A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

  ‘We shall meet again.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘In about a year from now.’

  ‘Perhaps before.’

  ‘No,’ she said, smiling with the complacence of one to whom the secrets of human existence had been long since occultly revealed. ‘Not before.’

  I did not press the point. Uncle Giles accompanied me to the hall. He had by then returned to the subject of money, the mystique of which was at least as absorbing to him as the rites upon which we had been engaged.

  ‘. . . and then one could not foresee that San Pedro Warehouses Deferred would become entirely valueless,’ he was saying. ‘The expropriations were merely the result of a liberal dictator coming in—got to face these changes. There was one of those quite natural revulsions against foreign capital. . . .’

  He broke off. Supposing our meeting now at an end, I turned from him, and made preparations to plunge through the opaque doors into the ocean of streets, in the grey ebb and flow of which the Ufford floated idly upon the swell. Uncle Giles put his hand on my arm.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I should mention to your parents the matter of having your fortune told. I don’t want them to blame me for leading you into bad habits, superstitious ones, I mean. Besides, they might not altogether approve of Myra Erdleigh.’

  His brown, wrinkled face puckered slightly. He still retained some vestige of good looks, faintly military in character. Perhaps this hint, increased with age, of past regimental distinction in some forgotten garrison town was what Mrs. Erdleigh admired in him. Neither my parents, nor any of the rest of Uncle Giles’s relations, were likely to worry about his behaviour if the worst he ever did was to persuade other members of the family to have their fortunes told. However, recognising that silence upon the subject of Mrs. Erdleigh might be a reasonable request, I assured him that I would not speak of our meeting.

  I was curious to know what their relationship might be. Possibly they were planning marriage. The ‘marriage card’ had clearly been of interest to my uncle. There was something vaguely ‘improper’ about Mrs. Erdleigh, almost deliberately so; but impropriety of an unremembered, Victorian kind: a villa in St. John’s Wood, perhaps, and eccentric doings behind locked doors and lace curtains on sultry summer afternoons. Uncle Giles was known to possess a capacity for making himself acceptable to ladies of all sorts, some of whom had even been rumoured to contribute at times a trifle towards his expenses; those many expenses to which he was subject, and never tired of detailing. Mrs. Erdleigh looked not so much ‘well off’ as eminently capable of pursuing her own interests effectively. Possibly Uncle Giles considered her a good investment. She, on her side, no doubt had her uses for him. Apart from material considerations, he was obviously fascinated by her occult powers, with which he seemed almost religiously preoccupied. Like all such associations, this one probably included a fierce struggle of wills. It would be interesting to see who won the day. On the whole, my money was on Mrs. Erdleigh. I thought about the pair of them for a day or two, and then they both passed from my mind.

  As I made my way towards the neighbourhood of Fitzroy Square, experiencing as usual that feeling of release that always followed parting company with Uncle Giles, I returned to the subject of future business difficulties foretold in the cards. These, as I have said, had seemed to refer to St. John Clarke’s introduction to The Art of Horace Isbister, already a tiresome affair, quite likely to pass from bad to worse. The introduction had been awaited for at least a year now, and we seemed no nearer getting the manuscript. The delay caused inconvenience at the office, since blocks had been made for a series of forty-eight monochrome plates and four three-colour half-tones; to which St. John Clarke was to add four or five thousand words of biographical reminiscence.

  Isbister himself had been ill, on and off, for some little time, so that it had not been possible through him to bring pressure to bear on St. John Clarke, although the painter was the novelist’s old friend. They may even have been at school together. Isbister had certainly executed several portraits of St. John Clarke, one of them (the sitter in a high, stiff collar and limp spotted bow tie) showing him as quite a young man. The personal legend of each, for publicity purposes, took the form of a country lad who had ‘made good’, and they would occasionally refer in print to their shared early struggles. St. John Clarke, in the first instance, had positively gone out of his way to arrange that the introduction should be written by himself, rather than by some suitable hack from amongst the Old Guard of the art critics, several of whom were in much more need of the fee, not a very princely one, that my firm was paying for the work.

  That a well-known novelist should take on something that seemed to call in at least a small degree for an accredited expert on painting was not so surprising as might at first sight have appeared, because St. John Clarke, although certainly quieter of late years, had in the past often figured in public controversy regarding the arts. He had been active, for example, in the years before the war in supporting the erection of the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens: a dozen years later, vigorously opposing the establishment of Rima in the bird sanctuary of the same neighbourhood. At one of the Walpole-Wilsons’ dinner parties I could remember talk of St. John Clarke’s intervention in the question of the Haig memorial, then much discussed. These examples suggest a special interest in sculpture, but St. John Clarke often expressed himself with equal force regarding painting and music. He had certainly been associated with opposition to the Post-Impressionists in 1910: also in leading some minor skirmish in operatic circles soon after the Armistice.

  I myself could not have denied a taste for St. John Clarke’s novels at about the period when leaving school. In fact Le Bas, my housemaster, finding me reading one of them, had taken it from my hand and glanced through the pages.

  ‘Rather morbid stuff, isn’t it?’ he had remarked.

