Death of a Hero (22 page)

They had missed two buses outside the tube station in their excited chatter. A third came along. George grabbed Elizabeth's arm:

“Come on, here's our bus. Let's go on top.”

The bus-top was empty except for a couple spooning on a back seat. George and Elizabeth a little haughtily went to the very front.

“Other people's love-affairs are very tedious,” said George sententiously.

“Oh, very.”

“Rather primitive and humiliating.”

“Why humiliating?”

“Oh, because.”

“Fares, please!”

The conductor lurched skilfully against the front of the bus as it made a cow-like leap forward. George raked in his pocket for the pennies.

“Let me pay my share.”

Elizabeth produced a sixpence.

“Oh no, please. Look, let me take you back to Hampstead, and you can pay from Tottenham Court Road.”

“All right.”

The conductor and the fare-paying had interrupted the rhythm of their communication. They were silent. The bus ran noisily along the wave-furrowed, shiny, tarred street, with the dark mystery of Kensington Gardens to the right and the equally mysterious boarding-houses of Bayswater to the left. Near the street-lamps the grass behind the railing was a vivid artificial green, as if some one had splashed down a bucketful of bright paint. Like savages in some primitive dance, the ancient trees swayed slowly, irregularly, and mysteriously in the strong wind. A red apocalyptic glow from the lights of Oxford Street stained luridly and uneasily the low rolling clouds before them. The grey monster Ennui of Sunday-in-London had vanished. George took his hat off and let the wind rumple his hair. Their young cheeks were fresh with driving moist rain.

“Don't you really like the Pre-Raphaelites?” asked Elizabeth, as the bus slowed down near Lancaster Gate.

“I used to. About three years ago I was quite cracked about Rossetti and Burne-Jones and Morris. Now I simply hate them. I can still read Browning and Swinburne – Browning for his sense of life, Swinburne for his intoxicating rhetoric. But after spending three
months in Paris I get frightfully excited about modern painting. Do you know Apollinaire?”

“No, who's he?”

“Oh, he's a Polish Jew who has written some quite good poems and does amusing word-pictures he calls Calligrammes. He lives by writing and editing obscene books, and he's the great defender of the new painters like Picasso and Braque and Lager and Picabia.”

“The Cubists?”

“Yes.”

“I've only heard of them. I never saw any of their work. I thought they were just ‘wild men' and
fumistes
?”

“You wait ten years, and see then if you dare to say that Picasso is a
fumiste!
But haven't you been to Paris?”

“Yes, I was there last year, in September.”

“We must have been there together. How curious! I wish I'd seen you.”

“Oh, it was very dull. I was with father and mother, and everybody we met kept talking about the coming war with Germany. A friend of father's in the Admiralty told him in confidence that it was absolutely certain to happen.

“What nonsense!” said George explosively, “what absolute nonsense! Haven't you read Norman Angell's
Great Illusion?
He shows quite conclusively that war does nearly as much damage to the victor as the conquered. And he also says that the structure of modern international commerce and finance is so delicate and widespread that a war couldn't possibly last more than a few weeks without coming to an end automatically, because all the nations would be ruined. I'll lend you the book if you like.”

“I don't know anything about such things, but father's friend said the Government were very worried about the position.”

“I can't believe it. What! A war between European nations in the twentieth century? It's quite unthinkable. We're far too civilized. It's over forty years since the Franco-Prussian War…”

“But there's been a Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan Wars…”

“Well, yes, but they're different. I can't believe any of the big European nations would start a war with another. Of course, there are Chauvins and Junkers and Jingoes, but who cares a hang about them? The people don't want war.”

“Of course, I don't know, but I heard Admiral Partington telling father that the navy is bigger, newer, and more efficient than it's ever been. And he said the German army is huge and most efficient and the French are so frightened they've made the period of conscription three years. And he said, look out when the Kiel Canal is opened.”

