by Rebecca West
‘Oh, Oppenshaw!’
‘He is our real curse. I often dream of his silly, handsome old face, all curves and whirls of chins and dimples, and soft, soft, soft. It’s like a giant nose done in butter for a Grocers’ Exhibition. Oh, they both did their bit in dragging us down. But it was the fault of all of us. For we all stood by while those two with their passion for fiddling negotiation made the Party take the first step downhill. That was before the war. Let me see, you weren’t in the House then, were you?’
‘No. I got in for Braystoke in 1919. I only came to England from California in 1913.’
‘Ah. Our paths crossed. You went in as I came out. Well, I wish you better luck than I had.’
They raised their glasses to each other. That was a gesture of friendship; and she knew that Essington’s fretful sincerity about even the smallest things in life would not have let him make it had he not meant it. But by throwing the two into the same attitude of bowed head and lifted hand it exhibited them as so different that with a sinking of the heart she feared that they would not remain friends very long; that Francis Pitt might not come to the house very often. Essington sat high in his chair, like some great cat with delicate bones, a puma or a cheetah, with his lean sloping shoulders, and his small poised head, that was broad across the square brow and narrowed suddenly below the wide cheekbones to the little, fine, snapping jaw, over which the silver moustache stuck out like feelers. His eyes were like a cat’s, limpid as water, but secretively set; and he had that feline look of having been moulded out of a plastic substance by long, sweeping fingers. He would have been beautiful to look at had he not been disfigured by the expression that the world thought to be sourness, but that she knew to be tortured sweetness. His face was tragic with qualities which life had infected with their opposites: kindliness that because of the million objections which had been raised to his plans for being kind was now chiefly impatience; sensitiveness that because of the wounds inflicted on it had become brutally insensitive in its own defence. She cried out to herself, obstinately, ‘I will go on loving him, I will go on loving him.’
But Francis Pitt was a being of a different kind; it seemed, of a different time. With his ape’s mouth, his over-large head, and his over-broad shoulders he had an air of having been created before the human structure had added to itself such refinements as beauty and shapeliness. Yet he had as much of a body as a man needs. He looked enormously strong, and as if he could go through anything. Captain Scott. Gold prospectors. Seekers for the source of tropical rivers. She saw them all, on the snow, on the lye-frosted sand, in the green oven of the forest, with his troglodyte body, his unperishable face that also, like his body, rejected certain human novelties. There was there no such tangle of transmuted sweetness and kindliness and sensitiveness as there was in Essington. He seemed to have been created before the human soul had split itself up into these subdivisions. The only modern thing in his face, the only thing which would have been surprising in the death’s-head of a mummy found crouching in a grave dug in a place now desert but not so a million years ago, was a certain whimsicality, a certain puckishness, which spoke of an intention to break up life whenever it seemed to be settling down into a form that encouraged these recent psychological inventions. Yet he had surely as much of a nature as a man needs. She tried to put into words what she guessed about it, but since it was his essential quality that he belonged to an age when words were not yet important she could not do it, and simply saw images. He made her think of an iron spade with clods of earth still clinging to it. Suddenly a gust of pleasure at his presence passed over her, and it seemed to her as if she were in a high place, where the air was very clear. Woods ran down to a lake, the green fire of young leaves crackling among the treetops; the milder mirrored woods ran out into the lake, the leaves’ fire quenched to a paste of green jewels. She stood among rocks by the water. Something like the fire of the leaves crackled all round her; and within her the mirrored woods were troubled, they were fluted into ribs of thick glass. There was coming a canoe that was driven forward to her, to the fire that crackled round her and in her, by a man with strong arms, with broad shoulders, who cried to her across the water, a round-mouthed cry without words; who was this man.
It was silly to have daydreams when one was grown-up. Under the table she rubbed her hands, which felt as if they were charged with electricity.
‘Better luck!’ repeated Essington, as he set down his glass.
‘And what better luck can you have than to be a great man?’ asked Francis Pitt.
