“Not young, Sonia. You should see us. The average age of the subalterns is about forty, the colonel finished the last war as a brigadier, and our troopers are all either weatherbeaten old commissionaires or fifteen-stone valets.”
Alastair came in from the bathroom. “How’s the art tart?” He opened bottles and began mixing stout and champagne in a deep jug. “Blackers?” They had always drunk this sour and invigorating draught.
“Tell us all about the war,” said Sonia.
“Well—” Basil began.
“No, darling, I didn’t mean that. Not all. Not about who’s going to win or why we are fighting. Tell us what everyone is going to do about it. From what Margot tells me the last war was absolute heaven. Alastair wants to go for a soldier.”
“Conscription has rather taken the gilt off that particular gingerbread,” said Basil. “Besides, this ain’t going to be a soldier’s war.”
“Poor Peter,” said Sonia, as though she was talking to one of the puppies. “It isn’t going to be your war, sweetheart.”
“Suits me,” said Peter.
“I expect Basil will have the most tremendous adventures. He always did in peace time. Goodness knows what he’ll do in war.”
“There are too many people in on the racket,” said Basil.
“Poor sweet, I don’t believe any of you are nearly as excited about it as I am.”
The name of the poet Parsnip, casually mentioned, reopened the great Parsnip–Pimpernell controversy which was torturing Poppet Green and her friends. It was a problem which, not unlike the Schleswig-Holstein question of the preceding century, seemed to admit of no logical solution for, in simple terms, the postulates were self-contradictory. Parsnip and Pimpernell, as friends and collaborators, were inseparable; on that all agreed. But Parsnip’s art flourished best in England, even an embattled England, while Pimpernell’s needed the peaceful and fecund soil of the United States. The complementary qualities which, many believed, made them together equal to one poet, now threatened the dissolution of partnership.
“I don’t say that Pimpernell is the better poet,” said Ambrose. “All I say is that I personally find him the more nutritious; so I personally think they are right to go.”
“But I’ve always felt that Parsnip is so much more dependent on environment.”
“I know what you mean, Poppet, but I don’t agree… Aren’t you thinking only of Guernica Revisited and forgetting the Christopher Sequence…”
Thus the aesthetic wrangle might have run its familiar course, but there was in the studio that morning a cross, red-headed girl in spectacles from the London School of Economics; she believed in a People’s Total War; an uncompromising girl whom none of them liked; a suspect of Trotskyism.
“What I don’t see,” she said (and what this girl did not see was usually a very conspicuous embarrassment to Poppet’s friends)—“What I don’t see is how these two can claim to be Contemporary if they run away from the biggest event in contemporary history. They were contemporary enough about Spain when no one threatened to come and bomb them.”
It was an awkward question; one that in military parlance was called “a swift one.” At any moment, it was felt in the studio, this indecent girl would use the word “escapism”; and, in the silence which followed her outburst, while everyone in turn meditated and rejected a possible retort, she did, in fact, produce the unforgivable charge. “It’s just sheer escapism,” she said.
The word startled the studio, like the cry of “Cheat” in a card-room.
“That’s a foul thing to say, Julia.”
“Well, what’s the answer?…”
The answer, thought Ambrose, he knew an answer or two. There was plenty that he had learned from his new friends, that he could quote to them. He could say that the war in Spain was “contemporary” because it was a class war; the present conflict, since Russia had declared herself neutral, was merely a phase in capitalist disintegration; that would have satisfied, or at least silenced, the red-headed girl. But that was not really the answer. He sought for comforting historical analogies but every example which occurred to him was on the side of the red-head. She knew them too, he thought, and would quote them with all her post-graduate glibness—Socrates marching to the sea with Xenophon, Virgil sanctifying Roman military rule, Horace singing the sweetness of dying for one’s country, the troubadours riding to war, Cervantes in the galleys at Lepanto, Milton working himself blind in the public service, even George IV, for whom Ambrose had a reverence which others devoted to Charles I, believed he had fought at Waterloo. All these, and a host of other courageous contemporary figures rose in Ambrose’s mind; Cézanne had deserted in 1870, but Cézanne in the practical affairs of life was a singularly unattractive figure; moreover, he was a painter whom Ambrose found insufferably boring. There was no answer to be found on those lines.
