After the Fireworks (24 page)

Outwardly, however, there was no change. The two worlds were parallel; they did not meet. They did not meet, even when Rodney came to dine
en famille
, even when John accompanied his wife to one of Rodney's less aggressively ‘artistic' (which in inverted commas means very much the same as ‘modern') evening parties. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that Rodney's world met John's, but John's did not meet Rodney's. Only if Rodney had been a Zulu and his friends Chinese would John have noticed that they were at all different from the people he was used to meeting. The merely spiritual differences which distinguished them were too small for his notice. He moved through life surrounded by his own atmosphere; only the most glaring lights could penetrate that half opaque and intensely refractive medium. For John, Rodney and his friends were just people, like everybody else; people who could be button-holed and talked to about the Swiss banking system and Einstein's theory, and the rationing of sugar. Sometimes, it was true, they seemed to him rather frivolous; their manners, sometimes, struck him as rather unduly brusque; and John had even remarked that they were sometimes rather coarse-spoken in the presence of ladies—or, if they happened to be ladies themselves, in the presence of gentlemen.

‘Curious, these young people,' he said to me, after an evening at Rodney's studio. ‘Curious.' He shook his head. ‘I don't know that I quite understand them.'

Through a rift in his atmosphere he had caught a glimpse of the alien world beyond; he had seen something, not refracted, but as it really was. But John was quite incurious; careless of its significance, he shut out the unfamiliar vision.

‘I don't know what your opinion about modern art
may be,' he went on, disappointing me of his comments on modern people. ‘But what I always say is this.'

And he said it, copiously.

Modern art became another gramophone record added to his repertory. That was the net result of his meeting with Rodney and Rodney's friends.

For the next few months I saw very little either of Grace or of Rodney. I had met Catherine, and was too busy falling in love to do or think of anything else. We were married towards the close of 1921, and life became for me, gradually, once more normal.

From the first Catherine and Grace were friends. Grace admired Catherine for her coolness, her quiet efficiency, her reliableness; admired and liked her. Catherine's affection for Grace was protective and elder-sisterly; and at the same time, she found Grace slightly comic. Affections are not impaired by being tempered with a touch of benevolent laughter. Indeed, I would almost be prepared to risk a generalization and say that all true affections are tempered with laughter. For affection implies intimacy; and one cannot be intimate with another human being without discovering something to laugh at in his or her character. Almost all the truly virtuous characters in fiction are also slightly ridiculous; perhaps that is because their creators were so fond of them. Catherine saw the joke—the rather pathetic joke—of Grace. But she liked her none the less; perhaps, even, the more. For the joke was appealing; it was a certain childishness that raised the laugh.

At the time of my marriage, Grace was acting the eternally feminine part more fervently than ever. She had begun to dress very smartly and rather eccentrically, and was gen
erally unpunctual; not very unpunctual (she was by nature too courteous for that), but just enough to be able to say that she was horribly late, but that she couldn't help it; it was in her nature—her woman's nature. She blamed Catherine for dressing too sensibly.

‘You must be gayer in your clothes,' she insisted, ‘more fantastic and capricious. It'll make you
feel
more fantastic. You think too masculinely.'

And to encourage her in thinking femininely, she gave her six pairs of white kid gloves, marvellously piped with coloured leather and with fringed and intricately scalloped gauntlets. But perhaps the most feminine and fantastic thing about them was the fact that they were several sizes too small for Catherine's hand.

Grace had become a good deal more loquacious of late and her style of conversation had changed. Like her clothes, it was more fantastic than in the past. The principle on which she made conversation was simple: she said whatever came into her head. And into that vague, irresponsible head of hers the oddest things would come. A phantasmagoria of images, changing with every fresh impression or as the words of her interlocutor called up new associations, was for ever dancing across her field of mental vision. She put into words whatever she happened to see at any given moment. For instance, I might mention the musician Palestrina.