She looked at Essington with real interest as to what his answer would be. But he made none, though he acknowledged the implied compliment with a little ironic bow. She turned towards Francis Pitt, hoping he would press his question; but he was thinking of nothing but the turtle savoury he was eating, and it was apparent that he had never expected an answer. She supposed it was typical of her stupidity that she had not seen that it was just one of those questions that men ask for the sake of asking, in political speeches and in newspaper articles: like ‘Shall we let Germany?’, as it used to be, or as it was now, ‘Shall we let France?’ But suddenly she rebelled against that customary way of looking at it. It was they who were stupid not to see that the question did need an answer. Most people thought it was good luck to be great. But here was Essington, who was great, and it had been no luck for him. He was miserable. It was of no value to him that the dinner was really very good. It was of no value to him that she had made the room so pretty with its apple-green walls and its black lacquer furniture faintly inscribed with golden beauty. The loveliest thing in it, the dark bush starred with white flowers that stood on the settle behind the windows, he never looked at, though he knew all about it, and when she had brought it home, having bought it because she thought it lovely, he had been able to tell her exactly when it had been made and in what part of China. And it was of no value to him that she was sitting there ready to be nice to him. He knew what she was, how much she loved him, but it did not seem to matter. He looked peevishly past all these offers of satisfaction to a future that was to be reformed half for its own sake and half as an insult to the hated present. That was the fault of his greatness; it was because he had to roll in such fierce grips with his times in his effort to dominate them that he loathed them. It was the fault of his greatness too that he minded it all so much. He could not take anything easily because the knowledge of his power and his responsibility pulled his head stiff and high like an invisible bearing-rein. It had been no luck at all for him. Look at the querulous beauty of his long fingers, for ever restless, now kneading the stem of his wineglass, as if he hoped to change its shape, which could not be done! There must be better luck than his. What was it then that a man ought to try to be? She turned to Francis Pitt, who, she thought, might know. But again his eyes slid away from hers. She looked across the table at Miss Pitt, wondering whether she had come by observation of her male to any understanding of what men were up to; but Miss Pitt’s eyes were on her brother’s empty plate, and she took advantage of the silence of the two men to ask, with such nervous hurry as might be shown by somebody who had been allowed by the police to cross a street just before a royal procession came along, what the name of this exceedingly nice savoury might be.
‘No,’ Essington began again, ‘the rot began before the war. With our weakness in dealing with the Ulster Rebels. We made it plain that we thought of expediency before principle. That was Oppenshaw, of course. But we should have stood up to him. It meant so much. I myself believe that Germany would never have started the war at the time she did if she hadn’t been encouraged to think that we were in a state of anarchy by the Ulster business. And it would have cost us so little to keep order. We need not have shot one of the leaders. We need only have told them we would shoot them.’
‘Now, is that true?’ asked Francis Pitt, slowly. ‘I thought that whatever we might say of them they were at least men of courage. What about Canterton? Wasn’t he very
resolute on the matter?’
‘That drunken lout! If anybody ever knocked the cigar out of his mouth he’d fall to pieces. Nobody has ever tried it, because he fulfils a certain deep human need. Every man wants to believe that it is possible for some human being, even if it isn’t himself, to drink eight bottles of champagne a day and suffer no ill effects. Canterton’s magnificent physique makes him look as if he could. It isn’t till you get to know him that you realise that you see that drink has changed his soul to a stench of vulgarity. Oh, he’d have run all right.’
‘But Barstow, now? He surely …’
‘No. A coward. He hates the Catholic Irish because way back in the eighties he had to go round Ireland prosecuting for the Crown in the Crimes Act Special Courts, and they frightened him sick. He’s never forgiven them for that. He’s been a brave man because he’s gone on in spite of his funk. But one can be a coward and a brave man at the same time, and he was so much of a coward that he couldn’t have faced hanging for treason. Dodging assassination is different. It is exciting; you can do it on your nerves. But a cell and the drop—that can’t be done on the nerves. He would never have seen it through. Look at the way that long after the whole business was settled he had to have corps of detectives to guard his house down in Sussex. Absurd. Preposterous.’
‘Is it true,’ asked Francis Pitt, ‘that you were the man in the Cabinet who refused all protection of any sort?’
Sunflower, forgetting she was in disgrace, cried out, ‘Yes! He never had one detective and Bryce Atkin always had five!’
Francis Pitt laughed outright; and Essington looked at her with his head on one side like a cat that is not sure whether to smack a beloved kitten.
‘Well, I’ve had my question answered,’ said Francis Pitt, smiling at her. ‘I don’t doubt the truth of what I’ve heard. It came, by the way, from Hurrell.’
‘From Hurrell?’ Essington jerked back his head as if he were a nervous high-bred animal and someone had held food under his nose which he wanted to see before he swallowed it. The name recalled to her one of those quarrels of his, when secretaries stood outside his door, saying to each other, ‘Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t post it till the morning. Hold it back somehow. You can’t send out a thing like that. He’ll probably feel better in the morning, you know …’ He went on, ‘I wouldn’t have thought you were likely to hear much good of me from that quarter.’
‘There you’re very much mistaken,’ said Francis Pitt, shaking his great head impressively. ‘He has a tremendous admiration for you, a tremendous admiration.’
‘He hadn’t at one time.’
