortunate beings escorted to the cells.... We would do all we could for them; we would clamber on to the window sill and would shout our condolences; and these friendly wishes would on the next day as likely as not serve as an excuse for the General to place upon us some further restriction, as punishment for what he considered an unmannerly exhibition of independence.
Of these bold bids for freedom none stood any very real chance of success, and towards the end they became somewhat discredited,as they involved certain inconveniences on those who had resigned themselves to their fate. There would be additional roll-calls, and precautions. Whole rooms were searched and ransacked, a most disagreeable proceeding. And on one occasion the attempt was made from the theatre, which led to the closing of that hall of pleasure during an entire morning while the complete staging apparatus was overhauled, and examined. This caused genuine annoyance, especially as the ravages of the soldiery delayed for three days a performance that had been the centre of much curiosity and conjecture. And this annoyance became almost indignation, when it transpired that this herald of defiance had provisioned himself for his long journey with nothing more substantial than a tin of skipper sardines, two oxo cubes, and a tin of mustard. The general opinion was that if a man was “such a damned fool as to carry that sort of stuff about with him, he had no right to try to escape, upsetting arrangements and all.”
And on this type of sally the theatre incident rang down the curtain. But under this category it is impossible to number the attempts of Colonel Wright. His methods were very different; they were not showy; he did not talk about what he was going to do. And as a result he very nearly succeeded.
The chief ingenuity of the Scarlet Pimpernel lay, as far as I can remember, in his grasp of the fact that it is the obvious that evades suspicion. Sentries are on the lookout for an escape by night, but by day they are off their guard. And working on this plan, both Colonel Wright’s attempts were made by daylight. Indeed they were both so simple that in cold blood they looked quite ridiculous. The first attempt failed completely, and but for his later achievement, one might have been tempted to wonder how the gallant colonel could have expected any different result.
Alone of the Pitt Escape League he literally did not progress a yard; not one foot did headvance. In broad daylight he was arrested where he stood, or rather, where he sat, for it was in that position that he was discovered.
The plan was not elaborate. Once a week a cart from the laundry came to collect dirty linen from the camp and take it away to be cleaned. And to keep a check on the returns, a British orderly always went with it. Colonel Wright’s scheme was to impersonate the orderly, to get himself conducted safely outside the gates, and once there to rely on his own speed and ingenuity to effect an escape. It might have come off; there was an outside chance, remote certainly, but still a chance; however, he was given no opportunity of gauging his share of the two requisite abilities. It is true he got into the cart and sat quietly in a far corner; but before even the harness had begun to jingle, he had been recognised and arrested. A grey business, but he was in no wise daunted. And within a few weeks he had his hand to the wheel again.
His second scheme was considerably moreelaborate, but was none the less sufficiently obvious. Zero hour was fixed for half-past five, and at five o’clock in a far corner of the square preparations were begun for a boxing match. Towels and chairs were set out, sponges and bowls of water appeared, and two brawny Scotsmen shivered in greatcoats. There had been no previous notice of this engagement, but interest was speedily kindled, and within a quarter of an hour quite a large crowd had assembled. The close of the opening round was the signal for a marked display of enthusiasm. And it was in the middle of the second round that Colonel Wright made his dash. No one noticed him. The sentries were absorbed in the boxing, and those whose attentions showed signs of wandering were engaged in conversation by two field officers who could speak German. And Colonel Wright, clad in a suit of civilian clothes, cut through the wire netting of the first entanglement, and dashed across the open. In a few seconds he had swarmed over the second series andwas out of sight. It was a most daring and brilliant piece of work. All that remained for him now was to lie till nightfall in the shadow of the wall. Then when it was dark he could choose an auspicious moment and lower himself to the ground.
It was a plan that certainly deserved success, and as the hours passed we began to hope that some one had at last got clean away. There was some anxiety lest his absence should be spotted at roll-call, but when nine o’clock came and went, we felt that all was well. And then just before ten o’clock the two whistle blasts rang out. Colonel Wright had been retaken.
