CHAPTER V

“Quitethe little poet”—how bitterly poor Keats resented the remark. Perhaps because he secretly knew that it was just. For Keats, after all, was that strange, unhappy chimaera—a little artist and a large man. Between the writer of the Odes and the writer of the letters there is all the gulf that separates a halma player from a hero.

Personally, I do not go in for heroic letters. I only modestly lay claim to being a competent second-class halma player—but a good deal more competent, I insist (though of course it doesn’t matter), than when I wrote about the larks. “Quite the little poet”—always and, alas, incorrigibly I am that.

Let me offer you a specimen of my matured competence. I select it at random, as the reviewers say, from my long-projected and never-to-be-concluded series of poems on the first six Caesars. My father, I flatter myself, would have liked the title. That, at any rate, is thoroughly Wordsworthian; it is in the great tradition of that immortal “Needle Case in the form of a Harp.” “Caligula crossing the bridge of boats between Baiae and Puteoli. By Peter Paul Rubens (b. 1577: d. 1640).” The poem itself, however, is not very reminiscent of the Lake District.

Prow after prow the floating shipsBridge the blue gulph; the road is laid.Caesar on a piebald horsePrances with all his cavalcade.Drunk with their own quick blood they go.The waves flash as with seeing eyes;The tumbling cliffs mimic their speed,And they have filled the vacant skiesWith waltzing Gods and Virtues, setThe Sea Winds singing with their shout,Made Vesta’s temple on the headlandSpin like a twinkling roundabout.The twined caduceus in his hand,And having golden wings for spurs,Young Caesar dressed as God looks onAnd cheers his jolly mariners;Cheers as they heave from off the bridgeThe trippers from the seaside town;Laughs as they bang the bobbing headsAnd shove them bubbling down to drown.There sweeps a spiral whirl of gestureFrom the allegoric sky:Beauty, like conscious lightning, runsThrough Jove’s ribbed trunk and Juno’s thigh,Slides down the flank of Mars and takesFrom Virtue’s rump a dizzier twist,Licks round a cloud and whirling stoopsEarthwards to Caesar’s lifted fist.A burgess tumbles from the bridgeHeadlong, and hurrying Beauty slipsFrom Caesar through the plunging legsTo the blue sea between the ships.

Prow after prow the floating shipsBridge the blue gulph; the road is laid.Caesar on a piebald horsePrances with all his cavalcade.

Prow after prow the floating ships

Bridge the blue gulph; the road is laid.

Caesar on a piebald horse

Prances with all his cavalcade.

Drunk with their own quick blood they go.The waves flash as with seeing eyes;The tumbling cliffs mimic their speed,And they have filled the vacant skies

Drunk with their own quick blood they go.

The waves flash as with seeing eyes;

The tumbling cliffs mimic their speed,

And they have filled the vacant skies

With waltzing Gods and Virtues, setThe Sea Winds singing with their shout,Made Vesta’s temple on the headlandSpin like a twinkling roundabout.

With waltzing Gods and Virtues, set

The Sea Winds singing with their shout,

Made Vesta’s temple on the headland

Spin like a twinkling roundabout.

The twined caduceus in his hand,And having golden wings for spurs,Young Caesar dressed as God looks onAnd cheers his jolly mariners;

The twined caduceus in his hand,

And having golden wings for spurs,

Young Caesar dressed as God looks on

And cheers his jolly mariners;

Cheers as they heave from off the bridgeThe trippers from the seaside town;Laughs as they bang the bobbing headsAnd shove them bubbling down to drown.

Cheers as they heave from off the bridge

The trippers from the seaside town;

Laughs as they bang the bobbing heads

And shove them bubbling down to drown.

There sweeps a spiral whirl of gestureFrom the allegoric sky:Beauty, like conscious lightning, runsThrough Jove’s ribbed trunk and Juno’s thigh,

There sweeps a spiral whirl of gesture

From the allegoric sky:

Beauty, like conscious lightning, runs

Through Jove’s ribbed trunk and Juno’s thigh,

Slides down the flank of Mars and takesFrom Virtue’s rump a dizzier twist,Licks round a cloud and whirling stoopsEarthwards to Caesar’s lifted fist.

Slides down the flank of Mars and takes

From Virtue’s rump a dizzier twist,

Licks round a cloud and whirling stoops

Earthwards to Caesar’s lifted fist.

A burgess tumbles from the bridgeHeadlong, and hurrying Beauty slipsFrom Caesar through the plunging legsTo the blue sea between the ships.

A burgess tumbles from the bridge

Headlong, and hurrying Beauty slips

From Caesar through the plunging legs

To the blue sea between the ships.

Reading it through, I flatter myself that this is very nearly up to international halma form. A little more, and I shall be playing in critical test-matches against Monsieur Cocteau and Miss Amy Lowell. Enormous honour! I shrink from beneath its impendence.

But ah! those Caesars. They have haunted me for years. I have had such schemes for putting half the universe into two or three dozen poems about those monsters. All the sins, to begin with, and complementarily all the virtues.… Art, science, history, religion—they too were to have found their place. And God knows what besides. But they never came to much, these Caesars. The notion, I soon came to see, was too largeand pretentious ever to be realised. I began (deep calls to deep) with Nero, the artist. “Nero and Sporus walking in the gardens of the Golden House.”