‘Ah, but that’s a long time ago, and many things have changed since then. I think you’d find yourself seeing pretty well eye-to-eye with him now.’
‘Mm …’
‘No, I mean this. Often and often he has said to me that you were the one man who could have saved the Liberal Party. He ranks you far higher than himself.’
‘So he might,’ said Essington; and they all laughed.
‘You don’t think much of Hurrell?’ asked Francis Pitt, meditatively. ‘Ah, he’s a fine man. I met him a week after I landed from America in 1913 in search of my real career, and he’s been my best friend ever since. I know him through and through, and I don’t think there ever was a much finer man.’
She saw the little man in California, riding a horse on warm white dust, drawing rein, and looking over his shoulder. It was like this large little man that what had caught his eye was nothing less than another continent. She saw him dismount; and later get into a tall American train, as she had seen people doing on the movies. In the blacks and greys of photography she saw him sitting reading a newspaper; she saw the negro porter bending over him; she saw him looking at the women; she saw him eating in the restaurant car; she saw him going down the steep steps and taking a stroll in the clean open air. She saw him doing these things all across the continent; and the effect was like the clenching of a fist. She saw him on shipboard, swathed up to his ugly face on a deck-chair, watching the taut line where sea and sky dip up and down behind the swaying rails; the fist was clenched to hit. She saw him in England, in some open but urban place, its dingy background stained by those dingy and splendid towers of St Stephen’s, which are as if London’s dreams had wished her fog into shapes of magnificent governances, which have so strange an effect on Englishmen. She saw him walking up to Hurrell, whom she remembered having met, a stooping dull-eyed man on whom intellectuality seemed to be acting like some form of pulmonary weakness; one could imagine his nights much troubled by short dry thoughts. In front of him Francis Pitt came to a halt, as once he had come to a halt in front of her. But he did not hurry away from this man as he had hurried away from her. The fist unclenched, it became a hand held out, held up, like a child’s.
It was queer that speaking so baldly he made one think of all these things. It was because his voice was full of character, though his words had none. In this also he was the opposite of Essington, whose voice was without character. Because of his rage at not having been at Balliol he spoke exactly like all men who have been at Balliol; though if he had been at Balliol he would without doubt have disgustedly schooled himself to speak as if he had never seen Oxford. Except for that accent his speech was nearly without attributes. It was silver-bright and unsigned, like a scalpel, a mental instrument as that is a surgical instrument; kept in the locked cabinet of silence when it was not required for real work, never treated as a toy. That was so hard on him, for when he was tired in the garrulous way, and felt the need of just letting his tongue run on and on, as everybody does sometimes, he was ashamed of it, and insisted on thinking, so that his words would be justified by their meaning. His poor head, his poor head. But of course it was obviously more sensible to put one’s meaning into as many words as it needed and say them clearly than to let it blow, pungent but vague like a breath of spice, on a booming wind of deep-voiced sentences. This too made her feel that Essington represented a more recent, more edited kind of man than the other. The difference between them seemed to her to be in itself a thrilling drama. She suddenly felt very gay, and began to drink her wine.
Essington said acidly: ‘Hurrell wasn’t with me at Versailles, you know.’
‘No. I know he wasn’t. He saw the whole business very differently from the way you did. He thought that to get out when you did was to be a quitter. He had an idea that he could do better if he stayed inside and tried to mould things nearer to what you and he both hoped for. You see, compromise is a very strange thing in Hurrell. Remember he was brought up in a Jesuit school. That leaves a mark on a man. It’s left a very deep mark on Hurrell. With him it’s always compromise, compromise, compromise. That’s made him a good thing in my life. I’m too forthright. I go for what I want, and I must have all I want. Hurrell has taught me to water that down, to take what I can get. But, mind you, he carries the thing too far with himself. I admire him more than any other living man, but I see all his faults, and I know that’s the chief of them. But he knows it too. And particularly he knows that he was wrong and you were right about Versailles. He feels very strongly that he should have come out with you. He knows he did no good by staying in with Bryce Atkin. And he owns it publicly now. He was saying so last Sunday when we were all down at Tenby’s for the weekend. Tenby was greatly impressed.’
‘Mm …’
‘Ah, you don’t believe me. But I tell you Hurrell is with you on this. I should say he’d be willing to be with you on many other points than this.’
‘He’s never made a sign,’ said Essington.
‘That’s Hurrell’s way. He’s a terribly proud man. I know him through and through. A lot goes on inside that quiet man you’d never suspect. He’s so proud that it’s an agony to him to have to climb down. But I think he would do if he met you. I’m sure he would. Indeed I know he would. Now, would you meet him and see if I’m not right? Would you and Miss Fassendyll come over to my house one night this week and dine
with Etta and me and Hurrell? Just us five?’
