Part 12

Turgenev never organised his thought as Tolstoi did. He did not explain himself in constructive argument. He had no need. There is implicit in his work, the most gentle, the most tolerant, the most harmonious philosophy that has been expounded by man since the Sermon on the Mount. And Turgenev was a story-teller. He knew that no language speaks more directly to the human heart than that of simple narrative. The Russians hated and distrusted him, especially Dostoieffsky, who could never forgive Turgenev for being a gentleman. But there has never been anyone less a snob, intrinsically, than Turgenev, no one who has stood more simply, less assumingly by his achievements. He was content to be an artist, a maker of beautiful things. He did not, as Tolstoi did, assume the rôle of prophet. “If story-telling is a cheap thing,” we can imagine him to say, “I cannot help it. It is the thing that I was born to do.”

Turgenev knew that it was enough to create beauty: that it is unprofitable folly to ask a direct influence of art; that it is for the politician and the journalist, not the artist, to alter the social fabric. Turgenev was an entertainer; nothing more, and nothing less. To-day the artist has developed a sense of mission. He feels that he is here to get something done. And is in danger, consequently, of exchanging a temporal for an eternal view of life. We have come through our familiarity with the daily press to associate the written word with the statement of a case.

When we read a newspaper article on the conditions of life in Bermondsey our first question is: “That is all very well. But is it thus that the majority of people in Bermondsey exist?” And when we read a novel about Bermondsey we apply the same standard. “Is this,” we ask ourselves, “how the majority of Bermondsians live?” If we decide that it is not, we say that the novel “is not true to life.” We find it hard to rid ourselves of the idea that all writing must be a form of special reporting.

And, of course, for the purposes of a novel it does not in the least matter whether the lives of the majority of Bermondsians do, or do not, correspond with those of the hero and the heroine. Universality is not obtained by cataloguing the routine of a number of uninteresting persons. It is unlikely that many dairy-maids have been the victims of such a disconcerting series of adventures as befell Tess of the D’Urbevilles. But Tess is true to life. It is true to life because Thomas Hardy is a novelist and not a journalist. If he had intended his book to be an “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” if his creative impulse had been inspired by a wish to improve the lot of the Wessex farm-hand, the critics would have been justified in saying: “This is a piece of special pleading based on a particularly unusual combination of circumstances. We therefore consider it to be untrue to life.” For the journalist the word “life” implies the external conditions under which the majority of people live; for the artist, life is the reality behind livelihood, and for the revelation of that reality the choice of subject is comparatively unimportant. The same moment of reality may be presented equally effectively through the most diverse mediums.

The appreciation of the temporal quality of life, of the approach of age, the sense of weakening power, is found in the work of nearly all great writers; but it is expressed by each writer in terms of the phenomena with which he is most familiar. Anthony Trollope would find relief from such a mood in the study of a kindly, ineffectual parson. George Moore would tell the story of some butterfly of the Nouvelle Athène, some Marie Pellegrin. Neville Cardus would recall the fleeting splendour of Tom Richardson. To the journalist there would seem little in common between these three studies. But the artist would see that the subject was in each case the same. In “La Terre,” Zola told the same story that Shakespeare told in “Lear.”

It is only the best sellers nowadays who are writing stories, really writing stories, stories for their own sakes. That is why they are best sellers. They may be bad stories that they are telling, or rather they may be telling the stories badly. For there is no such thing as a new story--it is the treatment that is all-important. But they are stories; and most of their authors, if they chose, if they thought it worth the doing, could write the sort of novel with three hundred readers that would get half a column of serious consideration in the cultured weeklies.

Berta Ruck, for instance. I do not know if her books are ever reviewed in the sixpenny weeklies; I should be inclined to doubt it. But I have not the slightest doubt that her books are a great deal better than the majority of novels that are so honoured. She writes very jolly stories about very jolly people. They begin with a highly improbable situation. A woman persuades a man to become her husband in name so that she can attend to her business unbothered by the attentions of a crowd of suitors. A financier, to pacify his match-making parents, engages a secretary to act as his official fiancée. A girl dresses up as a boy and becomes a chauffeur. Highly improbable occurrences, undoubtedly. But it is permissible to open on a situation of any degree of improbability, provided the characters subsequently behave according to rule. And Berta Ruck’s characters do. They are real people. And what is more important, they are very jolly people. One has a genuine affection for them, which is more than one can say of most modern novels. How often do we come across a hero and a heroine that we really like, that we really want to see in the last chapter happily married to the right person? We do in a Berta Ruck novel, and we will pardon any stretching of coincidence if it allows that fortunate encounter on the last page. To be able to do that, to be able to write a jolly book about jolly people is very much more worth while than.... But we will be neither personal nor malicious. Let us be content to state that it would be certainly more charitable, and probably more accurate to assume that a book sells on account of its qualities rather than its defects.