“You’re just sentimental,” said Poppet, “like a spinster getting tearful at the sound of a military band.”
“Well, they have military bands in Russia, don’t they? I expect plenty of spinsters get tearful in the Red Square when they march past Lenin’s tomb.”
You can always stump them with Russia, thought Ambrose; they can always stump each other. It’s the dead end of all discussion.
“The question is, would they write any better for being in danger,” said one.
“Would they help the People’s Cause?” said another.
It was the old argument, gathering speed again after the rude girl’s interruption. Ambrose gazed sadly at the jaundiced, mustachioed Aphrodite. What was he doing, he asked himself, in this galley.
Sonia was trying to telephone to Margot, to invite themselves all to luncheon.
“An odious man says that only official calls are being taken this morning.”
“Say you’re M.I.13,” said Basil.
“I’m M.I.13…. What can that mean? Darling, I believe it’s going to work… It has worked… Margot, this is Sonia… I’m dying to see you too…”
Aphrodite gazed back at him, blind, as though sculptured in butter; Parsnip and Pimpernell, Red Square and Brown House, thus the discussion raged. What was all this to do with him?
Art and Love had led him to this inhospitable room.
Love for a long succession of louts—rugger blues, all-in wrestlers, naval ratings; tender, hopeless love that had been rewarded at the best by an occasional episode of rough sensuality, followed, in sober light, with contempt, abuse and rapacity.
A pansy. An old queen. A habit of dress, a tone of voice, an elegant, humorous deportment that had been admired and imitated, a swift, epicene felicity of wit, the art of dazzling and confusing those he despised—these had been his, and now they were the current exchange of comedians; there were only a few restaurants, now, which he could frequent without fear of ridicule and there he was surrounded, as though by distorting mirrors, with gross reflections and caricatures of himself. Was it thus that the rich passions of Greece and Arabia and the Renaissance had worn themselves out? Did they simper when Leonardo passed and imitate with mincing grace the warriors of Sparta; was there a snigger across the sand outside the tents of Saladin? They burned the Knights Templar at the stake; their loves, at least, were monstrous and formidable, a thing to call down destruction from heaven if man neglected his duty of cruelty and repression. Beddoes had died in solitude, by his own hand; Wilde had been driven into the shadows, tipsy and garrulous, but, to the end, a figure of tragedy looming big in his own twilight. But Ambrose, thought Ambrose, what of him? Born after his time, in an age which made a type of him, a figure of farce; like mothers-in-law and kippers, the century’s contribution to the national store of comic objects; a kin with the chorus boys who tittered under the lamps of Shaftesbury Avenue. And Hans, who at last, after so long a pilgrimage, had seemed to promise rest, Hans so simple and affectionate, like a sturdy young terrier, Hans lay in the unknown horrors of a Nazi concentration camp.
The huge, yellow face with scrawled
moustaches offered Ambrose no comfort.
There was a young man of military age in the studio; he was due to be called up in the near future. “I don’t know what to do about it,” he said. “Of course, I could always plead conscientious objections, but I haven’t got a conscience. It would be a denial of everything we’ve stood for if I said I had a conscience.”
“No, Tom,” they said to comfort him. “We know you haven’t a conscience.”
“But then,” said the perplexed young man, “if I haven’t got a conscience, why in God’s name should I mind so much saying that I have?”
“… Peter’s here and Basil. We’re all feeling very gay and warlike. May we come to luncheon? Basil says there’s bound to be an enormous air raid to-night so it may be the last time we shall ever see each other… What’s that? Yes, I told you I’m (What am I, Basil?) I’m M.I.13. (There’s a ridiculous woman on the line saying is this a private call?)… Well, Margot, then we’ll all come round to you. That’ll be heaven… hello, hello, I do believe that damned woman has cut us off.”
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art. Nature in the raw is seldom mild; red in tooth and claw; matelots in Toulon smelling of wine and garlic, with tough brown necks, cigarettes stuck to the lower lip, lapsing into unintelligible, contemptuous argot.
Art: this was where Art had brought him, to this studio, to these coarse and tedious youngsters, to that preposterous yellow face among the boiled sweets.