It was as if he had produced a white rabbit from his sleeve. His talk was retrospectively recognisable as conjurer’s patter.
‘Well …’ said Essington. He made a little purring sound of embarrassment; and wagged his forefinger at Pitt. ‘Vamp!’ he said solemnly. ‘Vamp!’ And he put back his head and laughed silently behind his silver feelers.
Francis Pitt chuckled without real merriment. It was plain that he could not make out whether Essington was really amused or was hiding behind laughter a harsh annoyance that he should have been forced to say whether or not he wanted to meet Hurrell. Essington did not help him. He raised his glass to his lips and drank his port between gusts of silent laughter. Pitt shot a look of hostility at his sister, as if she were somehow to blame for all this; and turned to Sunflower, saying with heavy courtesy, ‘Well, what does Miss Fassendyll say? Won’t you persuade Lord Essington?’
She was confused by him. The courtesy in his voice was so very heavy. It was as if he stood on the steps of a throne, and she were kneeling to him, and he bent down to do her honour, and cast about her a rich cloak, too rich a cloak, so rich that its weight crushed her. But in the centre of his hard grey gaze there was something that was as if he had not bent down at all, as if he had no intention of doing her honour; as if he were standing level with her, and meant her to take whatever he gave her. She turned aside and looked at Essington, as years before, when she had first sat at meals with Essington, she used to turn aside and look at the thought of Chiswick: the streets; the people; her mother’s house; her sisters and brothers; the comparatively simple and unpatterned life she had left behind her. But immediately she forgot Francis Pitt, for she saw what was the matter with Essington. He had put down his glass, and now that he felt himself free from the other man’s attention he looked like a child who has heard that if he likes he will be given a certain treat, who longs for that treat more than anything else in the world, but who is prevented by some infantile point of dignity from showing that he longs for it. Of course, he wanted to make it up with Hurrell. It was always like this a year or two after his quarrels, if they were with anybody whom he had known for a long time. If they were with people whom he had met during the last few years, since this curious lack of interest in personality had come upon him, of course he parted with them with no emotion save relief at having eliminated one of those innumerable human annoyances that seemed to his mad nerves to be crowding in and in on his tired middle-age. But about old friends he felt just as if he were an ordinary person. You would not have thought so at the time, for these quarrels were not just a mere matter of having a few words. There was always one of his ideas behind them, and that meant that he went about blue-white like one of the revival preachers that used to come to Chapel now and again, and whipped himself to go on with the thing long after he would naturally have lost interest in it. There wasn’t any bright side to them at all, for he got none of the relief that Father used to get by swearing about the place, since he held himself taut all the time lest he should say anything unfair. He seemed to dread being unfair as other people dreaded being sent to prison: for him there wasn’t anything worse. But deep down he minded his quarrels in the ordinary way as well. She would see signs of that first some months after it was all over, when a name came up in conversation and Essington pursed his mouth behind his silver feelers and said, with a bruise on his voice, ‘Woodruff? Oh, we don’t see anything of each other now; not since the Amritsar business’; as, tonight, he had said, ‘Hurrell? I wouldn’t have thought you were likely to learn much good of me from that quarter.’ And then with luck, a year or two later, there would happen a night when she came back from the theatre and found him sitting in his armchair by the fire in the little library, that was so pretty with the birds-of-paradise chintz, drinking his weak whisky-and-water and looking chubby. ‘Well, how did it go tonight? That’s good. You’re getting on, you know. This is a long way the best thing you’ve ever done. There’s quite a quality about your acting now. But what a pretty thing you are! The best part of your prettiness never shows in the theatre. In a little room like this you’re astounding. Come here and let me kiss your silly old neck. Well. I’ve had a good evening too. A dinner at the Jacobsons’. Ooh! Such a rich house. Lots of footmen nine feet tall. And I think there was a pearl in my soup. Very good talk, though. And who do you think was there? Old Woodruff. I haven’t seen him since the Amritsar business. He was very friendly. He asked after you. We are the most official pair of sinners that ever were. I’m dining with him on Thursday, just ourselves. Hm. What about going to bed?’ He wanted it to be like that with Hurrell, whom she remembered now he had known not very well, but for a long time. He had told her once that they had sat together for the same examination at some very early stage in their careers, and had gone off in company at the lunch-hour and eaten bread and cheese in a public house, united by the link, which was not alluded to then and never had been since, that they were both wearing suits of clothes which they had outgrown to a ridiculous degree. It occurred to her that this must have happened years before she was born. This somehow brought tears to her eyes. It was as if she saw him sitting alone among long shadows.