And if the story that we heard afterwards is true, chance was outrageously unkind. He had waited till it was quite dark, and had carefully watched for the moment when the beat of the outside sentry carried his warders out of earshot. He had then lowered himself from the wall; and it was here that his luck deserted him. For a couple of lovers had selected that particular part of thebattlements as a shelter for their amorous dalliance. And the point at which Colonel Wright would have landed was removed from them by scarcely a dozen yards. He was instantly detected. Yet, with a very little luck, things might still have turned out favourably; for the man, who seemed sufficiently intrigued with his partner, gave him only a cursory glance and returned to the matter in hand; but the woman, with an eye to advertisement, characteristic of her sex, gave expression to her feelings in a series of piercing shrieks. Colonel Wright was instantly arrested.
The sentries found on him a hundred marks of German money, and a railway ticket to Frankfurt. And if he could only have got clear of the camp, I believe he would have had little difficulty in getting to the frontier. For he spoke German excellently and had friends in that part of the country. He had also the nerve and ingenuity which alone could have rendered such a feat possible. This the authorities musthave realised; for a few days later he was moved to another camp. What he did there, we do not know. But rumour has it that on the journey he made three more attempts to break away. And doubtless in a camp with fewer natural defences he would sooner or later have succeeded in outwitting his captors.
But as regards Mainz the gloomy record of its impregnability still stands. At one time or another it has been the temporary home of Russians, French and English; all three have in their turn tried to escape, and all have failed. After four years of warfare Mainz is still the inviolable citadel.
Eachweek the Pitt League posted up on the walls of the theatre a notice of the times and places of the various classes that were to be held. There were some six rooms at the disposal of this enterprising society. There was the attic at the top of Block I, a noisy room because the dramatic society would probably be found rehearsing next door; then there was the theatre, an impossible room; in the first place because it was too big, and in the second because the scenic artists behind the curtain carried on a continual dialogue to the tune of: “Where is that blue paint?” “Have you put up the wings?” “Where the hell’s the hammer?” which dialogue the scene-shifters accompanied with suitable crashes and landslides. It was a poor room for study—the
Image unavailable: THE BILLIARD ROOM AT MAINZ. [To face page 172.THE BILLIARD ROOM AT MAINZ.[To face page 172.
theatre; and then there was the field officers’ dining-room—that was not too bad. But one window-pane was missing, and there was no heating apparatus, and the orderlies were always wanting to lay the plates; altogether there was not a superfluity of spare space; there was really only one decent room—the Alcove—and that was for one hour of the day allotted to the botanists and anatomists. For the rest of the time an agenda at the bottom of the Pitt League poster announced that “the Alcove was reserved for authors, architects and other students.”
The Alcove was a small room opening out of the billiard-room, and its possession by the “authors, architects and other students” was a privilege jealously guarded. Not that we ever resorted to force, the mere strength of personality was sufficient. A few acid epigrams drove the intruders away with the impression that after all there were lunatics in the camp. Only one man stayed for more than an hour, and that was Captain Frobisher,a large, fat man who was doubtless an excellent soldier, but who was not an addition to a literary society that prided itself upon its exclusiveness. After all, when one is searching for a lost rhyme, or trying to make an honest scene sufficiently obscure to protect Canon Lyttelton’s delicate susceptibilities, it is disconcerting to have to listen to a conversation of this sort:—
“ ... And what do you think of the new offensive, Skipper?”
“Oh, we’ll wipe the swine off the face of the earth. I hope our men don’t take too many prisoners. There’s only one sort of Hun that’s any use, and that’s a dead one. Excreta, that’s all they are, excreta.... What I say is, smash ’em, and then when they’re down tread on ’em. That’s all they’re fit for. A good Hun is a dead Hun.”
Of course such rhetoric is excellent in its place, and in the mouth of a politician would appear as the supreme unction shed over the warring banners of humanity. But there are times....
Frobisher must go. We all decided that. The only difficulty was that ... well, even in confinement one must show respect to a senior officer. It would have to be done with considerable tact; we could hardly approach him ourselves. We supposed that if he really wanted, he could defend himself on the ground that he was a student, a student of the philosophical interpretation of a dozen cocktails. But yet he had to go. And finally Stone undertook the job.
