Thirteen Such Years

by Alec Waugh

  It was a position in which many found themselves in the nineteen-twenties. The Neo-Georgian faced with a post-war world set himself the Socratic question and found no answer. He was weary of panaceas, of the millennium, of facile political enthusiasms. He doubted whether that society could be constructed that would not contain the fallibility of the persons who contructed it. He had no illusions about himself. He saw all forms of social life as arrangements of temporary convenience, and was able consequently to regard the maintenance and safeguarding of those conveniences as a labour of relative importance. Either way he was inclined to think it does not matter very greatly. The structure of life was as impermanent as the hands that built it. He could view without dismay the crumbling of the fabric. He wondered, with the picture of Russia and central Europe before his eyes, whether a certain cycle of civilization is not about to close.

  §

  Through immediate post-war literature the idea is repeatedly developed. In The People of the Ruins Mr. Edward Shanks drew a picture of the England that may be after the revolution, with the machinery of modern life destroyed, and sheep grazing among the ruins. Cicely Hamilton told in Theodore Savage the story of a similar collapse in wartime when terror fell from the skies, and within a few months England became a collection of small tribes living separately and brutishly, tilling the soil and building hutments; small tribes who retained only as a vague legend the memory of a world that has passed for ever; tribes for whom that world is only a living force in the persisting dread of science, in their eyes “devil’s knowledge” which the wreck of that world has handed down to them. In R.U.R. there was the same presentiment of ruin, the foreboding that after a certain point life returns to primitive forms and customs; an identical note was struck in J. D. C. Pellew’s After London.

  London Bridge is broken down;

  Green is the grass on Ludgate Hill,

  I know a farmer in Camden Town

  Killed a buck by Pentonville.

  I have heard my grandam tell

  How some thousand years ago,

  Houses stretched from Camberwell

  Right to Highbury and Bow.

  Down by Shadwell’s golden meads,

  Tall ships’ masts would stand as thick

  As the pretty tufted reeds

  That the Wapping children pick…

  To the Neo-Georgian such a prospect was the subject of intellectual curiosity, of detached conjecture. “These things may very well be,” he seemed to say, “but that is none of my business.”

  In the work of Aldous Huxley, the best equipped and the most articulate writer of his hour, there was at this time to be detected nowhere the note of approval or condemnation that has come later to it. He presented his troop of characters with the whimsical deference of the showman or The Blue Bird company, watching from the wings with a smile of detached amusement their fantastic humours. His investigations and his discoveries appeared to leave him with no disturbing speculations as to whether “all this was right or not.” He appeared untouched by the feeling so tantalizing to his grandfather “something ought to be done about it.”

  Modern life to the immediately post-war writer was a spectacle; a harrowing, a diverting, a depressing spectacle as you might choose to look at it, but a spectacle, nothing more; the material out of which his books were made.

  In Antic Hay Myra Viveash described her generation as living in a vacuum. For a great many of her contemporaries life was that. It was varied, and entertaining: a swift kaleidoscope of novelties. But it was undirected. Restlessness was in the air.

  Chapter VI

  It was this feeling of restlessness as much as anything that prompted me to buy in the early summer of 1926 a Messageries Maritime world tour steamship ticket.

  It began with a Mediterranean tour in the Lamarline. We stopped at Naples, Athens, Constantinople, Rhodes on our way to the Levant and Egypt. It was a pleasant trip. The sun shone. The sea was calm. The passenger list changed at every port, and for me there was the exciting knowledge that this ship was the prelude to other ships; to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean; the attap huts of Malaya, the palm-fringed atolls of Polynesia.

  The first days of the trip were made increasingly pleasant for me by the companionship of a man whom I had known slightly for several years, but with whom I had never approached terms of intimacy. He was a man I was curious to get to know. He was a painter, in the middle forties, tall, dark-haired, bearded. He was successful, both with his portraits and his landscapes. He was a fashionable painter, but his fellow artists respected him. His photograph appeared frequently in the illustrated weeklies. He was paragraphed in the gossip columns. He was extremely talkative. It was not only his extreme good looks that made one immediately conscious of his presence in a room. Three-quarters of his life was staged in public. He can rarely have been alone. Yet at the same time he looked lonely. One felt that his real life was lived behind a mask. When he told me that he was going to Palestine to paint a series of biblical studies I persuaded him to come by the same boat, less for the reasons of companionship I urged than out of curiosity to see if in another setting he would lift the mask.

  At first nothing seemed less likely. He behaved on the ship in precisely the same way that he did in London. There were crowds round him all the time: whether he was on deck playing shuffleboard, or in the bar standing a round of “bocks.” He visited Naples, Athens and Constantinople as a tourist, in a charabanc. It was not till practically the last day, at Smyrna, that I saw him by himself; and only then because I was the one person who cared to go ashore at that dusty, war sacked port.

  Before we had spent five minutes on land we felt that the apathy of the other passengers had been justified. There was nothing to be seen but ruins. And of those we had seen plenty in the war.