‘Yes, yes,' Grace would say, ‘what a marvellous composer!' Then, reacting to the Italian reference, she would add in the same breath: ‘And the way they positively
drink
the macaroni. Like those labels that come out of the mouth of caricatures. You know.'

Sometimes I did know. I skipped over the enormous
ellipses in this allusive thinking and caught the reference. Sometimes, when the association of her ideas was too exclusively private, I was left uncomprehending. The new technique was rather disconcerting, but it was always amusing, in a way. The unexpectedness of her remarks, the very nonsensicality of them, surprised one into finding them witty.

As a child, Grace had been snubbed when she talked in this random, fantastic fashion. ‘Talk sense,' her governesses had said severely, when she told them during the geography lesson that she didn't like South America because it looked like a boiled leg of mutton. ‘Don't be silly.' Grace was taught to be ashamed of her erratic fancy. She tried to talk sense—sense as governesses understand it—found it very difficult, and relapsed into silence. Peddley was even more sensible, in the same style, than the governesses themselves; devastatingly sensible. He was incapable of understanding fancy. If Grace had ever told Peddley why she didn't like South America, he would have been puzzled, he would have asked her to explain herself. And learning that it was the mutton-like shape of the continent on the map that prejudiced Grace against it, he would have given her statistics of South America's real dimensions, would have pointed out that it extended from the tropics almost into the antarctic circle, that it contained the largest river and some of the highest mountains in the world, that Brazil produced coffee and the Argentine beef, and that consequently, in actual fact, it was not in the very least like a boiled leg of mutton. With Peddley, Grace's only resources were laboriously talked sense or complete silence.

In Rodney's circle, however, she found that her gift of nonsense was appreciated and applauded. An enthusiast for the ‘fantastic' and the ‘feminine,' Rodney encouraged her to
talk at random, as the spirit of associative fancy might move her. Diffidently at first, Grace let herself go; her conversation achieved an immediate success. Her unstitched, fragmentary utterances were regarded as the last word in modern wit. People repeated her
bons mots.
A little bewildered by what had happened, Grace suddenly found herself in the movement, marching at the very head of the forces of contemporaneity. In the eighteenth century, when logic and science were the fashion, women tried to talk like the men. The twentieth century has reversed the process. Rodney did Grace the honour of appropriating to himself the happiest of her extravagances.

Success made Grace self-confident; and confident, she went forward triumphantly to further successes. It was a new and intoxicating experience for her. She lived in a state of chronic spiritual tipsiness.

‘How stupid people are not to be happy!' she would say, whenever we discussed these eternal themes.

To Catherine, who had taken my place as a confidant—my place and a much more intimate, more confidential place as well—she talked about love and Rodney.

‘I can't think why people manage to make themselves unhappy about love,' she said. ‘Why can't everybody love gaily and freely, like us? Other people's love seems to be all black and clotted, like Devonshire cream made of ink. Ours is like champagne. That's what love ought to be like: champagne. Don't you think so?'

‘I think I should prefer it to be like clear water,' said Catherine. To me, later on, she expressed her doubts. ‘All this champagne and gaiety,' she said; ‘one can see that Rodney is a young man with a most wholesome fear of emotional entanglements.'

‘We all knew that,' I said. ‘You didn't imagine, I suppose, that he was in love with her?'

‘I hoped,' said Catherine.

‘Because you didn't know Rodney. Now you do. Champagne—you have the formula. The problem is Grace.'

Was she really in love with him? Catherine and I discussed the question. I was of opinion that she was.

‘When Rodney flutters off,' I said, ‘she'll be left there, broken.'

Catherine shook her head. ‘She only imagines she's in love,' she insisted. ‘It's the huge excitement of it all that makes her happy; that, and the novelty of it, and her sense of importance, and her success. Not any deep passion for Rodney. She may think it's a passion—a champagnish passion, if you like. But it isn't really. There's no passion; only champagne. It was his prestige and her boredom that made her fall to him originally. And now it's her success and the fun of it that make her stick to him.'