  It was a statement rather than a question, though I doubt whether Le Bas had ever read any of St. John Clarke’s novels himself. He merely felt, in one sense correctly, that there was something wrong with them. At the same time he made no attempt to disallow, or confiscate, the volume. However, I had long preferred to forget the days when I had regarded St. John Clarke’s work as fairly daring. In fact I had become accustomed to refer to him and his books with the savagery which, when one is a young man, seems—perhaps rightly—the only proper and serious attitude towards anyone, most of all an older person, practising the arts in an inept or outworn manner.

  Although a few years younger than the generation of H. G. Wells and J. M. Barrie, St. John Clarke was connected in my mind with those two authors, chiefly because I had once seen a snapshot of the three of them reproduced in the memoirs of an Edwardian hostess. The photograph had probably been taken by the lady herself. The writers were standing in a group on the lawn of a huge, rather gracelessly pinnacled country seat. St. John Clarke was a little to one side of the picture. A tall, cadaverous man, with spectacles and long hair, a panama hat at the back of his head, he leant on a stick, surveying his more diminutive fellow guests with an expression of uneasy interest; rather as if he were an explorer or missionary, who had just coaxed from the jungle these powerful witch-doctors of some neighbouring, and on the whole unfriendly, tribe. He seemed, by his expression, to feel that constant supervision of the other two was necessary to foil misbehaviour or escape. There was something of the priest about his appearance.

  The picture had interested me because, although I had already read books by these three writers, all had inspired me with the same sense that theirs was not the kind of writing I liked. Later, as I have said, I came round for a time to St. John Clarke with that avid literary consumption of the immature which cannot precisely be regarded either as enjoyment or the reverse. The flavour of St. John Clarke’s novels is hard to describe to those unfamiliar with them, perhaps on account of their own inexactitudes of thought and feeling. Although no longer looked upon as a ‘serious’ writer, I be
lieve he still has his readers in number not to be disregarded. In his early years he had been treated with respect by most of the eminent critics of his time, and to the day of his death he hoped in vain for the Nobel Prize. Mark Members, his secretary, used to say that once, at least, that award had seemed within his grasp.

  We had never met, but I had seen him in Bond Street, walking with Members. Though his hair was by then white and straggling, he still looked remarkably like his picture in the book of memoirs. He was wearing a grey soft hat, rather high in the crown with a band of the same colour, a black suit and buff double-breasted waistcoat. As he strolled along he glanced rather furtively about him, seeming scarcely aware of Members, sauntering by his side. His features bore that somewhat exasperated expression that literary men so often acquire in middle life. For a second I had been reminded of my old acquaintance, Mr. Deacon, but a Mr. Deacon far more capable of coping with the world. Members, in his black homburg, swinging a rolled umbrella, looked quite boyish beside him.

  St. John Clarke’s reputation as a novelist had been made by the time he was in his thirties. For many years past he had lived the life of a comparatively rich bachelor, able to indulge most of his whims, seeing only the people who suited him, and making his way in what he used to call, ‘rather lovingly’, so Members said, the ‘beau monde’. Even in those days, critics malicious enough to pull his books to pieces in public were never tired of pointing out that investigations of human conduct, based on assumptions accepted when St. John Clarke was a young man, were hopelessly out of date. However, fortunately his sales did not depend on favourable reviews, although, in spite of this, he was said to be—like so many financially successful writers—painfully sensitive to hostile criticism. It was perhaps partly for the reason that he felt himself no longer properly appreciated that he had announced he would write no more novels. In due course memoirs would appear, though he confessed he was in no hurry to compose them.

  His procrastination regarding the introduction had, therefore, nothing to do with pressure of work. Putting the Isbister task in its least idealistic and disinterested light, it would give him a chance to talk about himself, a perfectly legitimate treat he was as a rule unwilling to forgo. Friendship made him a suitable man for the job. Those who enjoy finding landmarks common to different forms of art might even have succeeded in tracing a certain similarity of approach tenuously relating the novels of St. John Clarke with the portrait painting of Isbister. The delay was, indeed, hard to explain.

  There had been, however, various rumours recently current regarding changes supposedly taking place in St. John Clarke’s point of view. Lately, he had been seen at parties in Bloomsbury, and elsewhere, surrounded by people who were certainly not readers of his books. This was thought to show the influence of Members, who was said to be altering his employer’s outlook. Indeed, something suggesting a change of front in that quarter had been brought to my own notice in a very personal manner.

  St. John Clarke had contributed an article to a New York paper in which he spoke of the younger writers of that moment. Amongst a rather oddly assorted collection of names, he had commented, at least by implication favourably, upon a novel of my own, published a month or two before—the ‘book’ to which Mrs. Erdleigh had referred. Latterly, St. John Clarke had rarely occupied himself with occasional journalism, and in print he had certainly never before shown himself well disposed towards a younger generation. His remarks, brief and relatively guarded though they had been, not unnaturally aroused my interest, especially because any recommendation from that quarter was so entirely unexpected. I found myself looking for excuses to cover what still seemed to me his own shortcomings as a novelist.