  “We’d better have a cup of coffee and then go back,” he said. Even a café took some while to find. At last we found one. It was a typical Oriental scene. A little shadowed square with cafés at either end of it, cooled in the centre by an octagonal dome-shaped fountain. There were carpets for sale, along one side of it. Carpets and beads and necklaces, a bright, many-coloured splash of ornament under the guardianship of an old man in a white cloth cricket cap. On silent shambling feet, the suave, dark-skinned bootboys with their matted stools and gleaming brass-bound caskets of polishes and pads trotted from group to group. In placid and detached indifference to the needs of livelihood a quintet of Syrians puffed at the immense amber mouthpieces of their narghiles, so languidly that, but for the bubbling of the water in the large glass bowls, you would not have known that they were smoking. From time to time a waiter moved among them to lay fresh charcoal on the whitened ashes of a pipe. Behind us and beyond were the heat and dust and hurry of a seaport town, but here in this tranquil corner of the slow-altering East was an unruffled stillness. And above it all there were green leaves to pattern the cobbled road with sunlight.

  And there were beggars.

  An old woman draped in black, whose long nose projecting white against the veil gave to her half-seen features a gruesomely sinister appearance. A shuffling blind man with his hand on the shoulder of a boy that pleaded for him. A little bare-foot girl who stood quietly beside us with crinkled outstretched fingers.

  Alone of them she spoke no word. But her eyes, large and brown and luminous, were more eloquent than any words could have been. It was impossible to believe that their expression of hopeless misery was no more than a carefully-weighed device.

  “One knows quite well,” I said, “that every day of her life she walks in just this way from square to square, past café after café. One knows beyond questioning from what manner of home she comes. She is the parasite that is born of parasites. And yet when those large brown eyes meet yours you forget all that. You cannot believe that behind that look so candid and so appealing there is nothing but a calculated capacity to exploit men’s pity. You feel that in this day alone, at the climax of unimagined suffering, at heaven knows what s
acrifice of pride, she has taken this last avenue of relief.”

  The little crinkled fingers closed over the piastres that we slipped into them, and the luminous brown eyes grew wider and more sorrowful, misted momentarily by a film of tenderness. But her lips did not move either to smile or speak as she turned away from us to stand eloquent and silent beside another table. “You cannot believe,” I said, “that it is not sincere.”

  On the rickety carpet-covered bench the companion at my side stirred impatiently. His black eyes were flashing strangely and the long, slim, hard-fibred fingers that seemed ever restless when paint-brush or palette-knife was not between them, plucked at the thick stubble of his beard.

  “And later on,” he said—and his voice, for all that his features were harshly swarthy, for all that his expression was grated now with irritation, was curiously musical and rich—“and later on, in six or seven or a dozen years, can’t you see her in just that way looking up at some man or other out of those dolorous, pathetic eyes, and can’t you see him, poor devil, trusting blindly in that look of candour, assuring himself that once and this once only has she come thus helplessly, and to him, only because she feels that he has that of generosity and sympathy in his nature that will make possible for him an understanding of her, an understanding of her coming? And in the same way that we have given this girl piastres, he will give her whatever it may be she asks: frocks or jewels or a name; give them for her to shut away in that little crinkled hand.”

  He spoke slowly, drowsily, so that his words fell like a veil between me and the little square, shutting out the cafés and the bootboys, and the beadsellers; a veil through which I saw mistily, as through shaken water, an oval of black ebony set about with tables, through which I could hear above the chattering and the laughter the metallic rhythm of the saxophone beckoning to that dark pool the silver, gold-shod feet. And as I sat there listening, I wondered whether if such a scene as this, the cafés and the bootboys and the crinkled fingers, were to be a familiar spectacle in that other world from which we were seeking, both of us, temporary escape, that other life would be quite so smooth and facile, whether by virtue of example those little begging hands might not stand a cautionary witness against too ready a faith in the pathos of pleading looks.

  Slowly, drowsily, his words fell upon the heated air, and when he began to speak again, the expression of his voice had softened and in his eyes there was a vague unseeing look, as though they were gazing upon another place, upon another time.

  §

  “In six or seven or a dozen years. Ah, but how clearly I can see her. Her hair is light, so light that it is less golden than flaxen coloured, and about her ears beneath the white brim of a leather cap it bunches like clustered flowers. Her eyes too are light; a pale cornflower blue, and over them when she speaks her eyelids flicker. And there is an expression of hopeless pleading in them as she stands in the large sunlit studio, looking up at the man who has left his easel to welcome in perplexed pleasure her unexpected visit.

  “‘I ought not to have come,’ she says, and her fingers as she speaks flutter timidly on the squat tortoiseshell handle of her umbrella, ‘but I was in such trouble. And I am so alone, and you are the only friend of Tony that I know. Not that I can really say that I know you. It’s only a couple of times, isn’t it, that we’ve met? But in your case…’ and it is very charmingly that she hesitates, ‘with an artist, you see… I know your work so well, I’ve admired it so long. I feel that though I don’t really know you, I do know you. I felt certain you’ld understand.’

  “He smiles. It is the subtlest of all forms of flattery.

  “‘Won’t you sit down,’ he says, ‘and tell me all about it?’