It had been a primrose path in the days of Diaghilev; at Eton he had collected Lovat-Frazer rhyme sheets; at Oxford he had recited In Memoriam through a megaphone to an accompaniment hummed on combs and tissue paper; in Paris he had frequented Jean Cocteau and Gertrude Stein; he had written and published his first book there, a study of Montparnasse negroes that had been banned in England by Sir William Joynson-Hicks. That way the primrose path led gently downhill to the world of fashionable photographers, stage sets for Cochrane, Cedric Lyne and his Neapolitan grottoes.
He had made his decision then, turned aside from the primrose path, had deliberately chosen the austere and the heroic; it was the year of the American slump, a season of heroic decisions, when Paul had tried to enter a monastery and David had succeeded in throwing himself under a train. Ambrose had gone to Germany, lived in a workman’s quarter, found Hans, begun a book, a grim, abstruse, interminable book, a penance for past frivolity; the unfinished manuscript lay somewhere in an old suitcase in Central Europe, and Hans was behind barbed wire; or worse, perhaps, had given in, as with his simple, easy-going acceptance of things, was all too likely, was back among the Brown Shirts, a man with a mark against his name, never again to be trusted, but good enough for the firing line, good enough to be jostled into battle.
The red-headed girl was asking inconvenient questions again. “But Tom,” she was saying. “Surely if it was a good thing to share the life of the worker in a canned fruit factory, why isn’t it a good thing to serve with him in the army?”
“Julia’s just the type who used to go about distributing white feathers.”
“If it comes to that, why the hell not?” said Julia.
Ars longa, thought Ambrose, a short life but a grey one.
Alastair plugged his electric razor into the lamp on Sonia’s writing table and shaved in the bedroom, so as not to miss what was going on. He had once in the past seen Peter in full dress uniform at a Court Ball and had felt sorry for him because it meant that he could not come on afterwards to a night club; this was the first time he had seen him in khaki and he was jealous as a schoolboy. There was still a great deal of the schoolboy about Alastair; he enjoyed winter sports and sailing and squash racquets and the chaff round the bar at Bratt’s; he observed certain immature taboos of dress, such as wearing a bowler hat in London until after Goodwood week; he had a firm, personal sense of schoolboy honor. He felt these prejudices to be peculiar to himself; none of them made him at all censorious of anyone else; he accepted Basil’s outrageous disregard for them without question. He kept his sense of honor as he might have kept an expensive and unusual pet; as, indeed, once, for a disastrous month, Sonia had kept a small kangaroo named Molly. He knew himself to be as eccentric, in his own way, as Ambrose Silk. For a year, at the age of twenty-one, he had been Margot Metroland’s lover; it was an apprenticeship many of his friends had served; they had forgotten about it now, but at the time all their acquaintances knew about it; but never, even to Sonia, had Alastair alluded to the fact. Since marriage he had been unfaithful to Sonia for a week every year, during the Bratt’s Club golf tournament at Le Touquet, usually with the wife of a fellow member. He did this without any scruple because he believed Bratt’s week to be in some way excluded from the normal life of loyalties and obligations; a Saturnalia when the laws did not run. At all other times he was a devoted husband.
Alastair had never come nearer to military service than in being senior private in the Corps at Eton; during the General Strike he had driven about the poorer quarters of London in a closed van to break up seditious meetings and had clubbed several unoffending citizens; that was his sole contribution to domestic politics, for he had lived, in spite of his many moves, in uncontested constituencies. But he had always held it as axiomatic that, should anything as preposterous and antiquated as a large-scale war occur, he would take a modest but vigorous part. He had no illusions about his abilities, but believed, justly, that he would make as good a target as anyone else for the King’s enemies to shoot at. It came as a shock to him now, to find his country at war and himself in pajamas, spending his normal Sunday noon with a jug of Black Velvet and some chance visitors. Peter’s uniform added to his uneasiness. It was as though he had been taken in adultery at Christmas or found in mid-June on the steps of Bratt’s in a soft hat.
He studied Peter, with the rapt attention of a small boy, taking in every detail of his uniform, the riding boots, Sam Browne belt, the enameled stars of rank, and felt disappointed but, in a way, relieved, that there was no sword; he could not have borne it if Peter had had a sword.