It took two bottles of Rhine wine to screw him up to the proper pitch, but we got him there at last; and nobly did he fulfil our trust. It was an unforgettable afternoon. Captain Frobisher was sitting at the middle table discussing over a bottle of wine his schemes for the entire destruction of the German race. The old saws were rolling smoothly from his tongue.
“We must let them have it; what I say is, starve them out, bomb their towns, confiscate their colonies; then make thempay right up to the hilt, a crushing indemnity. They’d have done the same to us. An eye for an eye. That’s the principle we must work on, a tooth for a tooth.” Even a patriotic bishop could not have been more humanely vindictive.
And then we led in Stone.
He sat on the edge of the table nearest to the captain; his huge head of hair was flung back in a wild profusion, his shirt was open at the throat, he looked for all the world like a second Byron. And for the space of an hour he lectured on the higher life. As a testimony to the potency of the Rhine vintage, it was without parallel. It was a noble exposition.
He began with Schopenhauer; the jargon of metaphysics reeled into anacolutha: the absolute, the negation of the will; the thing in itself; phenomena, and the real. The mind was dazed with the conflicting theories of causation, and after each sounding peroration he recited in a crooning monotone the less cheerful musings of the Shropshire Lad;while we, entering into his mood, gazed up at him with enraptured eyes, murmuring: “Delightful! Oh, delightful!”
Captain Frobisher fidgeted nervously on his form, he moved first to one extremity, then to another. Periodically he attempted a conversation with his companion; but every time he began, Stone broke into a state of fervour more than usually impassioned, and Frobisher’s attention was irresistibly drawn towards this strange creature who had emerged suddenly out of a world he did not know. Stone realised his traditional conception of the romantic poet, the long-haired, sprawling, effervescent creature that he had never seen, but that he had been told the war had killed. And here into the very centre of Mainz, into this home of militarism, was introduced the loathsome atmosphere of Paris and the Café Royal, this unpleasant reincarnation of the hectic nineties.
For an hour he stood it, and then Stone arrived at the point to which all his previouseloquence had led. “I don’t know,” he said, “I have thought it out for a long time, but I am still uncertain as to which of all the collective emotions has done most harm, has wrought most damage to the suffering individual. Once I thought it was religion, religion with its bigotry and ritual, its confessional and chains; but during the last four years I have been sorely tempted—sorely tempted, my dear Waugh—to believe that of all the evils that can befall a community, there is none worse than the scourge of Patriotism.”
It was the limit, beyond which even the endurance of a soldier could not pass. Captain Frobisher threw at Stone one glance charged with distrust, and strode from the room. He never entered it again; and the “authors, architects and other students” were able to return to earth, and become once more respectable citizens.
Of the architects and other students we saw very little. Occasionally a linguist would drift in with a conversation grammarand a notebook, and sometimes a financier would draw up tables of expenditure and loss, but on the whole the Alcove was the property of “Wordsmiths.”
There were about five of us in all, and as soon asappelwas over we used to proceed towards the billiard-room laden with pens and paper. At this early hour there were usually not more than three of us, as Tarrant and Stone preferred to take breakfast at a later hour; but Milton Hayes was invariably to be found there, embellishing lyrics, or putting the final touches to his musical comedy, and in the intervals of production expounding his latest æsthetic theories.
A vivid contrast was presented by Tarrant and Stone. With popular taste they were both equally unconcerned. Relative merit interested them not at all; their standards were deep-laid and inelastic.
Tarrant usually appeared in the Alcove at about one o’clock, and observed a ritual that would with any one else have savoured of affectation, but was with him perfectlynatural. Nature had endowed him with generous proportions, more built for comfort than for speed; and he accentuated the natural roll of his gait by his strange footwear. A pair of field boots had been abbreviated into shoes by the camp cobbler in such a way as to admit of the insertion of two fingers between the leather and the instep. To keep them on his feet as he walked, Tarrant had to resort to a straddle that was one of the features of camp life. And as he entered he bulked largely in the door of the Alcove, marvellously shod, carrying under one arm a dictionary, a notebook and a Thesaurus, and over the other a cardigan waistcoat and a green velvet scarf.