One envies, sometimes, the people who were born a hundred years ago. It must have been so easy to write then, when all the plots were new and there were so few writers. To-day everyone is writing novels. One is cultivating a soil that has yielded many harvests. One begins a story: for a week, a month, a fortnight one is happy and excited, and then one loses interest suddenly. It is _vieux jeu_, one says. It has all been done so many times before. One is not good enough to make an old thing new. Or, again, it may be that one can find no ending to a story, an ending that has not become banal through other people’s exploitation of it. This, for instance, this scene in a Soho restaurant: a small, unobtrusive, unsensational, but very excellent foreign restaurant in Dean Street, where I used to dine occasionally, in days when I had a bungalow beneath the Downs, after a day’s football, before the last train down to Sussex, when I was tired, when I did not want to be disturbed by music and noise and laughter, when I wanted my eyes to rest on quiet wallpaper and quiet dresses, when I knew exactly what I wanted, and exactly where to find it; there: this one dramatic episode of which it has been my fortune to be a witness.

I had only just taken my seat and begun my examination of the menu when the double-doors of the restaurant swung open and a young girl paused there in the doorway, looking round her with the expression of perplexed embarrassment that the faces of young people assume in a strange place. She made a pretty picture as she stood there, a fur cap fitting tightly over the head, pressing the brown hair into a thick wave about her ears; a small hand raised towards the throat, keeping in its place the woollen scarf that was flung across the shoulder; a slim ankle protruding beneath her skirt, a “tweazy” looking little thing; and if her features were not beautiful, she had the prettiness of all young girls whose figures are slim and graceful--the charm of the green leaf and the bud, that fascinates a man more than beauty does, but that passes quickly and lasts rarely into womanhood.

She stood there, looking round her for a moment, then the perplexed expression left her; she smiled and walked down the centre of the room.

A man rose from a table in the corner and came to meet her. He was one of those men whom it is almost impossible to describe, so much did he resemble the rest of his sex in his dress, his manner, and the general carriage of his person. He looked, and probably was, a gentleman; he was about thirty years old; he had a small dark moustache, and he showed no signs of baldness. Beyond that I could tell nothing. He was hidden in complete security behind the technique of an upbringing.

I could not hear how they greeted each other, but in the way in which he helped her off with her coat there was implied, I fancied, a suggestion of uneasiness. “They do not know each other very well,” I said to myself, and, moving my chair a little further to the right, I arranged myself so that I should be able to watch them without turning my head.

The suggestion of uneasiness was repeated as he leaned over the table towards her with the menu. “He is a little too eager,” I told myself. “He is anxious to make a success of it, and he is overacting. He is confoundedly uncomfortable.” And, calling the waiter, I ordered a dish of which the preparation would take, I knew, a good twenty minutes--and settled myself to enjoy the little comedy.

He had ordered an expensive dinner--champagne, a fried sole, a pheasant and a Japanese salad, and a mushroom savoury. He was desperately anxious to make it a success, and, to avoid awkward pauses, he was talking most of the time: amusingly, too, I gathered, for she often smiled at what he said, and once she burst out laughing--fresh, clear laughter; and that laugh, which came about half-way through the meal, revealed to me what indeed I should have seen before, that, while he was enduring agonies of self-consciousness, she was solely concerned with the natural enjoyment of a good dinner in pleasant company. “The plot thickens,” I said, for this discovery ruled out the possibility of the pleasant little romance I had been considering--their parents had forbidden their marriage, they had decided to run away feeling very brave when the scheme was only under discussion, but now that the moment had come they repented the splendid resolution and would give anything to be in their respective homes sitting before the fire, thinking pleasantly of bed. That solution would have to go; for, if this was the case, she would certainly be as nervous, and probably more nervous, than he, unless--but that was a contingency of which I refused to consider the possibility. The elopement idea would have to go, and, besides, there was not the least suggestion that they were lovers; they had not once looked into each other’s eyes; they had not been even silent together, and silence is the beginning of love. They were not man and wife; they were not avowed lovers; they did not even seem to be potential lovers.

And yet this dinner was for him certainly a big occasion. She meant something to him. But what? It was possible, of course, that he was in love with her, and not she with him. But that was no cause for shyness. Courtship is a leisured and, on the whole, pleasant business; and surely the young man was not so foolish as to be contemplating a premature proposal on the way home. For there is nothing more fatal than a hurried courtship. A moment comes when a girl expects a man to take her by the hand and tell her that he loves her, and would be angry with him if he did not. But it is disastrous to anticipate a climax. And this the young man knows; being a man of thirty such moments must have often come to him before. “And yet, perhaps,” I said to myself, “he is contemplating this folly. Why?”

And, putting down my glass, I began to frame a story. He had been an officer in the war, and after demobilisation had gone up to Oxford to take his degree. That was quite possible, and would make him twenty-eight years old to-day. Yes, he had gone up to Oxford, and had decided to go in for the Civil Service; he had wanted a post in the Home Civil, but he had not been able to make up for the years he had lost during the war, and he had passed into the Indian Civil. In a fortnight he would go abroad for several years, and there was this girl whom he had met perhaps at tennis, and with whom he had fallen in love, fascinated by her delicacy, her frail grace, her suggestion of the butterfly. She was young and inexperienced, and had regarded his love as comradeship, for he was undemonstrative, and talked about dancing and the cricket championship; and now he was going away. He had asked her out to dinner, and was desperately anxious to bring things to a head before he went. And of all this she knew nothing.

An interesting situation that could be developed into a good story. In the man’s failure to pass into the Home Civil Service there would be just a hint of the sad position of the ex-soldier; he had served, and had been passed over in favour of someone who had not. And on this failure hung the significance of his romance. He had prepared himself for a slow, quiet courtship, and now found that he had to compress into a few days the campaign of several months--and, of course, he had not been able to. He was not the man to capture a young girl’s heart by storm. If he succeeded in making her fall in love with him, it would be only after many weeks of growing intimacy. She would begin by confiding in him--that would be the first step; and then--but it would be a slow business, and, at any rate, it was impossible now. In three days he would have to go to India.

It was really a capital story, and I began to plan it out: the meeting at a tennis tournament; the news of his failure at the exam.; the dinner party in the restaurant; and then the journey home in the taxi. I could see it so clearly.

They would sit in silence for a while. Then he would lean forward and whisper her name, and she would turn her head and look at him with surprise.

“Yes,” she would say.

And he would not know what to do in the unaccustomed situation; and, as he had over-acted in the restaurant to hide his nervousness, so would he overact now. Without any warning he would take her in his arms and kiss her awkwardly and say: “I love you.” It would be a horrible failure. Very likely it would be her first kiss, and she would have her own romantic conception of what a first kiss should be, and she would be angry with him for his clumsiness. The kiss will have given her no pleasure, and that she cannot forgive him. She will push him from her, will probably say: “Now you’ve spoilt it all,” for at these moments it is the ridiculous that occurs to us, and she would speak out of her recollection of book and magazine heroines, and he would try and explain, but she would shake her head angrily.

“Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Can’t you see that you’ve spoilt everything?”

And, when they reached her home, she would jump out of the taxi and run straight up the steps without turning to say good-bye to him, and he would sit back in the cushions reflecting dismally that in three days he would sail for India, and would not see her again for three--perhaps four--years.

A good story! I would sit down to write it as soon as I got home, not waiting for the morning to blur my impression of her startled girlhood. And I should not find it difficult to end this story. While he was away he would write to her and ask forgiveness, protesting that he loved her, had always loved her, that he was sorry for his rudeness; and that, when he came back, might he hope--a trite letter it would be; but then, if it were anything but trite, he would be a writer of much talent, and that I did not propose to make him. No; he would write her an ordinary love-letter, and she, being an ordinary woman, would be moved by it, and, with the distance hiding her blushes, she would write, saying that she had been young and foolish, but was now wise, and would gladly wait for him. And during four years they would create slowly, letter by letter, an illusion of each other out of the enchantment of things remote. He would become her Prince Charming, and she would be for him a creature of infinite fragrance. And then, when they met again, she would find herself in the arms of a prosaic Anglo-Indian, with thinning hair, and he would find that a girl had become a woman, that her pretty features had grown petulant during the years of waiting.

And in the morning I should have to decide whether or not they should marry; probably they would, from a lack of the courage that looks at itself in the glass and says: “You have failed, my friend.” Yes, it would be truer to make them marry, and perhaps she might be happy in her children, while he found pleasure in the society of another woman. But, at any rate, a dream would have been passed, and that would be the object of my story: to tell simply how everything changes, everything passes; not a new philosophy and one that occurred to Heraclitus, but true nevertheless.

And looking across at the couple in the corner, I thought with real sympathy on their sad fate. They were just getting ready to go; the waiter had brought the bill neatly folded upon a plate; the girl had turned towards a large photograph of the Royal Family, and was endeavouring to arrange her hair from the blurred reflection in it.

She was smiling and happy, ignorant of the disaster that awaited her. Within five minutes she would have been embraced clumsily, would have assured her lover that “he had spoiled everything,” and the curtain would have descended on the first act of the tragedy. Could nothing be done to save her; it was cruel--so young, so fresh and with so brief a springtime.

I was indulging myself in this soft, sentimental reverie, for a story-teller always runs in great danger of confusing his own reality with that of the world, and of regarding everything that happens to himself and to his friends as chapter headings in a novel. I was just, I say, indulging my pet weakness to the top of my bent when suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was the witness of a real dramatic incident.

The girl had turned to arrange her hair in the blurred reflection of the sheet of glass that protected the Royal Family from dust, and, in order to brush a little powder from her chin, she had taken her pocket-handkerchief from her bag. The bag lay open on the table, its mouth pointing to her companion, and, to my amazement, I saw the man lean forward, glance round the room to see if anyone was looking, and then quickly take from the bag a couple of pound notes; these he placed on the plate under the bill, added another note of his own, and called the waiter’s attention to the plate. Then, a minute later, the plate returned; the waiter received a substantial tip, in return for which he helped his clients on with their coats and bowed them out of the restaurant; all of which I watched in dazed, though intrigued, wonderment. I suppose I ought to have risen from my seat and called the girl’s attention to the theft, but it is hard for one who has chosen for himself the rôle of onlooker to decide on violent and sudden action. And besides, I have learnt that interference is invariably unwise, that I cannot expect other people to mind their own business until I mind mine. At any rate, whatever was the right thing to do, I did what it was natural for me to do under such circumstances: I sat where I was, and in five minutes became lost in a vague and wistful speculation.

The reasons for the man’s embarrassment were now clear; all the evening he had been waiting his opportunity to steal his companion’s money--that much was obvious. And to think that for half an hour I had been concocting an absurd story after the manner of Turgenev, about an Indian Civil Servant and “the girl he left behind him”! Impatiently I called for my bill, tipped the waiter, and walked out into Dean Street.

The cool air did me good in restoring my self-confidence. It was a mistake, I told myself, that anyone might have made. We do not expect to meet thieves outside the Stock Exchange and the pages of the police reports. And it was quite a good story that I had invented--a slight debt to Turgenev perhaps, but then every short story that is written owes something either to Turgenev or de Maupassant or Tchecov. And I had, besides, the material for another really first-class tale. I could see it so clearly: the young girl prattling away pleasantly and the man getting more and more worried. “Will she never powder her nose?” he asks himself, and tries to hide his anxiousness beneath a series of amusing anecdotes. And no doubt I could make them discuss the modern girl, and she will say that she hates the girl who powders and paints; and he will have to agree with her, seeing that her complexion is her own, although he is, for the first time in his life, hating the fresh bloom of her cheek and praying that she were another sort of girl--a delightful situation. And then, at last, when all seems lost, I could make her lean forward to smell the flowers on the table, and a speck of yellow pollen would attach itself to her chin, to which he would, of course, call her attention.

“Is there really,” she would say, and, opening her bag, she would take out her handkerchief, turn to the photograph beside them, and give him his opportunity.

Up to that point it would be quite simple. But beyond it a lot of thought would be required. So good a motive must not be flung away, and all the way down the Charing Cross Road I turned the incident over in my mind.

Fifteen years ago I could have made him an agent in the White Slave Traffic. It was a popular theme then; every young girl who came up to London looked round at Paddington apprehensively for the kindly old lady who would ask her if she was new to these parts. Yes, fifteen years ago it would have been a moving story. But, during the last fifteen years, Villiers Street has become placarded with shilling descriptions of “Why Girls Go Wrong”; and the Bishop of London has written a great many prefaces and preached a great many sermons. The White Slave Traffic is _vieux jeu_. Still, there was something in the seduction _motif_. “Yes, certainly,” I said to myself, as I presented my season-ticket at the barrier at Victoria and walked down the platform in search of a corner-seat; something might be made out of it: and by the time we had reached Selhurst a story had begun to form itself in my mind.

She had come up from the provinces for the day, and had met an old friend of hers who had asked her out to dinner; she had intended to catch the last train home. The man is smitten by her beauty and wonders how he can best possess it. Should he steal her money she will be unable to buy a ticket back.

The picture grew before me. I could see them at the booking-office. I could see her fumbling in her bag, searching every pocket, and then turning to him with a despairing look.

“I’ve lost the money.”

“Oh, no; surely not,” he would say. “It must be in one of your pockets. Have another look.”

And she would make another long, careful search which would, of course, be equally vain. And she would turn to him with tear-filled eyes.

“But what am I to do? I can’t get home. I haven’t any money to buy a ticket.”