Death of a Hero (21 page)

Was ever woman in this manner wooed! But George had mounted one of his hobby-horses and was careering away through a dust of words. Elizabeth, with practical instinct, stopped him.

“Where do you live?”

“In Greek Street. I've got a large room there, big enough to paint in. Where do you live?”

“In Hampstead. It's rather horrid and the place is full of old maids. But anything is better than being at home. I don't mind my father, but my mother makes me so nervous when I'm at home that I feel I shall just die if I have to be any longer with her.”

“I'm glad you hate your parents, at least one of them. It's so important to recognize these antipathies, which are after all perfectly natural. Most animals hate their mature young. I remember I used to watch the young robins exterminating their fathers, and think how right it was.
But it ought to be the mothers. Men sometimes leave each other alone.”

“Oh, it's partly due to the awful domestic-den family life. They can't really help it, poor dears. The den was forced on them, and they had to live in it.”

“Not really. They must have wanted it. It's all part of people's amazing cowardice, their panic terror of life. It's a device of governments, an official cheat.” George was off again. “All states are founded on the obligation of a man to provide for the child he begets and the woman who produces it. The State wants children, wants more and more ‘citizens' for various reasons. The State exploits the love of a man for a woman and his tenderness towards her children – even she may not know whether they are his or not. And so she's taught to say:

‘Be careful, step warily, don't offend any one, remember your first duty is to provide for me and the children, you mustn't let us starve, oh, do be careful,' with the result that the poor man very soon becomes a member of the infinite army of respectable season-ticket holders…”

“Oh! Oh!” Elizabeth laughed again. “Why are you so full of moral indignation?”

“I'm not. Only, I live a great deal alone. I'm always thinking about things and rarely have a chance of speaking about them. Most of my brilliant acquaintances, like Upjohn, have so much to say about themselves that I never seem to get a chance of discussing anything else. And my non-brilliant acquaintances are simply shocked and reproving. They think I'm utterly damned because I read Baudelaire, for instance. Have you noticed the British middle-class superstition that anything they can label ‘Gallic' must necessarily be libidinous and depraved? I get tired of telling them that the beauty of Baudelaire's verse is infinitely more spiritual and ‘uplifting' – to use their damned cant – than all the confounded nonconformist-baptist-cum-Salvation Army.

But the end of George's denunciation was never uttered, for at that moment they were interrupted by the gentle Mrs. Shobbe.

“Excuse me for interrupting you, Mr. Winterbourne. Elizabeth dear, do you know how late it is? I'm afraid you'll miss the last bus, and you know I promised your dear mother I would look after you…”

Both George and Elizabeth saw with surprise and some embarrassment that the studio was nearly empty. Almost every one else had
gone and they hadn't noticed it, absorbed in their delightful exploration of each other. Of course, in these cases it isn't what is said that matters, but all that remains unsaid. The talk is mere “parade”, a rustling out of the peacock's tail, a kind of antennae delicately fumbling. Lovers are like mirrors – each gazes rapturously at himself reflected in the other. How delicious the first flashes of recognition!

Elizabeth jumped nervously to her feet, almost upsetting a small table.

“Oh my! I'd no idea it was so late. I must go. Goodbye, Mr. – ' Mr. – ”

“Winterbourne,” said George. “But if you're going to Hampstead, let me take you back as far as Tottenham Court Road and put you on the Hampstead bus. It's not out of my way at all.”

“Yes, do, Elizabeth. I feel so nervous at your being alone in London at night like this. Whatever should we do if anything happened to you?”

“Why, what's likely to happen?” said George contemptuously, ever ready to defend the cause of female emancipation “she's got sense enough not to let herself be run over, and if any one tries to rape her she can yell for a policeman.”

“Such a violent and rude young man,” Mrs. Shobbe lamented as they went for Elizabeth's things. “But they're all like that now. They seem to have
no
respect for
anything
, not even the purity of womanhood. I don't know if I ought to let him take you home, Elizabeth.”

“Oh, that's all right; besides, I rather like him. He's quite amusing. I shall ask him to come and have tea with me at my studio.”

