Death of a Hero (17 page)

“If you continue in this way you will break your mother's heart!”

It was so ludicrous – poor old George Augustus! – that George couldn't help laughing. George Augustus raised his hand in a noble gesture of paternal malediction:

“Leave this house! And do not return to it until you have learned to apologize for your behaviour.”

“You mean it?”

“I solemnly mean it.”

“Right.”

George went straight upstairs and packed his few clothes in a suitcase, asked if he might have the volume of Keats, and left in half an hour – with elevenpence in his pocket, humming:

“Now of my threescore years and ten, twenty will not come again.”

So that was that.

PART II

andante cantabile

I

B
ANK pass-books and private account-books are revealing documents, strangely neglected by biographers. One of the most useful things to know about any hero is the extent of his income, whether earned or unearned, whether crescendo or diminuendo. Complicated
états d'âme
are the luxury of leisured opulence. Those who have to earn their living must accept Appearances as Reality, and have little time for metaphysical woes and passions. I once thought of beginning this section with an accurate fac- simile of George's private account, and passbooks. But that would be
vérisme.
It is enough to say that his unearned income was nil, and his earned income small but crescendo. Like most people who are too high-spirited to work for stated hours at a weekly wage, he drifted into journalism, which may be briefly but accurately defined as the most degrading form of that most degrading vice, mental prostitution. Its resemblance to the less reprehensible form is striking. Only the more fashionable cocottes of the dual trade make a reasonable income. The similarity between the conditions of the two parallel prostitutions becomes still more remarkable when you reflect that on the physical side you pretend to be a milliner, or a masseuse, or a clergyman's daughter, or a lady of quality, or even a lady journalist in need of a little aid for which you are prepared to make suitable acknowledgement; and on the mental side you pretend to be a poet, or an expert in something, or a lady of quality, or a duke. Both require suppleness in a supreme degree, and in both the fatal handicaps are honesty, modesty,
and independence. All of which George discovered very rapidly, and acted accordingly. But his powers of simulation were inadequate, and consequently he failed at all times to conceal the fact that he possessed some vitality and beliefs, and held to them. This, of course, for a long time prevented his obtaining work from any but crank periodicals, of which London before the war possessed about three, which believed in allowing contributors to say what they thought. Needless to say, they have since perished; and London journalism is now one compact sun of sweetness and light. If this, or indeed anything, much mattered, one might be tempted to deplore it.

In the course of his
naïf
peregrinations George became temporarily acquainted with numerous personages, whom he classified as morons, abject morons, and queer-Dicks. The abject morons were those editors and journalists who sincerely believed in the imbecilities they perpetrated, virtuous apprentices gone to the devil, honest bootblacks out of a job. The morons were those who knew better but pretended not to, and who by long dabbling in pitch had become pitchy. The queer-Dicks were more or less honest cranks, or at least possessed so much vanity and obstinacy that they seemed honest. After a few vague and awkward struggles, George found himself limited to the queer-Dicks. Of these there were three, whom for convenience sale I shall label Shobbe, Bobbe, and Tubbe. Mr. or Herr Shobbe ran a literary review, one of those “advanced” reviews beloved by the English, which move rapidly forward with a crab-like motion. Herr Shobbe was a very great man. Comrade Bobbe ran a Socialist weekly which was subsidized by a demented eugenist and a vegetarian Theosophist. Since Marxian economics, eugenics, pure food, and theosophy did not wholly fill its columns, the organ of the intellectual and wage-weary worker permitted regular comments on art and literature. And since none of the directors of the journal knew anything whatever about these subjects, they occasionally and by accident allowed them to be treated by some one with ideas and enthusiasm. Comrade Bobbe was a very great man. As for Mr. Waldo Tubbe, who hailed (why “hailed”?) from the Middle Western districts of the United States, he was an exceedingly ardent and patriotic British Tory, standing for Royalism in Art, Authority in Politics, and Classicism in Religion. Unfortunately, there was no dormant peerage in the family; otherwise he would certainly have spent all his modest patrimony in endeavouring to become Lord Tubbe. Since he was an unshakeable Anglo-Catholic,
there were no hopes of a Papal Countship; and Tory Governments are proverbially shabby in their treatment of even the most distinguished among their intellectual supporters. Consequently, all Mr. Waldo Tubbe could do in that line was to hint at his aristocratic English ancestry, to use his (possibly authentic) coat-of-arms on his cutlery, stationery, toilet articles, and book-plates, and know only the “best” people. How George ever got to know him is a mystery; still more how he came to write for a periodical which once advertized that its list of subscribers included four dukes, three marquesses, and eleven earls. The only explanation is that Mr. Tubbe's Americanized Toryism was a bit more lively than the native brand, or that he leaned so very far to the extreme Right that without knowing it he sometimes tumbled into the verge of the extreme Left. But, in any case, Mr. Waldo Tubbe was also a very great man.

