The Complete Stories (64 page)

  He wondered how long this unexpected holiday was going to last; he supposed about four days. This was really the first time that Ralf had made any mark in his life; he was five years older and had always kept himself very much aloof. They had had many quarrels as brothers always have. At times Ralf had been almost a prig, particularly when he was head of the house at Selchurch, and his first year at Oxford. Anyway it was through him that Peter was now sitting in comfort instead of marching his section up a wet hill in "blob" formation, and in the warmth of heart that can come only from physical comfort, Peter prepared to be very gracious towards his brother.

  At last the train slowed to a stop and stood panting but unexhausted like a well-trained runner. Peter suddenly realized that they had reached Bulfrey. He snatched up his hat and bag, buttoned his coat and leapt onto the platform. Ralf was striding down towards him.

  Peter had seen him in uniform before but then it had been with the timid pride of a 1914 subaltern. Now after three years fighting he looked wonderfully fit and hansome. A slanting ray of sunlight lit up his fair hair; he was wearing no cap.

  "Hullo, Peter," he cried, shaking hands, "we were afraid that you mightn't be able to get the train. I suppose you've had lunch?"

  "Yes thanks, I managed to get some in town. Pretty fair rush though. Hold on a second while I find my ticket." He handed Ralf his bag and began exploring his pockets. Finding it, at last, between the leaves of his school "blue-book," he gave it to the collector and taking back his bag followed his brother out.

  "Is that all the luggage you've got?" he asked, "That's splendid; we shall be able to bring it up with us now. I've got the dog-cart outside. Moira's looking after it. She was coming into Bulfrey to do some shopping so I asked her to come and meet you."

  Moira Gage was the daughter of the vicar of Bulfrey Combe. Peter's age, she and her brother had been the constant companions of the Audley boys before they went to school. They had seen less of each other as they grew up, Chris had gone to Winchester, Ralf and Peter to Selchurch, but the Vicarage was next door to the Hall and they had seen a good deal of each other in the holidays. Their fathers were close friends.

  "Good work, I was afraid she would be away doing that V.A.D. work. I only saw her once all last holidays. Ah there she is."

  They had come out into the small station yard. On the other side of it stood the dog-cart and in it stood Moira Gage, one hand holding the reins, the other shading her eyes. She was tall, slim and pale, not really pretty but graceful and attractive; from a distance she looked like a Shepperson drawing but when you got nearer you saw depths in her grey, scrutable eyes, which his charming mannerisms could never convey; she was dressed in a tweed coat and a skirt with a grey silk scarf over her shoulders. Peter ran forward and greeted her.

  "Peter," she said, "before you do anything else, do make Ralf put his hat on. He looks simply dreadful and I'm sure he'd be court-martialled or something, if anyone saw."

  "Three years of military life shatter any illusions about military discipline," Ralf replied, climbing up into the dog-cart, "the only hardened militarist nowadays is the newly conscripted civilian."

  "Now he's being clever again," Moira laughed, "I really thought you lost that when you came down from Oxford. Among other things, it's very bad manners when you are in stupid company."

  "Thank you," Peter expostulated, "I wish you'd speak for yourself. I'm in the sixth now and write essays on industrial history and all sorts of things."

  "You seem to regard your history with most unreasonable pride," said Moira, "from all I hear it sounds only slack."

  "All pride is unreasonable" said Ralf. To Peter it seemed that he had paused a moment hesitating whether "no pride is unreasonable" was the more impressive; he had long gone beyond the stage when a sweeping generalization could pass as an epigram.

  "The aphorisms of a disappointed man," said Moira. "The next remark like that Ralf and I get out and walk."

  Bulfrey Combe was a mile and a half out from Bulfrey and still kept most of the appearance of a country village. Bulfrey was a small town with two or three streets of cheap shops, a bank, and a small glass factory which formed the nucleus of a large area of slums which was gradually spreading its grimy tentacles along the roads into the

  ESSAY

  "Oh, yes," said Lurnstein, "I had ideals at one time all right—we all do, you know."