He flung his books noisily on the table and then proceeded to array himself for the ardours of composition. He first of all divested himself of his collar and tie, and wrapped round his throat the green velvet scarf, that would have lain more appropriately as a stole on the shoulders of an ecclesiastic than it did as a muffler on those of aGefangener, engaged on a psychological study of seduction. Tarrant then removed his tunic, disclosing a woollen waistcoat, over which he proceeded to draw the second woollen coat that he had brought with him. He explained that they brought him physical ease.
“You see, old man,” he said, “it’s not much use my mind being free, if my limbs are encased in even the loosest of military tunics.”
He then proceeded to work.
Every writer, of course, has his own particular foible, and Tarrant’s was an appalling accuracy in gauging the exact number of words that he had written. Most writers are quite content to add up the number of lines in a page, then find the average number of words in a line and multiply. But Tarrant would have none of these slipshod methods.
“On that principle,” he said, “I suppose you’d call a line a line whether it goes right across the page or not?”
“Yes,” I confessed.
He gave a grunt of contempt.
“And then you sayThe Loom of Youthis 110,000 words long; why, half the lines you call ten words long only consist of two words—‘Bloody Hell.’ That’s not the way to do things.”
And so Tarrant laboriously added up every word. It became quite a mania with him. So much so, in fact, that he used to embark on long discussions as to the derivation of amalgamated words, and whether “lunch-time” should count as two or one. For his rough draft he kept beside him a small slip of paper, on which at the end of each sentence he used to make mathematical calculations, that reminded me of school cricket, the scoring box, and the attempt to keep level with the tens.
Correction involved much labour. At the end of the sentence he might have noted down 277 words. Then he would revise; half a clause consisting of eight words would be omitted, and on the slip of paper down went 269. Then a celibate noun called foran adjectival mate, and 270 was hoisted amid applause. It was an amusing game, but it took up a great deal of time. Very rarely did Tarrant produce more than 400 words as the result of three hours’ work, and his absolute maximum for a day was 1100.
“All great men work slowly,” he said. “Flaubert took seven years overMadame Bovary, and I shall take only a year over this,” and with a sudden sweep he flashed the discussion back on to his pet subject of words.
“You see, I’ve done 48,374 words, and there are three more chapters of approximately 3000 words each. Now will that be enough?”
I told him that Mr. Grant Richards had stipulated in one of his weekly advertisements, that if he liked a book, it could range between the limits of 45,000 and 200,000 words, and Tarrant once more returned peacefully to his addition.
Stone, Tarrant’s constant companion through the tedium of eighteen months’imprisonment, was chiefly conspicuous for his conversation. Nobody ever actually saw him writing, or had indeed read anything he had written, but he always carried about with him a notebook, that gave the impression that he had either just risen from his labours, or was merely waiting the inspiration of the moment. As a scholar and a critic he was easily the most brilliant of our little circle, and it was delightful to hear him dethrone the idols of the twentieth century. He had very little use for any critic since Pater, or any novelist since Sterne. Of the modern novelists he maintained that the only two worth considering were H. H. Richardson and Arnold Bennett, though to Gilbert Cannan he extended a hand of deprecatory welcome. Wells was the chief target of his wit.
“I don’t know what to make of him,” he used to say. “Sometimes I think we may almost excuse him on the ground that if he had not written theNew Machiavelli,Perkins and Mankindwould not exist. But, really,as I read his recent stuff,Marriage,The Soul of a Bishop,Joan and Peter, why, Max has ceased to be the parodist of Wells, Wells has become the parodist of Max.”
As an actual “Wordsmith” Stone enjoyed a reputation something similar to that of Theodore Watts. One felt that he had only to publish what he had written, and he would receive world-wide recognition. In the notebook that never left him, he was supposed to carry the key that should unlock his heart. There lay two completed poems, and a tenth of a novel. But they were quite illegible. None of us ever saw them. Occasionally when the influence of Rhine wine had somewhat weakened the phenomenal barrier that separated Stone’s mentality from the real world of his metaphysics, he would promise to inscribe them for us in the morning in the full indelibility of purple pencil. Once he even went so far as to recite one of them; but the words came to us droningly sweet through a mist of inaudibility, and there remains only therecollection of certain sounding words, a low murmur as of a distant waterfall. In the morning all the promises were forgotten, and sometimes I have been tempted to wonder whether those poems had any real existence in the sphere of phenomena. Stone was so at the mercy of his metaphysics, he indulged in expeditions into a world whither I had neither the wish nor the ability to follow him, and perhaps he merely imagined those two poems as some manifestation of that inexplicable “Thing-in-itself” over which he was so concerned. Perhaps they had no counterpart in that draggled notebook; and though it is quite possible that some day we shall see those poems immortally enshrined in vellum, personally I rather doubt it.
Those hours in the Alcove contain all I personally would wish to remember of my captivity. It was a delightful room, with its white tables and windows opening on the fowl-run; it was a perfect place in which to write. The click of billiard balls, and themurmurous rise and fall of inaudible conversations provided the ideal setting for thought. Personally I can never write in a room that is quite silent; its isolation frightens me, and through an open window I listen in vain for the indistinct noises of humanity.
And then towards evening, when the labours of the day were ended, we would sit together round a bottle of a villainous brand ofLaubenheimerand discuss the merits of Tchecov and de Maupassant. Long contests were waged there on the vexed problems of æsthetics; the limits of dramatic art,vers libre, the function of criticism. All these in their turn passed through the sieve of dialectic. At times even captivity seemed a pleasant business, so full of leisure was it, after the bustle of the months that had preceded it. And no doubt years hence, when the rough outlines have become gently blurred against a harmonious background, we shall cast a glamour over those lazy days, and see in them a realisation of Bohemiandreams, of a Paris café and Verlaine leaning over a white table-cloth declaiming his lovely valedictory lines. And perhaps Time, that great alchemist, may even go so far as to transmute that foul white wine into the purest absinthe. We shall think of Dowson and the Cheshire Cheese, of the Rhymers’ Club and the delightful artifice of the nineties, and we shall claim companionship with those brave innovators to whom a finished work of art was a sufficient recompense for their weariness. But within it was not really like that; and as Pater has said, no doubt that ideal period of artistic endeavour has never had any existence outside the imagination of the dreamer, sick with a sort of far-away nostalgia, a vague longing for wider prospects and less narrowing horizons. Every generation has flung its eyes backwards over the past, and thought “if it had only been then that we had lived—then, when the values of life were still clear and simple,” and round certain names and ages there has been woven in consequence the thin gossamer of Romance, and the artist has found comfort in his conception of a world that has been passed by. From these backward glances and averted faces has emerged much that will never pass—Thais and Salambo, Henry Esmond and Marius the Epicurean.
During the last three years I have often wished that I had been born thirty years earlier, at a time when the influence of French literature was making itself so keenly felt, and when Verlaine was the light about the young men’s feet. It is a glamorous world that we catch glimpses of through the opening doors of Mr. George Moore’s confessions. But I suppose that really it would not have been so very wonderful after all, and that those delicate creatures whose feet moved through Symons’s verse to a continual rustle of silk and cambric, were probably the most tawdry ofgrisettes, and those Paris cafés and the many-coloured glasses of liqueur, they were very much like the Alcove, I expect; and the Alcove is aplace where no one would wish to sojourn indefinitely.
But we shall always look back at it with some affection. We spent there many happy hours, and there the weariness of captivity was relieved by the human comradeship that alone makes life endurable. We shall not easily forget how, when the billiard-room was closed for the night, we used to step out into the square, just as the sunset was flooding it with an amber haze, and walk beneath the chestnuts, prolonging the conversations of the afternoon, until the cracked bell and waking lights drove us back to the barracks. I shall never forget those evenings. Probably never before was the citadel—that home of militarism—the scene of so much artistic discussion; and it may be that in after days our ghosts will linger round those memorial places, and that on some quiet evening two tenuous and ungainly forms will be seen swinging down the avenue beneath the chestnuts—