“
Elizabeth!
”

But Elizabeth was already at the door, where George was waiting. All the guests had departed except Mr. Upjohn and Mr. Waldo Tubbe. A last whiff of their conversation reached George's ears:

“You see, what I mean is, you take Suprematism, what I mean is, you see, there you've got something…”

And like the toll of Big Ben over the sleeping city came Mr. Tubbe's last, deep-breathed, significant, deport-mental:

“Oe-oh.”

3

T
HIS banal party and banal conversation with Elizabeth were of capital importance in George's life. The party with its revelations of character and general tedium, confirmed George in his growing dislike for the intellectual banditti. Self-interest, though universal, is less tolerable in those who are supposed to be above it – there is, of course, no reason why a good artist should not be successful; but when one considers the intrigues now necessary for success, there is a natural prejudice in favour of those who do not elbow in the throng. Vanity is none the less odious even when there is some reason for it, though why any one should feel vain of publishing books and exhibiting pictures is a mystery, when you reflect that two thousand novels a year are published in England alone and that tens of thousands of canvases are showed annually in Paris. Gossip and scandal are none the less scandal and gossip even when witty and when the victims are more or less conspicuous in the small world which receives, or haughtily disdains to receive, Press cuttings. George felt it rather unimportant to know which talented lady was “with” which famous gentleman. His interest was comparatively so languid that he forgot most of the scandal he was told ten minutes after he heard it, and rarely bothered to repeat what little he remembered. Somehow people are frightfully offended if you say “Does it matter?” when they tell you with sparkling eyes that somebody you know has run away with the mistress of Snooks, the painter, or that Pocock, the eminent impresario, has just celebrated the birth of his twenty-fifth illegitimate child. Does it matter, indeed! Why this fascinated delight in the private lives of the great? They're just as sordid as everybody else's.

The artist, anyway, is not nearly so important as he thinks himself. It's all poppycock and swagger for Baudelaire to say that a man can live three days without food but not a day without poetry. It may have been true of Baudelaire; it certainly isn't true of the world in general. In any nation only a comparatively small minority are interested in the arts, and most of those merely want to be amused. If all the artists and writers of a nation were suddenly obliterated by some plague of Egypt, some legitimately vengeful angel, most people would be totally
unaware that they had suffered any loss, unless the newspapers made a fuss about it. But let the journeymen bakers go on strike for a fortnight… If I were a millionaire it would amuse me to go about giving high-minded artists five hundred pounds a year to shut up. The suggestion is not copyright.

Our young friend was, of course, filled with numerous highfalutin delusions about the supreme importance of art and the dazzling supremacy of artists over the rest of mankind. But he had two fairly sound ideas. One was that the artist should do his job, like any one else, as well as he could, without making too much fuss about it; the other was that knowledge of the arts and practice of any art are chiefly important for sharpening the intelligence and perceptions, extending one's experience and intensifying life. These objects are not furthered by scandal, preposterous vanity, and arrivism. He was therefore perfectly right in feeling a certain amount of contempt for Mr. Shobbe's guests. The life of Rousseau the Douanier is infinitely more respectable than that of a fashionable portrait-painter, touting socially for orders. Elizabeth and George continued their conversation on the bus from Holland Park to Tottenham Court Road. Like most bright young things they abounded in their own sense. As George said, it was perfectly obvious that they were an immense improvement on their predecessors, that they knew exactly how to avoid the lamentable errors and absurdities of former generations, and that they were going to have most interesting and delightful lives. Anybody who has not felt these pleasing delusions at the age of twenty must, I fear, be ranged in George's category of abject morons. Youth is so much more valuable than experience; it is also far more intelligent. Few things are more astounding and touching than the kindly tolerance of the young for their imbecile elders. For, have no doubts about it, even the greatest minds degenerate annually, and the finest moral character is repulsive at forty. Think of the fire and flash and inspiring genius of young General Bonaparte and the stupid degeneracy of the Emperor who had to retreat ignominiously from Moscow. A nation which relies on the alleged wisdom of sexagenarians is irrevocably degenerate. Attila was only thirty when he sacked sexagenarian Rome – at least, he ought to have been.