Upon the charity of these three gentlemen our hero chiefly but not extravagantly subsisted, skating indeed upon very thin ice in his relations with them, and expending treasures of diplomacy and dissimulation which might have been employed in the service of his Country. It subsequently transpired (why “transpired”?) that his Country did not want his brains, but his blood.

Sunday in London. In the City, nuts, bolts, infinite curious pieces of odd metal, embedded in the black shiny roads, frozen rivers of ink, may be examined without danger. The peace of commerce which passes all desolation. Puritan fervour relapsed to negative depression. Gigantic wings of Ennui folded irresistibly over millions. Vast trails of automobiles hopelessly hooting to escape. Epic melancholy of deserted side-streets where the rhythmic beat of a horse's hoofs is an adagio of despair. Horrors of Gunnersbury. The spleen of the railway line between Turnham Green and Hammersmith, the villainous sordidness of Raynes Park, the ennui which always vibrates with the waiting train at Gloucester Road station, emerge triumphant when the Lord is at rest and possess the streets. The rain is one melancholy, and the sun another. The supreme insult of pealing bells morning and evening. Dearly beloved brethren, miserable sinners, stand up, stand up for Jesus. Who will deliver us, who will deliver us from the Christians? O Lord Jesus, come quickly, and get it over!

It was a merry Sunday evening of merry England in the month of March, 1912. After a long day of unremitting but not very remunerative toil, George had gone to call on his friend, Mr. Frank Upjohn. The word “friend” is here, as nearly always, inexact, if by friend is meant one who feels for another a disinterested affection unaccompanied by sexual desire. (Friendship accompanied by sexual desire is love, the phoenix or unicorn of passions.) In the case of George and Mr. Upjohn there was at least a truce to the instinctive hostility and grudging which human beings almost invariably feel for one another. Ties of mutual self-interest bound them. George made jokes and Mr. Upjohn laughed at them: and vice versa. Mr. Upjohn desired to make George a disciple, and George was not averse from making use of Mr. Upjohn. Mutual admiration, implied if not expressed and perhaps not wholly insincere, enabled them to form a small protective nucleus against the oceanic indifference of mankind, and thus feel superior to it. They ate together, and even lent each other small sums of money without security. The word “friend” is therefore justified
à peu près.

