Irving was nearly always cheerful, except when he was cross. Irving was like that. He had been a cheerful Victorian and a cheerful Edwardian, and was now, in his late forties, a cheerful Georgian. He had a beautiful and charming wife, creditable children, a house in Devonshire and a house in London, a great deal of money (though the super-tax robbed him of much of it), two motor-cars, good fishing, shooting and stag hunting, and an excellent digestion. He had his troubles. The People’s Budget troubled him a
good deal, and the land taxes, and all the unfair, socialist legislation to which he was subject. He sometimes threatened to go and live abroad, to escape it. But he did not go and live abroad. He was, for all his troubles, a happy Englishman.
UNA, too, was cheerful. She was unaffected by reigns and periods. She was a very unconscious Georgian. Not like Stanley, who said, “We are now Georgians. Georgian England must be much better than any England before it,” nor like Roger, who would murmur, “We Georgians face facts . . .” nor like Vicky, who cried, “I will
not
be called a Georgian; not while that little Welsh horror rules over us.” Una hardly knew she was a Georgian, and, indeed, she was not, in any but a strictly technical sense. Her mind was unstirred by what used, long ago, to be called the Zeitgeist. She was happy; she enjoyed good health; her daughters were like polished corners and her sons like young plants; her husband’s acres flourished and his corn and wine and oil increased (as a matter of fact, his wine, always a trifle too much, had of late years decreased; Ted was a soberer man than of old); Katie, their handsome eldest, had married well; and Una found in the countryside the profound, unconscious content that animals find. Riding, walking, gardening, driving about the level Essex lands, she, attuned to the soil on which she lived, was happy and serene.
The younger generation of Georgians were happy enough. They were married, engaged, painting, writing, dancing, at the bar, at the universities, at school. They were behaving in the several manners suitable to their temperaments and years. Their lives were full of interests, artistic, literary, athletic, and social. Vicky’s Nancy was learning to paint futuristically; she had now a little studio in Chelsea, where she could be as Bohemian as she liked, and have her friends all night without disturbing any one. Night clubs, too, had of late come in, and were a great convenience. Phyllis was bringing up her children. Hugh, eating dinners in the Temple, read of torts and morts, but dreamed of machinery, and drew diagrams in court of pistons and valves, and jotted down algebraic formulæ when he should have been jotting down legal notes. Hugh was really a mechanician, and his heart was not in law, though he liked it well enough. His brother Tony had gone from Cambridge to the Foreign Office, and, when not writing drafts, was a merry youth about town.
Imogen was happy. She felt her life to be pleasure-soaked; a lovely, an elegant orgie of joy. And pleasure, orgies of dissipation even, did not absorb her, but were ministrants to the clear, springing life of the imagination. Imagination brimmed the cup of her spirit like golden wine. She felt happy and good, like a child in an orchard, ripe apples and pears tumbling in soft grass about her, the silver boat of the moon riding in a green sky. For her birds sang, sweet bells chimed and clashed, the stars made a queer, thin, tinkling song on
still and moonless nights. The people hurrying about the city streets and squares were kind and merry and good, like brownies; the city itself was a great, gay booth, decked and lit. Dawn came on a golden tide of peace; noon drove a flaming chariot behind the horses of the sun; evening spread soft wings, tender and blue and green; night was sweet as a dream of apple-blossoms by running water. When she wrote, whether by day or by night, her brain felt clear and lit, as by a still, bright taper burning steadily. Her thoughts, her words, rose up in her swiftly, like silver fishes in a springing rock pool; round and round they swam, and she caught them and landed them before they got away. While she wrote, nothing mattered but to seize and land what she saw thus springing up, to reach down her net and catch it while she might. Verse she wrote, and prose, with growing fastidiousness as to form and words. When she had first begun publishing what she wrote, she had been too young; she had fumbled after style like a blind puppy; she had been, like nearly all very young writers, superfluous of phrase, redundant. She read with fastidious disgust in her first book of stories such meaningless phrases as, “He lifted the child bodily over the rail and dropped it into the sea.” Bodily; as if the victim might, on the other hand, have been only caught up in the spirit, like St. Paul. What did I mean, she asked, across the years, of that bungling child, knowing that she had indeed meant nothing. But now style, the stark, bare structure of language, was to her a fetish. It was good to be getting on in life—twenty-three twenty-four, twenty-five—so that one’s head was clearer, if not yet very clear. The very young, thought Imogen, are muddled; they love cant and shun truth; they adopt and use imitative phrases; they are sentimental and easy idealists behind their masks of cheerful, slangy
hardness. Undergraduates, male and female, and their non-collegiate contemporaries, are the most obscurantist of reactionaries; facts annoy them and they pretend they do not see them, preferring to walk muffled through life, until life forcibly, year by year, tears the bandages from their eyes. The later Georgian, the post-war very young, were to be even more sentimental, muffled and imitative than their predecessors, because of the demoralising war, which was to give them false standards in the schoolroom. But the pre-war adolescents were sentimental enough.
The sharp, clear and bitter truth—that was the thing to aim at, thought Imogen, in her twenty-fifth year, knowing she was still far, but not knowing how far, from that. That courageous realism which should see things as they were, she desired, knowing herself to be still a false seer, blinded and dazzled by her personal circumstances, warped and circumscribed in her vision by the circle of her life. Perhaps she was too comfortable, too happy. . . . Or perhaps, like most people, too emotionally alive, strung too sharply to every vibration, for the clear, detached intellectuality she craved.
I feel things too much, she thought, smiling to be thinking what so many people thought, what too many even said, of themselves.
I don’t feel things much. I am not easily moved by life. . . . Why did people so seldom say that, and so much more seldom think it? No doubt because every one feels things terrifically, is quite horribly moved by this most moving business, life. No one believes him or herself to be insensitive, for no one is insensitive, life not being an affair it is possible to be insensitive to.
In a deeper layer of consciousness, where herself watched herself, Imogen thought that, though she might
believe herself to be sensitive to life, she at any rate knew why she believed it, knew why every one believed it of themselves, and that redeemed her from the commonplace boast, and gave her over the people who say “I
feel
too much, that’s where it is,” the advantage that the conscious must always have over the unconscious, the advantage, if it be one, that is perhaps the main difference between sophisticated and primitive forms of life.
Meanwhile Imogen, like her cousin Roger, wrote and published verse and prose. After all, it didn’t matter what one wrote. People wrote and wrote, and nearly every kind of thing got written by some one or other, well or ill, usually ill, and never so well as to touch more than the very outside edge of the beauty and adventure which was life. Written words opened the door, that was all. Beyond the door lay the adventure, bright and still and eerily clear, like a dream. Strange seas, purple with racing currents in the open, but under the eaves of coral islands green and clear like jade; white beaches of those same islands, hot in the sunshine under the spreading leaves of bread-fruit trees; yams and cocoa-nuts and pineapples dropping with nutty noises on to emerald-green grass; a little boat moored at the edge of lapping, creamy waves; witty monkeys and brilliant parrots chattering in the jungle; a little fire at night outside the tent, and a gun ready to one’s hand. Great fishes and small fishes swimming deeply in the jade rock pools, sailing and sailing with unshut eye; the little boat sailing too, pushing off into the wide seas dotted with islands, white wings pricking skyward like faun’s ears. Or deep orchards adrift with blossom, rosy-white; jolly colts in paddocks, dragging with soft lips and hard gums at their mother’s milk; the winds of April hurtling the cloud shadows across the grass. Long lanes running between deep hedges
in the evening, and the rustle of the sea not far, and the velvet dusk waiting for the moonrise, and queer, startled noises in the hedges, and quiet munching noises in the fields, and the cold, mocking stars looking down. And painted carts of gipsies, and roadside fires, and wood-smoke and ripe apples. And hills silver and black with olives and cypresses, and steep roads spiralling up them to little walled towns, and hoarse, chanted songs lilting among vineyards, and the jingling of the bells of oxen. And the streets and squares of rainbow-coloured towns, noisy
cafés
, and lemon trees in tubs, beautiful men noble with the feathers of cocks, beautiful women in coloured headkerchiefs, incense drifting out of churches into piazzas, coffee roasting in deep streets. To swim, to sail, to run naked on hot sands, to lie eating and eating in deep scented woods, and then to sleep; to wake and slip into clear, brown pools in sunshine, to spin out words as a spider his silvery web; to wear a scarlet silk jacket like a monkey’s and little white trousers, and, for best, a little scarlet crinoline over them, sticking out, very wide and short and jaunty, and a scarlet sunshade lined with white, and on one’s shoulder a tiny, flame-red cockatoo, and at one’s heels two little black slaves, shining and black as ebony, with ivory teeth a-glisten and banjos tucked beneath their arms. To clap one’s hands, twice, thrice, and presto! an elegant meal—mushrooms, cider and pêche melba, and mangoes and pineapple to end it, and then, when it was ended, a three-coloured ice. What joy! Dear God, what a world! What adventure, what loveliness, what dreams! Beauty without end, amen.
Then why write of what should, instead, be lived? Wasn’t the marvellous heritage, the brilliant joke, the ghostly dream, of life enough? Nevertheless, one did write, and was, inexplicably, praised for it. Black
marks on paper, scribbled and niggled and scrawled, and here and there the splendour and the joke and the dream broke through them, like sunshine flashing through prison bars, like music breaking through the written notes.
While she gave to the fashioning of the written word all the fastidious, meticulous austerity of devotion that she knew, Imogen in her personal life was not austere or fastidious or devoted at all. She idled; she lounged about; she was slovenly; she bought and sucked toffee; she read omnivorously, including much trash; she was a prey to shoddy, facile emotions and moods, none of which had power to impel her to any action, because a deep, innate scepticism underlay them all; she was a sentimental cynic. She loved too lightly and too slightly; she was idle, greedy, foolish, childish, impatient and vain, sliding out of difficulties like a tramp who fears a job of work. She did not care for great causes; public affairs were to her only an intriguing and entertaining show. She was a selfish girl, a shallow girl, a shoddy girl, enmeshed in egotism, happy in her own circus, caring little whether or no others had bread. Happy in her circus, and yet often wretched too, for life is like that—exquisite and agonising. She wanted to go to the Pacific Islands and bathe from coral reefs; wanted money and fame; wanted to be delivered for ever from meetings and tea-parties, foolish talkers and bores; wanted to save a life, watched by cheering crowds; wanted a motor bicycle; wanted to be a Christian; wanted to be a young man. But not now a naval man; she had seen through the monotony and routine of that life. She wanted in these days to be a journalist, a newspaper correspondent, sent abroad on exciting jobs, to report wars, and eruptions of Vesuvius, and earthquakes, and Cretan excavations, and revolutions in South America, and international conferences.
From time to time Imogen, in common with many others, brought out books, large and small. They would arrive in a parcel of six, and lie on the breakfast table, looking silly, in clownish wrappers with irrelevant pictures on them. Imogen would examine them with mild distaste. How common they looked, to be sure, now that they were bound! As common as most books, as the books by others. Dull, too. What if all the reviews said so? One couldn’t help caring what reviews said, however hard one tried not to. It was petty and trivial to be cast up and cast down by the opinions of one’s fellows, no wiser than oneself, expressed in print, but so it was. Why? Chiefly because they
were
expressed in print, to be read by all. One’s disgrace, if it were a disgrace, was so public. People who didn’t know that reviewers were just ordinary people, with no more authority or judgment than they had themselves, believed them. If people read in a review, “It cannot be said that Miss Carrington has been successful in her new book of stories,” they thought that it really could not, not knowing that almost anything can, as a matter of fact, be said, and often is. And if a reviewer said (as was more usual, for reviewers are, taking them all in all, a kindly race), “This is a good book,” people who didn’t know any better really thought that it was so. Then the author was pleased. Particularly as the book wasn’t really good in the least.
“I can’t say I am much concerned about my reviews, one way or another,” Roger had once said to Imogen. But he
was
concerned, all the same. Did he, did all
the people who said they didn’t mind things, know that they really did? Or were they indeed deluded? People were surely often deluded; they said such odd things. “It’s not that I mind a bit for myself, it’s the principle of the thing,” they would say. Or, “I don’t care a damn what any one says of me,” or “It isn’t that
I’d
mind taking the risk, but one has to think of other people.” And the people who said, “I know you won’t mind my saying . . .” when they knew you would, or “I don’t want to spread gossip, but . . .” when that was just what they did want, or “You mustn’t think I’m vexed with you, dear,” when they left you nothing else to think.