Dark stirrings in the perfumed airTouch your cheeks, lift your hair.With softer fingers I caress,Sporus, all your loveliness.Round as a fruit, tree-tangled, shinesThe moon; and fire-flies in the vines,Like stars in a delirious sky,Gleam and go out. UnceasinglyThe fountains fall, the nightingalesSing. But time flows and love availsNothing. The Christians smoulder red;Their brave blue-hearted flames are dead.And you, sweet Sporus, you and I,We too must die, we too must die.

Dark stirrings in the perfumed air

Touch your cheeks, lift your hair.

With softer fingers I caress,

Sporus, all your loveliness.

Round as a fruit, tree-tangled, shines

The moon; and fire-flies in the vines,

Like stars in a delirious sky,

Gleam and go out. Unceasingly

The fountains fall, the nightingales

Sing. But time flows and love avails

Nothing. The Christians smoulder red;

Their brave blue-hearted flames are dead.

And you, sweet Sporus, you and I,

We too must die, we too must die.

But the soliloquy which followed was couched in a more philosophic key. I set forth in it all the reasons for halma’s existence—reasons which, at the time when I composed the piece, I almost believed in still. One lives and learns. Meanwhile, here it is.

The Christians by whose muddy lightDimly, dimly I divineYour eyes and see your pallid beautyLike a pale night-primrose shineColourless in the dark, revereA God who slowly died that theyMight suffer the less; who bore the painOf all time in a single day,The pain of all men in a singleWounded body and sad heart.The yellow marble smooth as waterBuilds me a Golden House; and thereThe marble gods sleep in their strengthAnd the white Parian girls are fair.Roses and waxen oleanders,Green grape bunches and the flushed peach,—All beautiful things I taste, touch, see,Knowing, loving, becoming each.The ship went down, my mother swam:I wedded and myself was wed;Old Claudius died of emperor-bane:Old Seneca too slowly bled.The wild beast and the victim both,The ravisher and the wincing bride;King of the world and a slave’s slave,Terror-haunted, deified—An artist, O sweet Sporus, an artist,All these I am and needs must be.Is the tune Lydian? I have loved you.And you have heard my symphonyOf wailing voices and clashed brass,With long shrill flutings that suspendPain o’er a muttering gulf of terrors,And piercing breathless joys that endIn agony—could I have madeMy song of Furies were the baneStill sap within the hemlock stalk,The red swords virgin bright again?Or take a child’s love that is allWorship, all tenderness and trust,A dawn-web, dewy and fragile—takeAnd with the violence of lustTear and defile it. You shall hearThe breaking dumbness and the thinHarsh crying that is the very musicOf shame and the remorse of sin.Christ died; the artist lives for all;Loves, and his naked marbles standPure as a column on the sky,Whose lips, whose breast and thighs demandNot our humiliation, notThe shuddering of an after shame;And of his agonies men knowOnly the beauty born of them.Christ died, but living Nero turnsYour mute remorse to song; he givesTo idiot fate eyes like a lover’s,And while his music plays, God lives.

The Christians by whose muddy lightDimly, dimly I divineYour eyes and see your pallid beautyLike a pale night-primrose shine

The Christians by whose muddy light

Dimly, dimly I divine

Your eyes and see your pallid beauty

Like a pale night-primrose shine

Colourless in the dark, revereA God who slowly died that theyMight suffer the less; who bore the painOf all time in a single day,

Colourless in the dark, revere

A God who slowly died that they

Might suffer the less; who bore the pain

Of all time in a single day,

The pain of all men in a singleWounded body and sad heart.

The pain of all men in a single

Wounded body and sad heart.

The yellow marble smooth as waterBuilds me a Golden House; and thereThe marble gods sleep in their strengthAnd the white Parian girls are fair.

The yellow marble smooth as water

Builds me a Golden House; and there

The marble gods sleep in their strength

And the white Parian girls are fair.

Roses and waxen oleanders,Green grape bunches and the flushed peach,—All beautiful things I taste, touch, see,Knowing, loving, becoming each.

Roses and waxen oleanders,

Green grape bunches and the flushed peach,—

All beautiful things I taste, touch, see,

Knowing, loving, becoming each.

The ship went down, my mother swam:I wedded and myself was wed;Old Claudius died of emperor-bane:Old Seneca too slowly bled.

The ship went down, my mother swam:

I wedded and myself was wed;

Old Claudius died of emperor-bane:

Old Seneca too slowly bled.

The wild beast and the victim both,The ravisher and the wincing bride;King of the world and a slave’s slave,Terror-haunted, deified—

The wild beast and the victim both,

The ravisher and the wincing bride;

King of the world and a slave’s slave,

Terror-haunted, deified—

An artist, O sweet Sporus, an artist,All these I am and needs must be.Is the tune Lydian? I have loved you.And you have heard my symphony

An artist, O sweet Sporus, an artist,

All these I am and needs must be.

Is the tune Lydian? I have loved you.