  “It is an involved story, and she tells it with many hesitations, many repetitions, many attempted unravellings of cause and motive. But finally the issue is laid clear. Tony Jerram has for the last two months allowed her to use at a nominal figure a flat that has been sub-let to him for a year. The quarter’s rent is now due and Jerram announces that he can no longer afford to keep on the flat in which he is at present living and meet the difference between the rent he is paying for the other flat and the nominal sum that he receives in settlement for it from her. If she chose to pay the actual rent, well and good. If not he would have to take over the flat himself. The situation in fact boiled down to this: if Daisy Querrel was unprepared to pay the rent, she could only remain in the flat by agreeing to share it with Tony Jerram. A man of the world’s ultimatum.

  “‘And you can’t pay the rent?’

  “There is a look in her eyes of distracted helplessness.

  “‘Not now,’ she says. ‘In two months probably I could. In three months certainly. Some dividends will have fallen due. But just now it is utterly impossible. And I have no one to help me. I am quite alone.’

  “‘Your husband?’

  “She shrugs her shoulders.

  “‘I would rather die than go back to him. He was a beast to me, a beast. And he sits there waiting now, quite certain that sooner or later I shall be forced back, that life will be too strong for me, that I shall be beaten; but I won’t, I won’t, whatever happens I won’t go back. And I’m so alone now. My aunt who lives with me is old and doesn’t understand things. I have no brothers. There is only myself and my little boy.’

  “The painter, whom we will call, for it is better that people should have names, John Murgatroyd, starts at that. He had never associated her with an experience as profound as motherhood. She so young, so girlish-looking. Not that he had ever thought about her much. She is one of those women whom one sees often enough at places like Hurlingham and Ciro’s, in theatres and restaurants and dance clubs, but who have no real standing, no background of family and position, whom one meets seldom in private houses and seldom if ever hears discussed.

  “‘So I’ve come to you,’ she says, ‘you are Tony’s friend. You are the one person who I thought would understand. Please, please, say you’ll help me.’

  “They are wide and luminous and pleading, those lovely cornflower blue eyes. Her lips are parted, and the palms of her hands lie with the fingers a little crinkled, as they rest face upwards on the couch beside her.

  “‘What is there, though, that I can do?’

  “He is a man who has claimed, not recklessly, to have no existence outside his work. ‘I never quarrel, I never argue, I never discuss,’ he had once boasted. ‘I have not the time. I work.’ He had held himself to be armoured against the strain of human contacts. But with the light of those cornflower blue eyes upon him, he feels strangely weak, strangely unweaponed and irresolute.

  “‘I don’t see,’ he says, ‘that I can help you.’

  “‘Oh, but you can,’ she answers eagerly. ‘Tony is a friend of yours. He’d listen to what you said. Couldn’t you persuade him that there’s no need for the rent to be paid in advance. It’s paid, after all, to the proprietors in arrears. And the owners are friends of his. It ought to be able to be arranged. Couldn’t you, please, couldn’t you persuade him?’

  “For a moment he hesitates. It is the sort of thing against which he has resolutely set himself. He has work to do, and he cannot allow other people’s troubles to dissipate his store of nervous energy. But the look in the pale blue eyes is difficult to resist.

  “‘Very well,’ he says after a pause, ‘I’ll do my best.’

  “It was by no means an easy interview with Tony Jerram. He had never imagined that it would be. She had called them friends; but they were friends only in so far as they belonged to the same world, being members of the same club and sharing a certain number of acquaintances. Never once had they gone out of their way to meet each other, so that they were both more than a little constrained by an atmosphere of strangeness as they sat, at the outcome of an exchange of post-cards, sipping a dry sherry in the lounge bar of the R.A.C.

  “‘So the artist,’ said Jerram, in a heavyish attempt to appear at ease, ‘has turned financier, and has so
ught the advice of the humble merchant.’

  “Murgatroyd laughed.

  “‘Not so exciting as that, I’m afraid. I simply wanted to ask you something about Mrs. Querrel.’

  “The geniality on Jerram’s face was instantly extinguished.

  “‘What’s Mrs. Querrel to you?’ he asked.

  “‘Nothing.’

  “‘In that case I suggest that we don’t discuss her.’

  “‘Since, however, I have promised her I would…’

  “Their voices are frigidly restrained, but in a less controlled society they would have been on the brink of blows.

  “There is a moment’s pause.

  “‘Well?’ snapped Jerram.

  “‘She came to me,’ it was replied quietly, ‘knowing that I was your friend, to ask whether I could not persuade you to accept some other engagement as regards her rent.’

  “Jerram shook his head. ‘She had my last word. That’s all there is to it.’

  “‘Would it not though,’ Murgatroyd persisted, ‘be possible to arrange, since the owners of the flat are friends, that the rent should be paid to them in arrears?’

  “‘Probably, if I were to ask.’

  “‘Then…?’

  “‘But I shall not ask.’

  “‘Why not?’

  “‘I do not choose to.’

  “There are few things harder than to conduct an argument with a man who will not argue, who makes no attempt to justify his actions or opinions, asking no more than that they may be set on record. It was a method of attack to which Murgatroyd had often enough resorted, and it nettled him that it should be used against himself.