“Good Lord, you surely don't believe what stodgy old Admirals say, do you? It's their job to frighten people with war scares so that they can go on getting money out of the country and building their ridiculous Dreadnoughts. I met a coastguard officer last summer, who got drunk and said he'd sealed orders as to what to do in case of war. I told him I thought that seal would not be broken until the angels in the Apocalypse arrived.”

“And what did he say to that?”

“He just shook his head, and ordered another whisky.”

“Well, it doesn't concern us. It's not our business.”

“No, thank God, it doesn't and can't concern us.”

They were in Oxford Street, rolling past the shuttered shop-fronts. A good many people were on the pavements, but the street was comparatively empty of vehicles, empty and sonorous. As they ran down past Selfridge's, the curved line of lights in the centre of the street looked like an uncoiled necklace of luminous, glittering beads. At Oxford Circus they gazed down the old Regent Street with its long lines of
café-au-lait
Regency houses, broken only at the Quadrant by the new Piccadilly Hotel.

“Isn't that like us?” said George. “We have an attempt at town-planning, and, dull as Nash is, at any rate his design is simple and dignified, and then we go and ruin the Quadrant with a horrid would-be-modern hotel.”

“But I thought you believed in modernity in art.”

“So I do, but I don't believe in mucking up the art of the past if it can be avoided. Besides, I don't call these pastiches of Renaissance palaces modern architecture. The only people who have got a live modern architecture are the Americans, and they don't know it.”

“Those awful sky-scrapers!”

“They're awful in one way, but they're original. I saw some photographs of New York from the harbour recently, and I thought it the most beautiful city in the world, a sort of gigantic and stupendous Venice. I'd like to go there – wouldn't you?”

“No, I'd like to go to Paris and live in the real students' quarter, and to Italy and Spain.”

The bus stopped at the end of Tottenham Court Road. They got down, and crossed the street to wait for the Hampstead bus.

“Look here,” said Elizabeth: “why do you bother to come all the way out to Hampstead? I'm perfectly used to going about alone. I shall be all right.”

“Of course, you would be. But I'd like to come most awfully. I hope I shall see a good deal of you, and we haven't arranged where and when to meet again.”

“But there won't be a bus back.”

“Oh, I shall walk. I like walking. And it'll be an antidote to the fug and idiotic talk at Shobbe's. Here's the bus. Come on.”

They clambered on to the top of the bus, and again got the front seat. Elizabeth took off her right-hand glove to pay the fare, and after the conductor had gone George gently and rather timidly put his hand on hers. She did not withdraw it. Having established this delicious and dangerous contact, they sat silent for a while. The firm, cool male hand gently espoused her slim, glove-warmed fingers. In them both was the exaltation of the Cyprian, potential desire recognized only as a heightening of vitality. The first step along the primrose path – how delightful! But whither does it lead? To what everlasting bonfires of servitude or ashy wastes of indifference? Neither of them thought of the future. Why should they? The young at least have the sense to live only in the present moment.

Preceded by the silver dove-drawn chariot of the Paphian, the heavy bus lumbered northward. Sweet is the smile of Cypris, but ironic and a little terrifying, enigmatic as the fixed smile of the Veian Apollo.

Like all imaginative and sensitive men, George was not what is called an enterprising lover. He had too much male modesty, the inherent
pudor
which is so much stronger and more genuine than the induced modesty of women, that coquettish flight of the nymph who casts a rosy apple at her pursuer to encourage him to continue. Odd, but perhaps in the nature of things, that those men who have most contempt for women are generally the most successful with them. There must be a vast amount of latent masochism in women, ranging from the primitive delight in being knocked down, to the subtle enjoyment of complex jealousies. How ghastly – if you think about it – their passion for
soldiers! To breed babies by him who has slain men – puh! there's too much spilt blood in the world; one sickens at it. Give me some civet…

Once more they fell into talk – eager, excited, more intimate talk. They were calling each other “George” and “Elizabeth” before they reached the stately homes of Camden Town. By the time they passed Mornington Crescent they had admitted that they liked each other “frightfully” and would see a good deal of each other. In their excitement they talked rather incoherently, jumping from one topic to another in their eagerness to say something of all that seemed to clamour for expression, recklessly wasting their emotional energy. Their laughter had the ring of pure happiness. George slipped his arm through Elizabeth's and held her fingers more amorously. Their natures expanded in a sudden delicious efflorescence; great coloured plumes of flowers seemed to sway and nod above their heads. They were enclosed in a nimbler air, the clear oxygen of desire, so compact, so resistant to the grey monster Ennui of Sunday-in-London.

