A Writer's Notebook (55 page)

Kerensky. He looked very unhealthy. Everyone knew he was a sick man; and he spoke of himself, not without a suspicion of bravado, as a dying one. He had a rather large face; it was of a strange yellow colour and when he was nervous it went livid; the features were not bad, the eyes large and vivacious, but the general impression was of a plain man. He wore an odd dress, khaki, but it was not quite a military uniform, nor was it the dress of a civilian; it was nondescript and dingy. He came into the room followed by his A.D.C., with a quick step, and gave me a firm, hasty, mechanical
handshake. He seemed fearfully on edge. Sitting down and talking incessantly, he took hold of a cigarette box and played with it restlessly, locking and unlocking it, opening and shutting it, turning it round and round. His speech was rapid and emphatic; and his nervousness made me nervous too. He seemed to have no humour, but a lively and rather boyish sense of fun. It appeared that one of his A.D.C.s was a flirtatious youth and women were in the habit of ringing him up on the telephone which stood on Kerensky's desk. It was Kerensky's amusement to answer the telephone in place of the A.D.C. and, pretending it was the young officer speaking, to flirt violently with the unknown person at the other end. Tea was served and he was offered brandy, but as he was about to take it the A.D.C. expostulated, since alcohol was bad for him, and it was amusing to hear him, like a spoilt child, trying to wheedle the young man into allowing him to drink just one glass. He was very merry and laughed a good deal. I could not make out what were the characteristics which had raised him in so short a while to so extraordinary a position. His conversation did not suggest a man of wide culture, hardly even a man of general education. His personality had no magnetism. He gave me no feeling of intellectual or of physical vigour. But it was impossible to believe that he owed his ascent merely to chance and held his position only because there was no one with whom to replace him. As the conversation proceeded—he talked on as though he were too tired to stop—something pathetic seemed to arise; I felt sorry for him and I got the idea that his power consisted perhaps in exciting a protective emotion; there was something appealing in him so that you felt inclined to help him; he had the quality which Charles Frohman had to an extraordinary degree, the quality of exciting in others the desire to do things for him. I saw nothing of the outrageous vanity which so many had told me of; on the contrary I found him simple and unaffected. It was impossible not to believe in his honesty; I felt that here was a man who was sincerely trying to
do his best, and who was filled with a very pure enthusiasm to serve not so much his country as his fellow countrymen. His emotionalism was a strength in Russia, where the facile expression of feeling has an overwhelming effect, but it was rather disconcerting to English modesty. I could have wished his voice did not tremble quite so easily. It was a little embarrassing to hear such noble sentiments expressed with so much candour. But this is one of the differences between English and Russian which will always keep the two countries strange to one another. The final impression I had was of a man exhausted. He seemed broken by the burden of power. It was easy to understand that he could not bring himself to act. He was more afraid of doing the wrong thing than anxious to do the right one, and so he did nothing until he was forced into action by others. And then his great care was to avoid the responsibility which might be ascribed to him.

Gauguin. A fruit piece in the Gallery at Christiania. These are fruits, mangoes, bananas, persimmons, in which the colour is so strange that words can hardly tell what a troubling emotion they give; there are sombre greens, opaque like a delicately-carved bowl in Chinese jade and yet with a quivering lustre that suggests the palpitation of mysterious life; there are purples horrible like raw and putrid meat and yet with a glowing sensual passion that reminds one of the Roman Empire of Heliogabalus; there are reds, shrill like the berries of a holly—one thinks of Christmas in England and the snow and the good cheer and the pleasures of children—and yet by some magic softened till they are like the tender colours of a dove's breast; there are deep yellows that die with an unnatural passion into a green as fragrant as the spring and as pure as the sparkling water of a mountain brook. Who can tell what tortured fancy made these fruits? They seem to belong to some Polynesian garden of the Hesperides. There is something alien in them as though they grew in a stage of the
earth's dark history when things were not irrevocably fixed to their forms. They are extravagantly luxurious. They are heavy with tropical odours. They seem to possess a sombre passion of their own. It is enchanted fruit to taste which might open the gateway to God knows what secrets of the soul and to enchanted palaces of the imagination. They are heavy with unknown dangers, and to taste them might turn a man to beast or god.

They told him someone had said of him: “He's smart, he doesn't give much away.” He beamed; he took it as a compliment.

She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.

A married couple. She adored him with a selfish, passionate devotion, and their life was a struggle on his part to secure his soul and on hers to get possession of it. Then it was discovered that he had T.B. They both knew that this was her triumph, for thenceforward he would never escape her. He killed himself.

Jamie and his wife. Two stodgy people who do nothing but read novels. They live a perfectly monotonous life, but in the spirit, a life of romance. All their experiences are fiction. They had a baby and the baby died. Jamie hoped that his wife wouldn't have another. It disturbed the tenor of their
lives. After the funeral they both settled down with a sigh of relief to the new novels that had just come from the library.

Arnold. For thirty years he had cultivated a pose till at last it became second nature to him. Then he was bored to death by it, but when he came to look into his heart for his real self he couldn't find it. Nothing was left but the pose. He went to France hoping to get killed, but he came back at the end of the war safe and sound, and there stretched before him then an illimitable emptiness.

Chicago. The hogs are driven into pens and they come squealing as though they knew what was before them; they are attached by a hind leg and swung from a moving bar which takes them to where a man in blue overalls splashed with blood stands with a long knife. He is a pleasant-faced young man. He turns the hog towards him and stabs it in the jugular vein; there is a gush of blood and the hog passes on. Another takes its place. Hog follows hog with a mechanical regularity which reminds you of the moving steps of an escalator. I was struck by the calm indifference with which the pleasant-faced young man killed them. It was like a grim caricature of the Dance of Death. They come, struggling and screaming, the poet, the statesman, the merchant prince; and no matter what ideals, what passions or high endeavours have been theirs, they are hurried on by a remorseless fate and none escapes.

The activity is intense as the hog is passed by a machine from one man to another; one scrapes off such hair as is left after the hog has gone through one machine, another cuts out the bowels, a third slices off the hams. There was not a moment's pause, and I wondered what would happen if a man fell out and missed his appointed task. There was one old man, grey-bearded, who lifted a huge chopper and mechanically
cut off the hams. The movement of the chopper, so deliberate and regular, yet so unceasing, was strangely mysterious. They told me he had been doing that very same thing for thirty years.