And you have heard my symphony

Of wailing voices and clashed brass,With long shrill flutings that suspendPain o’er a muttering gulf of terrors,And piercing breathless joys that end

Of wailing voices and clashed brass,

With long shrill flutings that suspend

Pain o’er a muttering gulf of terrors,

And piercing breathless joys that end

In agony—could I have madeMy song of Furies were the baneStill sap within the hemlock stalk,The red swords virgin bright again?

In agony—could I have made

My song of Furies were the bane

Still sap within the hemlock stalk,

The red swords virgin bright again?

Or take a child’s love that is allWorship, all tenderness and trust,A dawn-web, dewy and fragile—takeAnd with the violence of lust

Or take a child’s love that is all

Worship, all tenderness and trust,

A dawn-web, dewy and fragile—take

And with the violence of lust

Tear and defile it. You shall hearThe breaking dumbness and the thinHarsh crying that is the very musicOf shame and the remorse of sin.

Tear and defile it. You shall hear

The breaking dumbness and the thin

Harsh crying that is the very music

Of shame and the remorse of sin.

Christ died; the artist lives for all;Loves, and his naked marbles standPure as a column on the sky,Whose lips, whose breast and thighs demand

Christ died; the artist lives for all;

Loves, and his naked marbles stand

Pure as a column on the sky,

Whose lips, whose breast and thighs demand

Not our humiliation, notThe shuddering of an after shame;And of his agonies men knowOnly the beauty born of them.

Not our humiliation, not

The shuddering of an after shame;

And of his agonies men know

Only the beauty born of them.

Christ died, but living Nero turnsYour mute remorse to song; he givesTo idiot fate eyes like a lover’s,And while his music plays, God lives.

Christ died, but living Nero turns

Your mute remorse to song; he gives

To idiot fate eyes like a lover’s,

And while his music plays, God lives.

Romantic and noble sentiments! I protest, they do me credit.

And then there are the fragments about Tiberius; Tiberius, need I add, the representative in my symbolic scheme of love. Here is one. “In the gardens at Capri.” (All my scenes are laid in gardens, I notice, at night, under the moon. Perhaps the fact is significant. Who knows?)

Hour after hour the starsMove, and the moon towards remoter nightAverts her cheek.Blind now, these gardens yet rememberThat there were crimson petals glossy with light,And their remembrance is this scent of roses.Hour after hour the stars march slowly on,And year by year mysteriously the flowersUnfold the same bright pattern towards the sky.Incurious under the streaming stars,Breathing this new yet immemorial perfumeUnmoved, I lie along the tumbled bed;And the two women who are my bedfellows,Whose breath is sour with wine and their soft bodiesStill hot and rank, sleep drunkenly at my side.

Hour after hour the stars

Move, and the moon towards remoter night

Averts her cheek.

Blind now, these gardens yet remember

That there were crimson petals glossy with light,

And their remembrance is this scent of roses.

Hour after hour the stars march slowly on,

And year by year mysteriously the flowers

Unfold the same bright pattern towards the sky.

Incurious under the streaming stars,Breathing this new yet immemorial perfumeUnmoved, I lie along the tumbled bed;And the two women who are my bedfellows,Whose breath is sour with wine and their soft bodiesStill hot and rank, sleep drunkenly at my side.

Incurious under the streaming stars,

Breathing this new yet immemorial perfume

Unmoved, I lie along the tumbled bed;

And the two women who are my bedfellows,

Whose breath is sour with wine and their soft bodies

Still hot and rank, sleep drunkenly at my side.

Commendable, I should now think, this fixture of the attention upon the relevant, the human reality in the centre of the pointless landscape. It was just at the time I wrote this fragment that I was learning the difficult art of this exclusive concentration on the relevant. They were painful lessons. War had prepared me to receive them; Love was the lecturer.

Her name was Barbara Waters. I saw her first when I was about fourteen. She was a month or two older than I. It was at one of those enormous water picnics on the Cherwell that were organised from time to time during the summer vacation by certain fiery and energetic spirits among the dons’ wives. We would start out at seven, half a dozen punt-loads of us, from the most northerly of the Oxford boat-houses and make our way up-stream for an hour or so until night had fairly set in. Then, disembarking in some solitary meadow, we would spread cloths, unpack hampers, eat hilariously. And there were so many midges that even the schoolboys were allowed to smoke cigarettes to keep them off—even the schoolgirls. And how knowingly and with what a relish we, the boys, puffed away, blowing the smoke through our noses, opening our mouths like frogs to make rings! But the girls always managed to make their cigarettes come to pieces, got the tobacco into their mouths and, making faces, had to pick the bitter-tasting threads of it from between their lips. In the end, after much giggling, they always threw their cigarettes away, not half smoked; the boys laughed, contemptuously and patronisingly. And finally we packed ourselves into the punts again and floated home, singing; our voices across the water sounded praeternaturally sweet. A yellow moon as large as a pumpkin shone overhead; there were gleamings on the crests of the ripples and in the troughs of the tiny waves, left in the wake of the punts, shadows of almost absolute blackness. The leaves of the willow trees shone like metal. A white mist lay along the meadows. Corncrakes incessantly ran their thumbs along the teeth of combs. A faint weedy smell came up from the river; the aroma of tobacco cut violently across it in pungent gusts; sometimes the sweet animal smell of cows insinuated itself into the watery atmosphere, and looking between the willows, we would see a company of the large and gentle beasts kneeling in the grass, their heads and backs projecting like the crests of mountains above the mist, still hard at work, thoughthe laborious day was long since over, chewing and chewing away at a green breakfast that had merged into luncheon, at the tea that had become in due course a long-drawn-out vegetarian dinner. Munchily, squelchily, they moved their indefatigable jaws. The sound came faintly to us through the silence. Then a small clear voice would begin singing “Drink to me only with thine eyes” or “Greensleeves.”

Sometimes, for the fun of the thing, though it was quite unnecessary, and if the weather happened to be really warm, positively disagreeable, we would light a fire, so that we might have the pleasure of eating our cold chicken and salmon mayonnaise with potatoes baked—or generally either half baked or burnt—in their jackets among the glowing cinders. It was by the light of one of these fires that I first saw Barbara. The punt in which I came had started some little time after the others; we had had to wait for a late arrival. By the time we reached the appointed supping place the others had disembarked and made all ready for the meal. The younger members of the party had collected materials for a fire, which they were just lighting as we approached. A group of figures, pale and colourless in the moonlight, were standing or sitting round the white cloth. In the black shadow of a huge elm tree a few yards further off moved featureless silhouettes. Suddenly a small flame spurted from a match and was shielded between a pair of hands that were transformed at once into hands of transparent coral. The silhouettes began to live a fragmentary life. The fire-bearing hands moved round the pyre; two or three new little flames were born. Then, to the sound of a great hurrah, the bonfire flared up. In the heart of the black shadow of the elm tree a new small universe, far vivider than the ghostly world of moonlight beyond, was suddenly created. By the light of the bright flames I saw half a dozen familiar faces belonging to the boys and girls I knew. But I hardly noticed them; I heeded only one face, a face I did not know. The leaping flame revealedit apocalyptically. Flushed, bright and with an air of being almost supernaturally alive in the quivering, changing light of the flames, it detached itself with an incredible clarity and precision from against a background of darkness which the fire had made to seem yet darker. It was the face of a young girl. She had dark hair with ruddy golden lights in it. The nose was faintly aquiline. The openings of the eyes were narrow, long and rather slanting, and the dark eyes looked out through them as though through mysterious loopholes, brilliant, between the fringed eyelids, with an intense and secret and unutterable happiness.

The mouth seemed to share in the same exquisite secret. Not full, but delicately shaped, the unparted lips were curved into a smile that seemed to express a delight more piercing than any laughter, any outburst of joy could give utterance to. The corners of the mouth were drawn upwards so that the line of the meeting of the lips was parallel with her tilted eyes. And this slanting close-lipped smile seemed as though suspended on two little folds that wrinkled the cheeks at the corners of the mouth. The face, which was rather broad across the cheek-bones, tapered away to a pointed chin, small and firm. Her neck was round and slender; her arms, which were bare in her muslin dress, very thin.

The punt moved slowly against the current. I gazed and gazed at the face revealed by the flickering light of the fire. It seemed to me that I had never seen anything so beautiful and wonderful. What was the secret of that inexpressible joy? What nameless happiness dwelt behind those dark-fringed eyes, that silent, unemphatic, close-lipped smile? Breathlessly I gazed. I felt the tears coming into my eyes—she was so beautiful. And I was almost awed, I felt something that was almost fear, as though I had suddenly come into the presence of more than a mere mortal being, into the presence of life itself. The flame leapt up. Over the silent, secret-smiling face the tawny reflections came and went, as though wild bloodwere fluttering deliriously beneath the skin. The others were shouting, laughing, waving their arms. She remained perfectly still, close-lipped and narrow-eyed, smiling. Yes, life itself was standing there.

The punt bumped against the bank. “Catch hold,” somebody shouted, “catch hold, Francis.”

Reluctantly I did as I was told; I felt as though something precious were being killed within me.

In the years that followed I saw her once or twice. She was an orphan, I learned, and had relations in Oxford with whom she came occasionally to stay. When I tried to speak to her, I always found myself too shy to do more than stammer or say something trivial or stupid. Serenely, looking at me steadily between her eyelids, she answered. I remember not so much what she said as the tone in which she spoke—cool, calm, assured, as befitted the embodiment of life itself.

“Do you play tennis?” I would ask in desperation—and I could have wept at my own stupidity and lack of courage. Why are you so beautiful? What do you think about behind your secret eyes? Why are you so inexplicably happy? Those were the questions I wanted to ask her.

“Yes, I love tennis,” she gravely answered.

Once, I remember, I managed to advance so far along the road of coherent and intelligent conversation as to ask her what books she liked best. She looked at me unwaveringly while I spoke. It was I who reddened and turned away. She had an unfair advantage over me—the advantage of being able to look out from between her narrowed eyelids as though from an ambush. I was in the open and utterly without protection.

“I don’t read much,” she said at last, when I had finished. “I don’t really very much like reading.”

My attempt to approach, to make contact, was baffled. At the same time I felt that I ought to have known that she wouldn’t like reading. After all, what need was there for her to read? When one is life itself, one has no usefor mere books. Years later she admitted that she had always made an exception for the novels of Gene Stratton-Porter. When I was seventeen she went to live with another set of relations in South Africa.

Time passed. I thought of her constantly. All that I read of love in the poets arranged itself significantly round the memory of that lovely and secretly smiling face. My friends would boast about their little adventures. I smiled unenviously, knowing not merely in theory but by actual experience that that sort of thing was not love. Once, when I was a freshman at the university, I myself, at the end of a tipsy evening in a night club, lapsed from the purity in which I had lived up till then. Afterwards, I was horribly ashamed. And I felt that I had made myself unworthy of love. In consequence—the link of cause and effect seems to me now somewhat difficult to discover, but at the time, I know, I found my action logical enough—in consequence I overworked myself, won two university prizes, became an ardent revolutionary and devoted many hours of my leisure to “social service” in the college Mission. I was not a good social servant, got on only indifferently well with fierce young adolescents from the slums and thoroughly disliked every moment I spent in the Mission. But it was precisely for that reason that I stuck to the job. Once or twice, even, I consented to join in the morris dancing in my mother’s garden. I was making myself worthy—for what? I hardly know. The possibility of marriage seemed almost infinitely remote; and somehow I hardly desired it. I was fitting myself to go on loving and loving, and incidentally to do great things.

Then came the war. From France I wrote her a letter, in which I told her all the things I had lacked the power to say in her presence. I sent the letter to the only address I knew—she had left it years before—not expecting, not even hoping very much, that she would receive it. I wrote it for my own satisfaction, in order to make explicit all that I felt. I had no doubt that I should soonbe dead. It was a letter addressed not so much to a woman as to God, a letter of explanation and apology posted to the universe.

In the winter of 1916 I was wounded. At the end of my spell in hospital I was reported unfit for further active service and appointed to a post in the contracts department of the Air Board. I was put in charge of chemicals, celluloid, rubber tubing, castor oil, linen and balloon fabrics. I spent my time haggling with German Jews over the price of chemicals and celluloid, with Greek brokers over the castor oil, with Ulstermen over the linen. Spectacled Japanese came to visit me with samples of crêpe de Chine which they tried to persuade me—and they offered choice cigars—would be both better and cheaper than cotton for the manufacture of balloons. Of every one of the letters I dictated first eleven, then seventeen, and finally, when the department had flowered to the height of its prosperity, twenty-two copies were made, to be noted and filed by the various sub-sections of the ministry concerned. The Hotel Cecil was filled with clerks. In basements two stories down beneath the surface of the ground, in attics above the level of the surrounding chimney-pots, hundreds of young women tapped away at typewriters. In a subterranean ball-room, that looked like the setting for Belshazzar’s feast, a thousand cheap lunches were daily consumed. In the hotel’s best bedrooms overlooking the Thames sat the professional civil servants of long standing with letters after their names, the big business men who were helping to win the war, the staff officers. A fleet of very large motor cars waited for them in the courtyard. Sometimes, when I entered the office of a morning, I used to imagine myself a visitor from Mars.…

One morning—it was after I had been at the Air Board for several months—I found myself faced with a problem which could only be solved after consultation with an expert in the Naval Department. The naval people lived in the range of buildings on the opposite side of thecourtyard from that in which our offices were housed. It was only after ten minutes of labyrinthine wanderings that I at last managed to find the man I was looking for. He was a genial fellow, I remember; asked me how I liked Bolo House (which was the nickname among the knowing of our precious Air Board office), gave me an East Indian cheroot and even offered whiskey and soda. After that we settled down to a technical chat about non-inflammable celluloid. I left him at last, much enlightened.

“So long,” he called after me. “And if ever you want to know any mortal thing about acetone or any other kind of bloody dope, come to me and I’ll tell you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “And if by any chance you should happen to want to know about Apollonius Rhodius, shall we say, or Chaucer, or the history of the three-pronged fork….”

He roared very heartily. “I’ll come to you,” he concluded.

Still laughing, I shut the door behind me and stepped out into the corridor. A young woman was hurrying past with a thick bundle of papers in her hand, humming softly as she went. Startled by my sudden emergence, she turned and looked at me. As though with fear, my heart gave a sudden thump, then seemed to stop for a moment altogether, seemed to drop down within me.

“Barbara!”

At the sound of the name she halted and looked at me with that steady unwavering gaze between the narrowed eyelids that I knew so well. A little frown appeared on her forehead; puzzled, she pursed her lips. Then all at once her face brightened, she laughed; the light in the dark eyes joyously quivered and danced.

“Why, it’s Francis Chelifer,” she exclaimed. “I didn’t know you for the first minute. You’ve changed.”

“You haven’t,” I said. “You’re just the same.”

She said nothing, but smiled, close-lipped, and from between her lashes looked at me as though from an ambush. In her young maturity she was more beautifulthan ever. Whether I was glad or sorry to see her again, I hardly know. But I do know that I was moved, profoundly; I was shaken and troubled out of whatever equanimity I possessed. That memory of a kind of symbolic loveliness for which and by which I had been living all these years was now reincarnated and stood before me, no longer a symbol, but an individual; it was enough to make one feel afraid.

“I thought you were in South Africa,” I went on. “Which is almost the same as saying I thought you didn’t exist.”

“I came home a year ago.”

“And you’ve been working here ever since?”

Barbara nodded.

“And you’re working in Bolo House too?” she asked.

“For the last six months.”

“Well I never! And to think we never met before! But how small the world is—how absurdly small.”

We met for luncheon.

“Did you get my letter?” I summoned up courage to ask her over the coffee.

Barbara nodded. “It was months and months on its way,” she said; and I did not know whether she made the remark deliberately, in order to stave off for a moment the inevitable discussion of the letter, or if she made it quite spontaneously and without afterthought, because she found it interesting that the letter should have been so long on its way. “It went to South Africa and back again,” she explained.

“Did you read it?”

“Of course.”

“Did you understand what I meant?” As I asked the question I wished that I had kept silence. I was afraid of what the answer might be.

She nodded and said nothing, looking at me mysteriously, as though she had a secret and profound comprehension of everything.

“It was something almost inexpressible,” I said. Herlook encouraged me to go on. “Something so deep and so vast that there were no words to describe it. You understood? You really understood?”

Barbara was silent for some time. Then with a little sigh she said: “Men are always silly about me. I don’t know why.”

I looked at her. Could she really have uttered those words? She was still smiling as life itself might smile. And at that moment I had a horrible premonition of what I was going to suffer. Nevertheless I asked how soon I might see her again. To-night? Could she dine with me to-night? Barbara shook her head; this evening she was engaged. What about lunch to-morrow? “I must think.” And she frowned, she pursed her lips. No, she remembered in the end, to-morrow was no good. Her first moment of liberty was at dinner-time two days later.

I returned to my work that afternoon feeling particularly Martian. Eight thick files relating to the Imperial Cellulose Company lay on my desk. My secretary showed me the experts’ report on proprietary brands of castor oil, which had just come in. A rubber tubing man was particularly anxious to see me. And did I still want her to get a trunk call through to Belfast about that linen business? Pensively I listened to what she was saying. What was it all for?

“Are men often silly about you, Miss Masson?” it suddenly occurred to me to ask. I looked up at my secretary, who was waiting for me to answer her questions and tell her what to do.

Miss Masson became surprisingly red and laughed in an embarrassed, unnatural way. “Why, no,” she said. “I suppose I’m an ugly duckling.” And she added: “It’s rather a relief. But what makes you ask?”

She had reddish hair, bobbed and curly, a very white skin and brown eyes. About twenty-three, I supposed; and she wasn’t an ugly duckling at all. I had never talked to her except about business, and seldom looked at herclosely, contenting myself with being merely aware that she was there—a secretary, most efficient.

“What makes you ask?” A strange expression that was like a look of terror came into Miss Masson’s eyes.

“Oh, I don’t know. Curiosity. Perhaps you’ll see if you can get me through to Belfast some time in the afternoon. And tell the rubber tubing man that I can’t possibly see him.”

Miss Masson’s manner changed. She smiled at me efficiently, secretarially. Her eyes became quite impassive. “You can’t possibly see him,” she repeated. She had a habit of repeating what other people had just said, even reproducing like an echo opinions or jokes uttered an instant before as though they were her own. She turned away and walked towards the door. I was left alone with the secret history of the Imperial Cellulose Company, the experts’ report on proprietary brands of castor oil, and my own thoughts.

Two days later Barbara and I were dining very expensively at a restaurant where the diners were able very successfully to forget that the submarine campaign was in full swing and that food was being rationed.

“I think the decorations are so pretty,” she said, looking round her. “And the music.” (Mrs. Cloudesley Shove thought the same of the Corner Houses.)

While she looked round at the architecture, I looked at her. She was wearing a rose-coloured evening dress, cut low and without sleeves. The skin of her neck and shoulders was very white. There was a bright rose in the opening of her corsage. Her arms without being bony were still very slender, like the arms of a little girl; her whole figure was slim and adolescent.

“Why do you stare at me like that?” she asked, when the fascination of the architecture was exhausted. She had heightened the colour of her cheeks and faintly smiling lips. Between the darkened eyelids her eyes looked brighter than usual.

“I was wondering why you were so happy. Secretlyhappy, inside, all by yourself. What’s the secret? That’s what I was wondering.”

“Why shouldn’t I be happy?” she asked. “But, as a matter of fact,” she added an instant later, “I’m not happy. How can one be happy when thousands of people are being killed every minute and millions more are suffering?” She tried to look grave, as though she were in church. But the secret joy glittered irrepressibly through the slanting narrow openings of her eyes. Within its ambush her soul kept incessant holiday.

I could not help laughing. “Luckily,” I said, “our sympathy for suffering is rarely strong enough to prevent us from eating dinner. Do you prefer lobster or salmon?”

“Lobster,” said Barbara. “But how stupidly cynical you are! You don’t believe what I say. But I do assure you, there’s not a moment when I don’t remember all those killed and wounded. And poor people too: the way they live—in the slums. One can’t be happy. Not really.” She shook her head.

I saw that if I pursued this subject of conversation, thus forcing her to continue her pretence of being in church, I should ruin her evening and make her thoroughly dislike me. The waiter with the wine list made a timely diversion. I skimmed the pages. “What do you say to a quart of champagne cup?” I suggested.

“That would be delicious,” she said and was silent, looking at me meanwhile with a questioning, undecided face that did not know how to adjust itself—whether to continued gravity or to a more natural cheerfulness.

I put an end to her indecision by pointing to a diner at a neighbouring table and whispering: “Have you ever seen anything so like a tapir?”

She burst into a peal of delighted laughter; not so much because what I had said was particularly funny, but because it was such a tremendous relief to be allowed to laugh again with a good conscience.

“Or wouldn’t you have said an ant-eater?” she suggested,looking in the direction I had indicated and then leaning across the table to speak the words softly and intimately into my ear. Her face approached, dazzlingly beautiful. I could have cried aloud. The secret happiness in her eyes was youth, was health, was uncontrollable life. The close lips smiled with a joyful sense of power. A rosy perfume surrounded her. The red rose between her breasts was brilliant against the white skin. I was aware suddenly that under the glossy silk of her dress was a young body, naked. Was it for this discovery that I had been preparing myself all these years?

After dinner we went to a music hall and when the show was over to a night club where we danced. She told me that she went dancing almost every night. I did not ask with whom. She looked appraisingly at all the women who came in, asked me if I didn’t think this one very pretty, that most awfully attractive; and when, on the contrary, I found them rather repulsive, she was annoyed with me for being insufficiently appreciative of her sex. She pointed out a red-haired woman at another table and asked me if I liked women with red hair. When I said that I preferred Buckle’sHistory of Civilization, she laughed as though I had said something quite absurdly paradoxical. It was better when she kept silence; and fortunately she had a great capacity for silence, could use it even as a defensive weapon, as when, to questions that at all embarrassed or nonplussed her, she simply returned no answer, however often they were repeated, smiling all the time mysteriously and as though from out of another universe.

We had been at the night club about an hour, when a stoutish and flabby young man, very black-haired, very dark-skinned, with a large fleshy nose and a nostril curved in an opulent oriental volute, came sauntering in with a lordly air of possession. He wore a silver monocle in his left eye, and among the irrepressible black stubbles of his chin the grains ofpoudre de rizglittered like littlesnowflakes. Catching sight of Barbara he smiled, lavishly, came up to our table and spoke to her. Barbara seemed very glad to see him.

“Such a clever man,” she explained, when he had moved away to another table with the red-haired lady to whom I preferred theHistory of Civilization. “He’s a Syrian. You ought to get to know him. He writes poetry too, you know.”

I was unhappy the whole evening; but at the same time I wished it would never end. I should have liked to go on for ever sitting in that stuffy cellar, where the jazz band sounded so loud that it seemed to be playing inside one’s head. I would have breathed the stale air and wearily danced for ever, I would even have listened for ever to Barbara’s conversation—for ever, so that I might have been allowed to be near her, to look at her, to speculate, until she next spoke, on the profound and lovely mysteries behind her eyes, on the ineffable sources of that secret joy which kept her faintly and yet how intently and how rapturously smiling.

The weeks passed. I saw her almost every day. And every day I loved her more violently and painfully, with a love that less and less resembled the religious passion of my boyhood. But it was the persistent memory of that passion which made my present desire so parching and tormenting, that filled me with a thirst that no possible possession could assuage. No possible possession, since whatever I might possess, as I realised more and more clearly each time I saw her, would be utterly different from what I had desired all these years to possess. I had desired all beauty, all that exists of goodness and truth, symbolised and incarnate in one face. And now the face drew near, the lips touched mine; and what I had got was simply a young woman with a “temperament,” as the euphemists who deplore the word admiringly and lovingly qualify the lascivious thing. And yet, against all reason, in spite of all the evidence, I could not help believing that she was somehow and secretly what I hadimagined her. My love for her as a symbol strengthened my desire for her as an individual woman.

All this, were it to happen to me now, would seem perfectly natural and normal. If I were to make love to a young woman, I should know precisely what I was making love to. But that, in those days, was something I still had to learn. In Barbara’s company I was learning it with a vengeance. I was learning that it is possible to be profoundly and slavishly in love with some one for whom one has no esteem, whom one does not like, whom one regards as a bad character and who, finally, not only makes one unhappy but bores one. And why not, I might now ask, why not? That things should be like this is probably the most natural thing in the world. But in those days I imagined that love ought always to be mixed up with affection and admiration, with worship and an intellectual rapture, as unflagging as that which one experiences during the playing of a symphony. Sometimes, no doubt, love does get involved with some or all of these things; sometimes these things exist by themselves, apart from love. But one must be prepared to swallow one’s love completely neat and unadulterated. It is a fiery, crude and somewhat poisonous draught.