Elizabeth and George were very young, and hence, on a
priori
grounds, extremely intelligent. Probably the highest intensity of life ever reached by man or woman is in the early stages of their first real love affair, particularly if it is not thwarted by insane social and religious
prejudices inherited from the timid and envious aged, and not contaminated by marriage.

They emerged from the stuffy, smoke-heavy room into the broad avenue, and walked towards Notting Hill tube station. A warm southwesterly wind was blowing, moisture-laden, the kindly courier of Spring. Gone was the raw, acrid damp of Winter, and they imagined they could taste in the air the faint, salt flavour of southern seas and the earthy English acres.

“We shall have rain tomorrow,” said George, instinctively looking up at the cloudy sky invisible beyond the glare of street lamps. “It is Spring at last. The crocuses will be nearly over. I must go and look at the flowers at Hampton Court. Will you come?”

“I'd love to, but isn't Hampton Court full of trippers?”

“Not if you go at the right time. I have walked there in the early morning as solitary as ever King Charles when the Privy Garden was really private. I should rather like to live in King William's summerhouse.”

“I like wilder and more primitive country, the Downs and those great round empty Exmoor hills. And I like the clear rough waves dashing against the rocks in Cornwall.”

“I don't know Cornwall, but I love the Downs above Storrington, and I've walked over Exmoor twice. But now I'm rather in revolt against mere country – 'Nature,' as they used to call it. Nature-worship is a sort of Narcissus-worship, holding up Nature's mirror to ourselves. And how abominably selfish these Nature-worshippers are! Why! they want a whole landscape to themselves, and they complain bitterly when farm-labourers want modern grocery stores and w.c.s. Whole communities apparently are to live in static ignorance and picturesque decay in order to gratify their false ideas of what is beautiful.”

“Of course, I hate the Simple-Lifers too. There was a set of them near the place at the seaside where we went for the holidays as children…”

“Oh! Have you got brothers and sisters?”

“A sister and two brothers. Why, haven't you?”

“Yes, I believe so, but I never think about it. Relatives are awful – they contribute absolutely nothing to your interest in life, and think that gives them a perpetual right to interfere in your affairs. And they have the monstrous impudence to pretend that you ought to love them. ‘Blood is thicker than water,' they say sententiously. So it may
be, but I don't want to dabble in thick blood. I hate proverbs – don't you? I've always noticed that anything absurd or tyrannical or fatuous can always be supported by a proverb – the collective stupidity of the ages. But, I say, I'm so sorry I interrupted you. I go on talking and talking, and don't give you a chance to say a word.”

“Oh, I like it. I think your ideas are amusing.”

“Not amusing, merely common-sense. But you mustn't let me talk all the time. You see, I find most people rather oppress my spirits, and keep me from saying what I really think. So as a rule I'm silent, but when I find a sympathetic victim – well, you've already had a bitter experience of how I chatter nineteen to the dozen. There I'm off again. Now tell me what you were going to say about the Simple-Lifers.”

“The Simple-Lifers? Oh, yes, I remember. Well, there was a set of people down there who had fled from the horrors of the mechanical age – you know, the usual art-y sort, Ruskin-cum-William Morris…”

“Handlooms, vegetable diet, long embroidered frocks, with home-spun tweed trousers from the Hebrides? I know them. ‘News from Nowhere' people. What a gospel to lead nowhither!”

“Yes. Well, they were to lead the simple life, work with their hands part of the time, and do arts and crafts and write the rest of the time. They were also to show the world an example of perfect community life. They used to make the farm-girls dance round a Maypole – the boys wouldn't come, they stood in the lane and jeered.”

“And what happened?”

“Well, those who hadn't private incomes got very hard up, and were always borrowing money off the two or three members who had money. The arts and crafts didn't sell, and the toiling on the land had very meagre results. Then they got themselves somehow into two or three cliques, always running down the people in the other cliques, talking scandal about them, and saying they were ruining everything by their selfish behaviour. Then the wife of one of the rich members ran away with one of the men, and the other rich members were so scandalized that they went away too, and the whole community broke up. The village was very glad when they went. The farmers and gentry were furious because they talked Socialism and the ideal State to the labourers. And all the labourers' wives were furious because the Simple-Life women tried to brighten up their lives and make them furnish their cottages ‘artistically.'…”