“Isn't it strange!” George exclaimed, with that fatuity peculiar to lovers; “I only met you this evening and yet I feel as if I had known you all my life!”

“So do I!”

He gratefully squeezed her fingers in silence, caught in a sudden panic of bashfulness, unable to pursue further.

“Do let's meet often. We can go to the galleries and Queen's Hall and Hampton and Oxshott. I can get you tickets for the new picture shows. Do you know the Allied Artists?”

“Yes, I belong.”

“Do you? Why ever didn't you tell me you are a painter too?”

“Oh, I'm such a bad painter; besides, you didn't ask me.”

“Touché!
How self-absorbed one is! I apologize.”

“You must come and have tea at my studio and look at my – what I call my pictures. But you mustn't be too critical. When can you come?”

“Any time. Tomorrow if you like.”

Elizabeth laughed.

“Oh! Oh! You are impatient. Can you come on Friday?”

“So long? It seems ages away!”

“Well, Thursday, then.”

“All right; what time?”

“About four.”

Elizabeth was probably not acquainted with Stendhal's ingenious theory of crystallization, but she acted instinctively in accordance with it. Three days and four nights made exactly the right period. Tomorrow was too soon, the crystals would be in process of formation. A week would be rather too long, they would be tending to disintegrate… Infinite subtlety of females! One must admit they need it.

George accompanied Elizabeth to the boarding-house where she lived and took the address of her studio. She held out her hand, after putting the latch-key in the Yale lock.

“Till Thursday, then, good-night.”

“Good-night.”

He held her hand a moment, and then awkwardly and timidly kissed it. In her turn she felt a sudden panic, opened the door swiftly, and disappeared inside, with a last hasty “Good-night, good-night!”

George stood for several moments irresolutely on the step. He was desolated, thinking he had offended her.

Inside Elizabeth was murmuring silently to herself:

“He kissed my hand, he kissed my hand! I've a lover, a lover!”

The sudden panic and flight were a masterpiece of erotic strategy – they left that feeling of uncertainty, of mingled hope and fear, so valuable to the production of a powerful crystallization.

George walked back to Greek Street, enclosing in himself a small chaos of emotions and thoughts. He went by way of Fitzjohn's Avenue and St. John's Wood. The infinite debate in a lover's mind – did she or didn't she, would she or wouldn't she? – moved in those curious arabesques where a mind continually wanders away from a main stem of thought, and perpetually comes back to it. Upjohn's ridiculous conceit, Shobbe's party, never go to that sort of thing again, Bobbe's acrid offensiveness, how delicate that line from her ear to her throat, I should like to paint her, now, in that article tomorrow I must try to show clearly and definitely what the new painters are attempting, I wonder if she was really offended when I kissed her hand, but I must think about that article, let me see, begin with an explanation of non-representational, yes, that's it, I must get a new tie for Thursday, this one's worn out… And thus, with merciless iteration.

Under a gas-lamp near Marlborough Road Station he stopped and tried to write his first poem, and was surprised to find how difficult it was and what nonsense he wrote. A policeman came out of a side-street, and looked a little suspiciously at him. George moved on. A little later he began to sing “Bid me to live”, interrupted himself half-way through to make a note for a study in analysis of form. He walked rapidly and absorbedly, unconscious of his physical fatigue. Just before he crossed Oxford Street, he stopped and clapped his hands together. My God! I was a fool to kiss her hand the first time I met her, she'll think I do that to every girl and won't want to speak to me again. Oh well, it's done. I wish I could kiss her mouth. I must remember to tell her on Thursday about that show at the Leicester Gallery.