Every hour I spent with Barbara brought fresh evidence of her inability to play the ideal part my imagination had all these years been assigning to her. She was selfish, thirsty for pleasures of the most vulgar sort, liked to bask in an atmosphere of erotic admiration, amused herself by collecting adorers and treating them badly, was stupid and a liar—in other words, was one of the normal types of healthy young womanhood. I should have been less disturbed by these discoveries if only her face had been different. Unfortunately, however, the healthy young woman who now revealed herself had the same features as that symbolic child on the memory of whose face I had brooded through all an ardent adolescence. And the contrast between what she was and what—with that dazzling and mysteriously lovely face—she ought to have been,what in my imagination she indeed had been, was a perpetual source of surprise and pain. And at the same time the nature of my passion for her had changed—changed inevitably and profoundly, the moment she ceased to be a symbol and became an individual. Now, I desired her; before, I had loved her for God’s sake and almost as though she were herself divine. And contrasting this new love with the love I had felt before, I was ashamed, I fancied myself unworthy, base, an animal. And I tried to persuade myself that if she seemed different it was because I felt differently and less nobly towards her. And sometimes, when we sat silent through long summer twilights under the trees in the Park, or at my Chelsea rooms, looking out on to the river, I could persuade myself for a precarious moment that Barbara was what she had been in my imagination and that I felt towards her now what I had felt towards the memory of her. In the end, however, Barbara would break the magic silence and with it the illusion.

“It’s such a pity,” she would say pensively, “that July hasn’t got an r in it. Otherwise we might have had supper in an oyster bar.”

Or else, remembering that I was a literary man, she would look at the gaudy remains of the sunset and sigh. “I wishIwere a poet,” she would say.

And I was back again among the facts, and Barbara was once more a tangible young woman who bored me, but whom I desired—with what a definite and localised longing!—to kiss, to hold fast and caress.

It was a longing which, for some time, I rigorously suppressed. I fought against it as against an evil thing, too horribly unlike my previous love, too outrageously incompatible with my conception of Barbara’s higher nature. I had not yet learned to reconcile myself to the fact that Barbara’s higher nature was an invention of my own, a figment of my proper imagination.

One very hot evening in July I drove her to the door of the house in Regent Square, Bloomsbury, in which sheoccupied a little flat under the roof. We had been dancing and it was late; a hunch-backed moon had climbed a third of the way up the sky and was shining down into the square over the shoulder of the church that stands on its eastern side. I paid off the cabman and we were left alone on the pavement. I had been bored and irritated the whole evening; but at the thought that I should have to bid her good-night and walk off by myself I was filled with such an anguish that the tears came into my eyes. I stood there in silent irresolution, looking into her face. It was calmly and mysteriously smiling as though to itself and for some secret reason; her eyes were very bright. She too was silent, not restlessly, not irresolutely as I was silent, but easily, with a kind of majesty. She could live in silence, when she so desired, like a being in its proper element.

“Well,” I brought myself to say at last, “I must go.”

“Why not come in for a final cup of tea?” she suggested.

Actuated by that spirit of perversity which makes us do what we do not want to do, what we know will make us suffer as much as it is possible in the given circumstance to suffer, I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I must get back.”

I had never longed for anything more passionately than I longed to accept Barbara’s invitation.

She repeated it. “Do come in,” she said. “It won’t take a minute to make tea on the gas ring.”

Again I shook my head, in too much anguish, this time, to be able to speak. My trembling voice, I was afraid, would have betrayed me. Instinctively I knew that if I went into the house with her we should become lovers. My old determination to resist what had seemed the baser desires strengthened my resolution not to go in.

“Well, if you won’t,” she shrugged her shoulders, “then good-night.” Her voice had a note of annoyance in it.

I shook her hand and walked dumbly away. When I had gone ten yards my resolution abjectly broke down.I turned. Barbara was still standing on the doorstep, trying to fit the latchkey into the lock.

“Barbara,” I called in a voice that sounded horribly unnatural in my own ears. I hurried back. She turned to look at me. “Do you mind if I change my mind and accept your invitation after all? I find I really am rather thirsty.” What a humiliation, I thought.

She laughed. “What a goose you are, Francis.” And she added in a bantering tone: “If you weren’t such a silly old dear I’d tell you to go to the nearest horse-trough and drink there.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. Standing once more close to her, breathing once again her rosy perfume, I felt as I had felt when, a child, I had run down from my terrifying night nursery to find my mother sitting in the dining-room—reassured, relieved of a hideous burden, incredibly happy, but at the same time profoundly miserable in the consciousness that what I was doing was against all the rules, was a sin, the enormity of which I could judge from the very mournful tenderness of my mother’s eyes and the severe, portentous silence out of which, as though from a thundercloud, my huge and bearded father looked at me like an outraged god. I was happy, being with Barbara; I was utterly miserable because I was not with her, so to speak, in the right way: I was not I; she, for all that the features were the same, was no longer herself. I was happy at the thought that I should soon be kissing her; miserable because that was not how I wanted to love my imaginary Barbara; miserable too, when I secretly admitted to myself the existence of the real Barbara, because I felt it an indignity to be the slave of such a mistress.

“Of course, if you want me to go,” I said, reacting feebly again towards revolt, “I’ll go.” And desperately trying to be facetious, “I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be best if I drowned myself in that horse-trough,” I added.

“As you like,” she said lightly. The door was open now; she walked into the darkness. I followed her, closingthe door behind me carefully. We groped our way up steep dark stairs. She unlocked another door, turned a switch. The sudden light was dazzling.

“All’s well that ends well,” she said, smiling at me, and she slipped the cloak from off her bare shoulders.

On the contrary, I thought, it was the tragedy of errors. I stepped towards her, I stretched out my hands and gripped her by her two thin arms a little below the shoulder. I bent down and kissed her averted cheek, she turned her face towards me, and it was her mouth.

Back to Index Next