  He was leaning back from the small table, on which the tea was set, eyeing my half finished portrait. I had had a long sitting and his beautiful china tea in his thin blue and white china came as a great relief.

  He looked extremely handsome, I thought, in the golden afternoon light, in his picturesque studio overall; Jewish, of course, but with a distinguished air that made one overlook his stumpy hands and other signs of ill-breeding.

  "Perhaps you'd like to hear something of my life," he said, "it has not been without interest."

  He lit another cigarette, pushed the box, a beautiful piece of Moorish inlaid work, to within my easy reach, and then drawing a deep breath of smoke, began:

  "I started life about as low as any new peer. My father was a Jew and we lived in the Jewish quarter off the Commercial Road. When he was sober he was very kind to me and my brothers. My mother never had any great significance for me, but I realize now that she must have been a very hard worked and hard treated woman as upon her fell the sole burden of supporting her husband and large family.

  "From the time when my first memories start I have always been interested in drawing, and I used to use every scrap of paper and every stump of pencil I could find, but lines never satisfied me—I wanted colours and tones. And these I could not afford. Coloured chalks used to be my chief delight and I used to take them from the desk of the Rabbi who managed the local synagogue and to whom I used to go once a week for religious instruction. For my father, though quite indifferent himself, was always most particular that I should attend. The Rabbi used the chalks, I remember, to draw maps of the divisions of the tribes with.

  "Well one day he caught me taking his chalks, but instead of beating me, as the red-haired master at the board school would have done, he asked me all about my drawing and finally persuaded me to let him take some of my work away to show to his rich friends. For he was the son of a very rich man himself and had been to the 'Varsity but had sacrificed it all to help his fellow countrymen in the slums. I tell you that there are just as fine acts of self-sacrifice done by the rabbis in the Yiddish quarter as by any of your parsons at Kennington, only they don't brag about it.

  "Well, he showed my work to his friends in the West, with the result that a few days later a man with a top hat and spats came to the door and asked to see me and my work. He gave half-crowns to all my brothers but he didn't give me half a crown, and I remember, I was very offended until I heard that I was to be taken away and taught painting.

  "That was the beginning of my ‘career.' Those Jews ran me for the next five years, and I painted just as I was told to at the Academy school, to which I was sent. And everyone was very kind to me and I was introduced to lots of rich men, not only the moneyed Jews but men of your class who spend lots of money on being bored and are called ‘in society' by lower middle class novelists. I began to acquire social polish and was being shaped into a pretty little gentleman; but all the time particularly when I could feel the grain of the canvas under my brush, I was dissatisfied.

  "When I was nineteen they gave me a studio, nothing like this, of course, but a decent enough shed with a good north light—and set me up as a Society portrait painter. Well I painted and flattered the ugly old women, that came to me, for a time; but after a little I found I could stand it no longer. I was painting badly, insipidly, insincerely, and I knew I could do better. I saw that the whole Academic conception was false—yes, that sounds funny from me nowadays, doesn't it? But we all see things more clearly when we're young.

  "That autumn the Italian futurists came to London and Marinetti delivered his epoch making series of broken-English lectures at the Dorée galleries. It was there, and particularly in Severini's ball-room scenes, that I found what I and half Chelsea had been looking for.

  "I always acted on impulses then, and when I came back and found in my room the luggage I had been packing for a tour through Italy with the Jews—they still ran me, though by that time I was making a fairly decent living—I was filled with revulsion. I wrote a brief, I am afraid rude, note to them, and slamming the door of my studio rushed out into the night.

  "I have no clear idea of what happened that night. I went to the Café Royal and drank absinthe. And soon I joined a group at the next table and together, as the sham English Bohemians do, we drank a lot, & laughed a lot, and finally all reeled out into the cool air of Regent Street. There were girls with us too, who had their hair cut short though it was not fashionable then. The leader of the set was a beautiful youth with red-gold hair whom we all called Ronald. I never learned his sirname though I met him continually for the next year and shared his studio with him. He painted fierce warm-colored ‘abstractions' in tremendous bouts of energy which left him lethargic and apathetic. He was a great friend of mine in the year I spent in our sham Quartier Latin. For after that night I left the Jews and spent my time with the young art students and futurists. We were a happy enough lot and I should always have looked back to that year as the best of my life if —

  "Well, during that year I painted as I have never painted before or since. I painted as I knew I ought to without convention or restraint. I exhibited at the Mansard Gallery and in the Adelphi and reviews of my work appeared in ‘Blast' and ‘The Gypsy.' I was gloriously happy in my work & then it was all spoilt, and by a woman.