Events were to show that Catherine was right, or at least more nearly right than I. But before I describe these events, I must tell how it was that Kingham re-entered my world.

It was I who took the first step to end our ridiculous quarrel. I should have made the attempt earlier, if it had not been for Kingham's absence from Europe. A little while after our squabble he left, with a commission to write articles as he went, first for North Africa and thence for the further East. I heard of him once or twice from people who had seen him at Tunis, at Colombo, at Canton. And I read the articles, the admirably original articles, as they appeared at intervals in the paper which had commissioned them. But direct communication with him I had none. I did not
write; for I was uncertain, to begin with, if my letter would ever reach him. And in any case, even if we had made up our quarrel by letter, what good would that have been? Reconciliations across eight thousand miles of space are never very satisfactory. I waited till I heard of his return and then wrote him a long letter. Three days later he was sitting at our dinner-table.

‘This is good,' he said, ‘this is very good.' He looked this way and that, quickly, taking in everything—the furniture, the books, Catherine, me—with his bright, quick eyes. ‘Definitely settled.'

‘Oh, not so definitely as all that, let us hope.' I laughed in Catherine's direction.

‘I envy you,' he went on. ‘To have got hold of something fixed, something solid and absolute—that's wonderful. Domestic love, marriage—after all, it's the nearest thing to an absolute that we can achieve, practically. And it takes on more value, when you've been rambling round the world for a bit, as I have. The world proves to you that nothing has any meaning except in relation to something else. Good, evil, justice, civilization, cruelty, beauty. You think you know what these words mean. And perhaps you do know, in Kensington. But go to India or China. You don't know anything there. It's uncomfortable at first; but then, how exciting! And how much more copiously and multifariously you begin to live! But precisely for that reason you feel the need for some sort of fixity and definition, some kind of absolute, not merely of the imagination, but in actual life. That's where love comes in, and domesticity. Not to mention God and Death and the Immortality of the Soul and all
the rest. When you live narrowly and snugly, those things seem absurd and superfluous. You don't even appreciate your snugness. But multiply yourself with travelling, knock the bottom out of all your old certainties and prejudices and habits of thought; then you begin to see the real significance of domestic snugness, you appreciate the reality and importance of the other fixities.'

He spoke with all his old passionate eagerness. His eyes had the same feverish, almost unearthly brightness. His face, which had been smooth and pale when I saw it last, was burnt by the sun and lined. He looked more mature, tougher and stronger than in the past.

‘Yes, I envy you,' he repeated.

‘Then why don't you get married yourself?' asked Catherine.

Kingham laughed. ‘Why not, indeed? You'd better ask Dick. He knows me well enough to answer, I should think.'

‘No, tell us yourself,' I said.

Kingham shook his head. ‘It would be a case of cruelty to animals,' he said enigmatically, and began to talk about something else.

‘I envy you,' he said again, later that same evening, when Catherine had gone to bed and we were alone together. ‘I envy you. But you don't deserve what you've got. You haven't earned your right to a fixed domestic absolute, as I have. I've realized, intimately and personally realized, the flux and the interdependence and the relativity of things; consequently I know and appreciate the meaning and value of fixity. But you—you're domestic just as you're moral; you're moral and domestic by nature, unconsciously, instinctively, without
having known the opposites which give these attitudes their significance—like a worker bee, in fact; like a damned cabbage that just grows because it can't help it.'

I laughed. ‘I like the way you talk about flux and relativity,' I said, ‘when you yourself are the fixed, unchanging antithesis of these things. The same old Kingham! Why, you're a walking fixity; you're the Absolute in flesh and blood. How well I know those dear old home truths, for example!'

‘But that doesn't prevent their being true,' he insisted, laughing, but at the same time rather annoyed by what I had said. ‘And besides, I
have
changed. My views about everything are quite different. A sensitive man can't go round the world and come back with the same philosophy of life as the one he started with.'