  As I turned over these things in my mind, on the way to Barnby’s studio, it struck me that Barnby himself might be able to tell me something of St. John Clarke as a person; for, although unlikely that Barnby had read the novels, the two of them might well have met in the widely different circles Barnby frequented. I began to make enquiries soon after my arrival there.

  Barnby rubbed his short, stubby hair, worn en brosse, which, with his blue overalls, gave him the look of a sommelier at an expensive French restaurant. By then we had known each other for several years. He had moved house more than once since the days when he had lived above Mr. Deacon’s antique shop, emigrating for a time as far north as Camden Town. Still unmarried, his many adventures with women were a perpetual topic between us. In terms of literature, Barnby might have found a place among Stendhal’s heroes, those power-conscious young men, anxious to achieve success with women without the banal expedient of ‘falling in love’: a state, of course, necessarily implying, on the part of the competitor, a depletion, if not entire abrogation, of ‘the will’. Barnby was, on the whole, more successful than his Stendhalian prototypes, and he was certainly often ‘in love’. All the same, he belonged in that group. Like Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, he set store ‘upon what terms’ he possessed a woman, seeking a relationship in which sensuality merged with power, rather than engaging in their habitual conflict.

  Like everyone else, at that moment, Barnby was complaining of ‘the slump’, although his own reputation as a painter had been rising steadily during the previous two or three years. The murals designed by him for the Donners-Brebner Building had received, one way and another, a great deal of public attention; the patronage of Sir Magnus Donners himself in this project having even survived Barnby’s love affair with Baby Wentworth, supposed mistress of Sir Magnus. Indeed, it had been suggested that ‘the Great Industrialist’, as Barnby used to call him, had been glad to make use of that or some other indiscretion, soon after the completion of the murals, as an excuse for bringing to an end his own association with Mrs. Wentworth. There appeared to be no bad feeling between any of the persons concerned in this triangular adjustment. Sir Magnus was now seen about with a jolie laide called Matilda Wilson; although, as formerly in the Baby Went-worth connexion, little or nothing definite was known of this much discussed liaison. Baby herself had married an Italian and was living in Rome.

  ‘You’ll never get that introduction now,’ Barnby said, after listening to my story. ‘St. John Clarke in these days would think poor old Isbister much too pompier.’

  ‘But they are still great friends.’

  ‘What does that matter?’

  ‘Besides, St. John Clarke doesn’t know a Van Dyck from a Van Dongen.’

  ‘Ah, but he does now,’ said Barnby. ‘That’s where you are wrong. You are out of date. St. John Clarke has undergone a conversion.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Modernism.’

  ‘Steel chairs?’

  ‘No doubt they will come.’

  ‘Pictures made of shells and newspaper?’

  ‘At present he is at a slightly earlier stage.’

  I asked for further details.

  ‘The outward and visible sign of St. John Clarke’s conversion,’ said Barnby, portentously, ‘is that he has indeed become a collector of modern pictures—though, as I understand it, he still loves them on this side Surrealism. As a matter of fact he bought a picture of mine last week.’

  ‘This conversion explains his friendly notice of my book.’

  ‘It does.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You yourself supposed that something unusual in the quality of your writing had touched him?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘I fear it is all part of a much larger design.’

  ‘Just as good for me.’

  ‘Doubtless.’

  All the same, I felt slightly less complimented than before. The situation was now clear. The rumours already current about St. John Clarke, less explicit than Barnby’s words, had equally suggested some kind of intellectual upheaval. Isbister’s portraits of politicians, business men and ecclesiastics, executed with emphatic, almost aggressive disregard for any development of painting that could possibly be called ‘modern’, would now certainly no longer appeal to
his old friend. At the same time the ray of St. John Clarke’s approval directed towards myself, until then so phenomenal, was in fact only one minute aspect of the novelist’s new desire to ally himself with forces against which, for many years, he had openly warred.

  ‘That secretary of his even suggested Clarke might commission a portrait.’

  ‘It is Members, of course, who has brought this about.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Barnby. ‘This sort of thing often happens to successful people when they begin to get old. They suddenly realise what dull lives they have always led.’

  ‘But St. John Clarke hasn’t led a dull life. I should have thought he had done almost everything he wanted—with just sufficient heights still to climb to give continued zest to his efforts.’

  ‘I agree in one sense,’ said Barnby. ‘But for a man of his comparative intelligence, St. John Clarke has always limited himself to the dullest of dull ideas—in order to make money, of course, a very reasonable aim, thereby avoiding giving offence to his public. Think of the platitudes of his books. True, I have only read a few pages of one of them, but that was sufficient. And then that professional world of bogus artists and bogus writers which he himself frequents. No wonder he wants to escape from it once in a while, and meet an occasional duchess. Men like him always feel they have missed something. You can leave the arts alone, but it is very dangerous to play tricks with them. After all, you yourself tell me he has agreed to write an introduction to the work of Isbister—and then you ask me why I consider St. John Clarke leads a dull life.’

  ‘But will this new move make his life any better?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He must always have been picture-blind.’

  ‘Some of my best patrons are that. Don’t be so idealistic.’

  ‘But if you are not really interested in pictures, liking a Bonnard doesn’t make you any happier than liking a Bouguereau.’