  "I won't say much about that, if you don't mind. I was desperately in love and Ronald kept telling me not to be a fool. I wouldn't listen to him and began to break with my friends. She was a model and her vision remains to me now as the most beautiful thing I need ever fear to see..... Well, the crash came, as Ronald said it would, and I tore up all my drawings and stuffed the stove in the studio full of them. And I scraped the paint off my canvases with my palette knife; and I had one tremendous night with the whole set ‘flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng, seeking to put thy pale lost lilies out of my mind.' We were all very noisy and drunk and we told Rabellaisian jokes till far into the morning, and then in the grey of dawn I slunk back to the respectability and the Jews."

  He was speaking, up till now, very seriously and bitterly. Now he shook his great shoulders like a dog, tossed his head, & motioning me to resume my pose took up his palette.

  "Oh yes, they received me with open arms. And Mayfair accepted me as its season's attraction. The old life went on. They made me an R.A. and—Happy? why yes. Why not? I've made a good thing out of life. Ask any of your club friends, they'll tell you so. But there are times when I see reviews of Ronald's work and hear my academic colleagues' sneers of him that I—Oh well; we must get on with the damned picture while the light lasts."

  THE HOUSE: AN ANTI-CLIMAX

  Never, in its varied and not always unqualifiedly successful career, had the school been in a state of such utter disorganization and prostration, as in the Easter term, 1917. In France & Flanders, our thinly guarded, inadequately munitioned lines, were quite incapable of successfully resisting the menaced German "push," every paper brought news of further mis-management and ill-success, every post news of some friend or relation who had been killed. At school, the houses had mostly been taken over, in the absence of their younger housemasters, by well meaning but incompetent elderly assistant masters; the prefects were young, and knowing that in a few weeks, at the most a few months, they would be "called up" to go to possible death, almost certain mutilation, cared little for school or house affairs. All over the country nerves were strained to the breaking point. This must be borne in mind when reading a story which at any other period would have been utterly impossible.

  Every house, of course, claims to be the best, and in all probability has hypnotized itself into believing so, but there is one House that is more exclusive, more arrogantly self-confident, more self-contained, than any other. The House has many exclusive points of etiquette that the out-houses look on with contempt or resentment. They have largely their own slang, a great many of their own customs, and above all an unshakable contempt for the corps and all its machinations. Every flight of Inspection-day oratory leaves them the same, and even when all over the country militarism was all powerful, when soldiers drilled on the Christ Church quads at Oxford, they kept up their contempt with unmitigated bitterness. And then came Ross. A prefect, an excellent all round athlete, with a high place in the Classical sixth, he had remained quite a nonentity until he returned at the beginning of the Easter term to find himself head of the House, now demoralized and bereft of all its earlier dignity.

  He had to take the entire management of the House into his own hands, and very soon he made himself felt. He stopped people getting "orders" for confectionery from their temporary housemaster, he stopped people getting leaves off Clubs & Parades without consulting the matron at all, he generally raised the house to something like its former standard and on the whole people liked it, for fundamentally men rather like being kept in order if it is done in the right way.

  For the first three weeks all went well—too well really. Then came the Monday afternoon parade in which the corps started organizing for the House Platoons Shield. Ross delivered a violent little speech and, as in most of his speeches, he said rather more than he meant to. "Stand easy and pay attention. The display that you have given so far has been perfectly monstrous. I've never seen such marching in my life before—might be a whole lot of boy scouts. I can tell you, that if you think that because this House has been disgustingly slack in the past, you are going to be disgustingly slack now, you are quite wrong for once in your lives. You're going to sweat for this—sweat your guts out—and I'm going to make you! Got that?" and he called the platoon up.