Needless to say, Mr. Upjohn was a very great man. He was a Painter. Since he was destitute of any intrinsic and spontaneous originality, he strove much to be original, and invented a new school of painting every season. He first created a sensation with his daring and brilliant “Christ in a Bloomsbury Brothel”, which was denounced in no unmeasured terms by the Press, ever tender for the purity of Public Morals and the posthumous reputation of Our Lord. “The Blessed Damozel in Hell” passed almost unnoticed, when fortunately the model most unjustly obtained an affiliation order against Mr. Upjohn and thus drew attention to a neglected masterpiece, which was immediately bought by a man who had made a fortune in intimate rubber goods. Mr. Upjohn then became aware of the existence of modern French art. One season he painted in gorgeous Pointilliste blobs, the next in monotone Fauviste smears, then in calamitous Futuriste accidents of form and colour. At this moment he was just about to launch the Suprematist movement in painting, to which he hoped to convert George, or at any rate to get him to write an article about it. Suprematist painting, which has now unfortunately gone out of fashion, was, as its name implies, the supreme point of modern art. Mr. Upjohn produced two pictures in illustration (the word is perhaps inaccurate) of his theories. One was a beautiful scarlet whorl on a
background of the purest flake white. The other at first sight appeared to be a brood of bulbous yellow chickens, with thick elongated necks, aimlessly scattered over a grey-green meadow; but on closer inspection the chickens turned out to be conventionalized phalluses. The first was called Decomposition-Cosmos, and the second Op. 49, Piano. Mr. Upjohn turned on both electric lights in his studio for George to study these interesting productions, at which our friend gazed with a feeling of baffled perplexity and the agonized certainty that he would have to say something about them, and that what he would say would inevitably be wrong. Fortunately, Mr. Upjohn was extremely vain and highly nervous. He stood behind George, coughing and jerking himself about agitatedly.

“What I mean to say is,” he said, puncturing his discourse with coughs, “there you've got it.”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“What I mean is, you've got precise expression of precise emotion.”

“Just what I was going to say.”

“You see, when you've got that, what I mean is, you've got something.”

“Why, of course!”

“You see, what I mean to say is, if you get two or three intelligent people to
see
the thing, then you've got it. I mean you won't get those damned block-headed sons of bitches like Quijasso and Caesar Frank to see it, I mean, it simply smashes them, you see.”

“Did you expect them to?”

“You see, what you've got is complete originality
and
The Tradition. One doesn't worry about the hacks, you see, but what I mean to say, one does
mildly
suppose Quijasso had a few gleams of intelligence, but what I mean is they won't
take
anything new.”

“I get the originality, of course, but I admit I don't quite see the traditional side of the movement.”

Mr. Upjohn sighed pettishly and waved his head from side to side in commiserating contempt.

“Of course, you
wouldn't.
What intelligence you have was ruined by your lack of education, and your native obtuseness makes you instinctively prefer the academic. I mean, can't you
SEE
that the proportions of Decomposition-Cosmos are exactly those of the Canopic vase in the Filangieri Museum at Naples?”

“How could I see that,” said George, rather annoyed, “since I've never been to Naples?”

“That's what I mean to say,” exclaimed Mr. Upjohn triumphantly, “you simply have no education
what-so-ever!
”

“Well, but what about the other?” said George, desiring to be placable; “is that in the Canopic vase tradition?”

“Christ-in-petticoats, NO! I thought even you'd see
that.
What I mean is, can't you
see
it?”

“They might be free adaptions of Greek vase painting?” said George tentatively, hoping to soothe this excitable and irritated genius. Mr. Upjohn flung his palette knife on the floor.

“You're
too
stupid, George. What I mean is, the proportion and placing and colour-values are exactly in the best tradition of American-Indian blankets, and what I mean is, when you've got that, well, I mean, you've got something!”

“Of course, of course, it
was
stupid of me not to see. Forgive me, I've been working at hack articles all day, and my mind's a bit muzzy.”

“I mildly supposed so!”

And Mr. Upjohn, with spasmodic movements, jerked the two easels round to the wall. There was a short pause in the conversation. Mr. Upjohn irritatedly cast himself at full length upon a sofa, and spasmodically ate candied apricots. He placed them in his mouth with his forefinger and thumb, holding his elbow at an angle of ninety degrees to his body, with his chin far extended, and bit them savagely in half. George watched this impressive and barbaric spectacle with the interest of one who at last discovers the meaning of the mysterious rite of Urim and Thummim. A timid effort at making conversation was repelled by Mr. Upjohn, with a gesture which George interpreted as meaning that Mr. Upjohn required complete silence to digest and sweeten with candied apricots the memory of George's treasonable obtuseness. Suddenly George started, for Mr. Upjohn, after coughing once or twice, swung himself from his couch with incredible swiftness, hawked vigorously, flung open a window with unnecessary violence and spat voluminously into the street. He then turned and said calmly: