Part 13

And in her voice would be the suggestion that he should lend her some, and, of course, he would say that he had none with him, but that if she would come back to his flat.... And she would thank him effusively and they would leap into a taxi, but when they arrived at the flat, which would be at the top of four flights of stairs, with the flat below unoccupied, he would discover that he had no money after all, and that the porter had gone, and that there was no one from whom he could borrow any; she would sink down on the sofa, her hands clasped before her knees, while he stood behind her wondering at what exact point----

But at that moment the train stopped at East Croydon, where I had to change and wait twenty minutes for a connection; and, while I stamped up and down the platform trying to keep warm, a swift dissatisfaction with my story overcame me. What did it matter what he said next, or at what exact point he ... for whatever he did, or whatever she did, the story as I had elected to tell it could only end in one way--a row of dots, and a short concluding paragraph: “Next morning, her dark hair scattered across the pillow, she woke in a strange room....” And how often that has been done. In how many novels has not that dark hair been scattered across that pillow? It was theatrical, vulgar, the sort of plot that occurs to one as one sits in the smoking-room of one’s club after a heavy lunch and half a bottle of Pommard, and I walked up and down the platform of East Croydon station in a state of cold and miserable self-contempt.

But warmth revives us, and when I was again in the corner-seat of a smoker, down the window of which the heat ran in long, straggly trickles, I began to think that, after all, though I had to wash out the seduction motive, there might be something in the idea of the lost return-ticket, and the last train to Anerley. Suppose now that the young man had for a long time besieged unsuccessfully his fair companion, and that on the refusal of his third proposal he had decided that he would never secure the hand of his beloved unless he managed to compromise innocently her honour?

Yes, that might work out. He would steal her money at the restaurant; they would reach the booking-office where the scene which I have already described would be enacted. There would be the return to the flat and the discovery that the porter was out, and that, after all, he had forgotten to cash the cheque he had written out that morning.

“But what am I to do?” she would say.

And, with well-simulated confusion, he would mutter something about not minding a “shake-down” on the sofa, and that if she would take his room ...

“Oh, but I couldn’t! How could I? What would mother say?”

Just a little touch that would place the mother at once before the reader’s eye--a plump, heavy woman with a small, unsatisfactory husband. A woman of strong passions, that have focussed themselves on a rigid observance of the proprieties.

“But what else are you to do?” the young man would exclaim, and he would stammer something about giving her his key. And, in the end, she would consent to pass the night there, and next morning they would arrive at Anerley together with the milk, and be received by the mother in the front-parlour, a cold, melancholy room with the fire smoking dismally. She would receive them with her hands on her hips, and she would say one word, “Well!” and then listen while the young man stammered his explanations. Of course she would not believe him: he had never expected her to, and would have been miserably disappointed if she had. He would listen to her threats and tirades, and then, at the right moment, he would draw himself up to his full height.

“Madam,” he would say, “your accusations are untrue; the door of the room in which your daughter slept was locked all night. I slept on the sofa. But to prove my honour, and to vindicate hers, I am prepared--and shall be proud--to marry your daughter.”

A slow smile would spread across the mother’s face. Honour saved, a daughter off her hands; and at last the daughter, moved by his chivalry, might even fall in love with her knight-errant.

I considered this solution during the two miles’ walk from Hassocks station. It was original. I had never seen it done before. Such a situation is common enough in modern fiction. But the mistake is usually genuine, and that scene in the dismal parlour is the prelude to long years of married misery. Occasionally the affair is arranged by the girl, if she can trust her lover’s lack of enterprise. For a girl is more interested in marriage than a man, and proposes it indirectly more often than the admirers of the strong man would have us think. But for a man to plan such an escapade--that would indeed be new. And I went to sleep contented, thinking that the next day would pass pleasantly in congenial work.

But there is a poem by a poetess, now little read, which contains the lines:

“Colours seen by candlelight Do not look the same by day,”

and when the sun shone next morning through my bedroom window my plot seemed less original than I had thought it the night before. What was it, after all, but a conceit? It said “black” to someone else’s “white”; it turned an old coat inside out, and though it would no doubt cause surprise if I were to walk down the village with my coat inside out, it would not be a particularly original act, and it would be the same coat.

That is not the way to make a good story--to tack an old situation on to a new one. I should have to find a different ending somehow; it was no good setting out to write it yet. For want of anything better to do, I walked out and began to weed the garden. But though I weeded the flower-beds in front of the house, and did valiant work with a hoe among the cabbages, no idea had come to me by lunch-time. And, though I spent the whole afternoon before a jigsaw puzzle, the most restful of all pursuits, tea-time found my mind a blank, and in this state it remained until a friend, to whom I had related the incident, made a most pertinent remark:

“Why, if the girl could see her face reflected in the photograph, did she not see the young man take the money from her purse?”

I sat in surprised silence. Why had I not thought of that before?

“Yes,” I said, “but if she saw, why didn’t she say something?”

“That’s for you to find out.”

And for the next three days I searched my mind for reasons for her silence.

At last I began to see the glimmerings of a tale, the fifth that I had constructed about this romantic couple. And this is what I saw: a shy young man from the provinces comes up to London with an introduction to some wealthy friends. There is a daughter whom he thinks very beautiful, and with whom he thinks that he might in a short while find himself in love. And he suggests very timidly that it would be nice if she would show him “round the sights,” for he wants to see London, and has no other friends in it. And, as these wealthy people have advanced views, or perhaps because the daughter has succeeded in impressing her views upon her parents, his suggestion is accepted; the result is a lunch at the Criterion, a theatre, and tea afterwards. As they seem to be getting on rather well together, he suggests a dinner-party. He would like to see Soho.

“Oh, but I must go back and ask mother first,” she says.

“Really?”

“Of course; it’s very nice of her to let me out at all. I must go back and ask her.”

And he admires this sense of duty, which is probably only an excuse for a change of frock. And so she returns home to tell her mother how well everything is going, while he goes to the little Soho restaurant to engage a table; and then, while he is waiting for her, he makes a horrible discovery. He has only a pound left; what is he to do? He picks up the menu, and sees that it will be impossible for him to dine in anything like the way he wishes for less than thirty shillings. He is a stranger; the restaurant will not give him credit. There is no one to whom he can go to for a loan; he cannot ask the girl, on their first day together, to lend him money. And so, all through the dinner there hangs over his head the menace of that piece of folded paper. What will happen to him? He remembers seeing once in Manchester the proprietor pitch an impecunious client headlong into the street. They could hardly do that to him. He would be too big, but he will be disgraced in the girl’s eyes. He has not the presence to carry off such a scene with honour. He will stammer and mumble, and try to explain, and look foolish; probably in the end he will leave his watch in bail, while the girl will stand by him, ashamed of him and contemptuous.

He tries to make the meal last as long as possible; they have coffee and two liqueurs and endless cigarettes; but the moment comes at last when she begins to button on her gloves and collect her things.

“I really must go now,” she says, “and it has been such a lovely evening. Thank you so much.”

And he looks in misery at the piece of folded paper. Then, just as he is preparing to signal to the waiter and ask for an interview with the patron, the temptation comes: her bag lies open facing him; she is looking the other way. He sees money. Here is the way out; perhaps she will not notice that she has lost it. She is rich. At any rate, he must run the risk. And, as she tidies her hair in the glass, she sees him take her money.

She is shocked, terribly shocked, but it is easy to understand her silence; her curiosity is whetted, she is interested in the young man, and guesses that one day it may very well be that she will feel more than interest for him. Money is of no great concern to her.

Yes, I could see the scene clearly enough; it would provide me with excellent opportunities for dramatic dialogue; the growing uneasiness of the man with the girl’s gradual appreciation of it and wonder at the cause of it, the hope, perhaps, that it is the beginning of love. A good scene, but it would be impossible not to write a good scene with such a setting and such an episode. But, even as I saw it, I knew that it would be no good. To what climax would it work: to nothing but the old _cliché_--“I knew it all along.” It would be kept as a surprise, of course; the reader would not be told that the girl had seen the theft reflected in the looking-glass. The story would describe the progress of their courtship; the heart-searchings of the young man. “If I tell her, will she despise me?” How the machinery would creak, how often it has been done before; and at last the stage would be set for the confession.

“I have something terrible to tell you, dear.”

He would blurt it out and then hide his face in her lap for shame, and she would stroke his hair softly and smile.

“Silly old dear,” she would say. “I knew it all along!”

How trite it would be, how banal! And the fact that it might be very likely true would not in any way redeem it. We are plagiarists in life as we are in books, and there are certain motives that are now impossible in a story, although they occur in life. They have been used too often. What a weariness overcomes us when we discover in a novel of matrimonial dispute that the wife is about to become a mother, and that in consequence the hero cannot run off with his secretary.

No doubt it is an affair of frequent occurrence; impending maternity frustrates an impending honeymoon. Autumn lays waste the spring. But no self-respecting novelist would allow “the little stranger” to extricate him from a difficulty. And, in the same way, no self-respecting novelist would allow a heroine “to know it all along.” It is a motive that has served its purpose well enough in its time, but when a coin has passed through many hands the signs and figures on it are worn away; it is valueless and is returned to the Mint; which is the proper place for “the little stranger” and “I knew it all along.”

And now, having attempted five different stories, all of them unsatisfactory, I know that it is my duty to provide a conclusion that shall be unexpected and that shall ridicule my previous conjectures. I know that I ought to meet in the restaurant at a later date the hero or heroine, or both of them together, and learn from them the true story; there should be--I know it--a punch in the last paragraph; but that is exactly what I cannot give, for I do not know the real end of the story and have been unable to invent one. Unsatisfactory, perhaps, but intriguing all the same. In a world where so much is ordered by the inviolable laws of mathematics, it is pleasant to find something that is truly incomplete. For the first time in my life I was the witness of a dramatic episode, the sort of thing that one would not see again in a thousand years. It was a fragment in the lives of two people, and it must remain a fragment, a baffling, fascinating fragment. And, on the whole, I am glad to have it so. Such another moment will never come to me. When the voice of the lecturer begins to fade, when the sun beats down upon the mound at Lord’s and the cricket becomes slow: at all times when the mind detaches itself from its surroundings I shall return in my imagination to that evening in the restaurant. It will be a treasure for all time, a book in which I shall read for ever without weariness. Perhaps one day I shall hit upon the meaning of it; but I hope not. I prefer to keep it an enigma, to be able to shut my eyes and watch the growing embarrassment of a young man who is planning an unnatural theft, to see a young girl stand in the doorway of a restaurant, a fur cap fitting tightly over her head, a gloved hand raised across her throat.

XII

Certain motives, I said, after a while get written out, and must be sent like coins for renewal to the mint. And so of a particular technique, of certain ways of narrative, the chronicle novel for example. In 1911 everyone was telling the story of a generation’s passage through youth to middle age; it had become the fashionable medium for social satire; it seemed the destined channel for the main stream of early twentieth-century narrative. But already a dam has been placed across its path, the dam of the years 1914-1918.

The novel reader, I suppose, knows no greater weariness, no sensation of more profound misgiving than that which comes over him when he realises on page 173 that the action of the story is about to land him in the year 1913. He loses interest immediately. What does it matter, he asks himself, whether Jane becomes engaged to that rascal Harry, or Arthur elopes with the designing Marjorie? August 1914 is coming, and from whatever manner of fix into which, between now and then, they may contrive to place themselves the author will have no difficulty in extricating them. The reader feels that he has been deceived. He has no use for the _deus ex machinâ_. He feels as the small boy did who flung the _Iliad_ in disgust across the room, and exclaimed: “Rotten! they never had a fair fight once. There was always a god on one side or another.”

The war, in the average novel, is an effect without a cause. It is unquestionable that a great many homes were absolutely turned inside out by “the great interruption.” There is no doubt that a great many difficulties were removed by this heaven-sent intervention, even as a great many simple situations were made interminably complex. All over the world there was effect without a cause, but in the novel, which is an essentially artificial thing, a thing that one makes with one’s own hands, there can be no effect without cause. And the conscientious novelist gazes in dismay at this tear across the fabric of life. He can, of course, start his story earlier; but there can be no real conclusion to a chronicle novel that ends in 1910. The reader knows that, in four years’ time, the happy home on which the curtain has so tenderly descended will be in chaos and that the hero will have to set out again on his travels. He can hardly begin it in December 1918 with the picture of a young man walking out of his tailor’s, in a grey tweed suit. A chronicle novel can barely get started in five years. And it is equally difficult for a writer to take the war in his stride. There have been one or two attempts; but, with the exception of “The Forsyte Saga,” they have been failures. For that type of novel one wants a clear ten years on either side.

Or it may be that the generating force of the movement is already spent; it may be that the reader has grown indifferent through repetition to the fortunes of the shy, sensitive young man who retired into a corner and read Keats while his companions were playing football, and to whom one of the masters would deliver himself of some such portentous prophecy as: “You are not for the middle way. You will rise or you will sink. The stars for you, or the depths.” And there was certainly a singular similarity about that young man’s early amatory adventures; the wanton with the heart of gold; the pure girl and the unhappy marriage; the splendid heroism of infidelity. It seemed very daring and original in 1912 to end a novel with a divorce instead of with a marriage. But was such an end any more conclusive than the Victorian wedding bells? In the Victorian novel the young man gets engaged to the wrong girl, but meets the right girl in time to marry her. In the Georgian novel the marriage to the right girl is preceded by a divorce, instead of a broken engagement.