“I know I look awful,” Peter said. “The adjutant left me in no doubt on that subject.”
“You look sweet,” said Sonia.
“I heard they had stopped wearing cross straps on the Sam Browne,” said Alastair.
“Yes, but technically we still carry swords.”
Technically. Peter had a sword, technically.
“Darling, do you think that if we went past Buckingham Palace the sentries will salute?”
“It’s quite possible. I don’t think Belisha has quite succeeded in putting it down yet.”
“We’ll go there at once. I’ll dress. Can’t wait to see them.”
So they walked from Chester Street to Buckingham Palace; Sonia and Peter in front, Alastair and Basil a pace or two behind. The sentries saluted and Sonia pinched Peter as he acknowledged it. Alastair said to Basil:
“I suppose we’ll be doing that soon.”
“They don’t want volunteers in this war, Alastair. They’ll call people up when they want them without any recruiting marches or popular songs. They haven’t the equipment for the men in training now.”
“Who do you mean by ‘they’?”
“Hore-Belisha.”
“Who cares what he wants?” said Alastair. For him there was no “they.” England was at war; he, Alastair Trumpington, was at war. It was not the business of any politician to tell him when or how he should fight. But he could not put this into words; not into words, anyway, which Basil would not make ridiculous, so he walked on in silence behind Peter’s martial figure until Sonia decided to take a cab.
“I know what I want,” said Basil. “I want to be one of those people one heard about in 1919; the hard-faced men who did well out of the war.”
VI
Although it was common for Freddy Sothill, Sir Joseph Mainwaring and various others who from time to time were enlisted to help solve the recurrent problem of Basil’s future, to speak of him in terms they norma
lly reserved for the mining community of South Wales, as feckless and unemployable, the getting of jobs, of one kind and another, had, in fact, played a large part in his life, for it was the explanation and excuse of most of Basil’s vagaries that he had never had any money of his own. Tony and Barbara by their father’s will each enjoyed a reasonable fortune, but Sir Christopher Seal had died shortly after the first of Basil’s major disgraces. If it were conceivable that one who held the office of Chief Whip for a quarter of a century could be shocked at any spectacle of human depravity, it might have been thought that shame hastened his end, so fast did one event follow upon the other. Be that as it may, it was on his death-bed that Sir Christopher, in true melodramatic style, disinherited his younger son, leaving his future entirely in his mother’s hands.
Lady Seal’s most devoted friend—and she had many—would not have credited her with more than human discretion, and some quite preternatural power would have been needed to deal with Basil’s first steps in adult life. The system she decided on was, at the best, unimaginative and, like many such schemes, was suggested to her by Sir Joseph Mainwaring; it consisted, in his words, of “giving the boy his bread and butter and letting him find the jam.” Removed from the realm of metaphor to plain English, this meant allowing Basil £400 a year, conditional on his good behavior, and expecting him to supplement it by his own exertions if he wished for a more ample way of life.
The arrangement proved disastrous from the first. Four times in the last ten years Lady Seal had paid Basil’s debts; once on condition of his living at home with her; once on condition of his living somewhere, anywhere, abroad; once on condition of his marrying; once on condition of refraining from his marriage. Twice he had been cut off with a penny; twice taken back to favor; once he had been set up in chambers in the Temple with an allowance of a thousand a year; several times a large lump sum of capital had been dangled before his eyes as the reward of his giving himself seriously to commerce; once he had been on the verge of becoming the recipient of a sisal farm in Kenya. Throughout all these changes of fortune Sir Joseph Mainwaring had acted the part of political agent to a recalcitrant stipendiary sultan, in a way which embittered every benevolence and minimized the value of every gift he brought. In the intervals of neglect and independence, Basil had fended for himself and had successively held all the jobs which were open to young men of his qualifications. He had never had much difficulty in getting jobs; the trouble had always been in keeping them, for he regarded a potential employer as his opponent in a game of skill. All Basil’s resource and energy went into hoodwinking him into surrender; once he had received his confidence he lost interest. Thus English girls will put themselves to endless exertion to secure a husband and, once married, will think their labor at an end.