Fashions pass quickly nowadays, there are so many novels and so many novelists. One man starts a movement; a whole host of lesser writers follow him, prejudicing him with their imitations. This romantic movement of Michael Sadleir’s: ten years at the most I give it. “Desolate Splendour” is a good book, but it is the forerunner inevitably of a positive cavalcade of melodramatic barons and pornographic duchesses. As a publisher’s reader I shiver to think of the fare with which these next few summers will provision me.

We have too many books: that is the whole trouble. And it is not from the commercial point of view that I am complaining. I am not saying the supply is greater than the demand. It isn’t. The number of novelists has increased, but so has the reading public. Commercially the writer has a pretty good time of it nowadays. The big men, Wells and Galsworthy and Bennett, must have made more money out of writing than Dickens and Thackeray ever did: and we others, life is materially easier for us than it was probably for our brothers of the 1820’s. At any rate, I know no other profession in which a man of twenty-five can afford to play cricket three whole days of a working week. It is not on the commercial side I am grumbling. What I am trying to say is this: that it is harder to-day for a writer to produce good work now than it has ever been before.

The pace is too fast for one thing. A novel a year. “You must keep your name before a public.” That is what agent and publisher are continually dinning into the author’s mind, and it is true, of course. That is the commercial line. Spring and autumn fashions. And only a few can last. A novel a year would be no hardship to a man endowed with the ebullient vitality of a Dickens or a Balzac; but there are not many such. In five novels and a few short stories Flaubert said all he had to say. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Richardson together, they do little more than reach double figures. Maupassant had written himself out at forty-three.

And then because there are so many novelists, each writer is expected to cultivate a particular province. His name on a book is like the label on a bottle of wine. “Ah, yes,” says the library subscriber, “Compton Mackenzie, a story of sound and colour; a little naughty: many alluring ladies; a smooth, ornate, sentimental style.” Should he discover instead a grey, political study of the effect of Trade Unionism on the commercial prosperity of the Tynemouth, he would be as disappointed, and would consider himself as ill-used, as Professor Saintsbury would if the Chateau Margaux he was offering his guests should reveal itself as Clos de Vougeot. An admirable Burgundy, but he had ordered claret. The novelist is not encouraged to make experiments. He is asked to rewrite one book indefinitely, till the material is watered down and a new entertainer has appeared.

And there have been so many novels. Every obvious situation has been used. The simple themes of love, jealousy, parenthood have been exploited till there is little new to say. The broad field has been ploughed so often. There are only a few dark spots by the hedge, under the shadow of the trees, where there is little sunshine and plants grow weakly, crookedly, different from their fellows, dank places where the few may specialise. “This, at least,” they say, “we can make our own.”

And whatever else may be urged against _Ulysses_ no one could deny it is James Joyce’s own. An amazing work. A book without grammar and without coherence; like a boat that is launched from an aeroplane in mid-ocean, without oars, without rudder, and without sails. Sometimes I see _Ulysses_ as a literary Thermopylae, a desperate stand against insuperable odds. “I will transcribe life,” he said, “as it is. I will omit nothing. Everything that passes through the mind shall be set on record. By setting everything down I shall achieve proportion.” _Ulysses_ is, perhaps, the most splendid failure in literature. But it is a failure. And when I hear ecstatic praise of it, I remember the five weeks or so during which I was the slave of jigsaw puzzles. For six hours a day I worked at them. I assorted and reassorted ridiculous pieces of coloured wood; I acquired a second sight for the dimensions of lozenge shapes. Gradually, bit by bit, there emerged from the discordant masses of detail on the table, a scheme, a pattern. Gradually, what I had taken for a turnip was revealed to me as a cockatoo, and what I had thought to be a beetroot became a face. Till, at last, the final piece was fitted, and there stared up at me from the table the sort of picture that I used to paint with water-colours in the nursery: a young girl feeding a rabbit with a lettuce; an old man filling a pipe before a fire; a dog crying for its master in the snow. But I had no eyes for the thing’s futility. Out of chaos had I achieved this symmetry. “Wonderful,” I said, “simply wonderful.” It was the picture that I so apostrophised. But it was myself that I was really praising. How wonderful of me, it was, I felt to have produced this thing. And in the same way when, after an hour’s battle, we have restored to sense and English a passage of Joyce’s shorthand, we have not the heart to consider the intrinsic value of the thing restored. We are so delighted with ourselves for having done it. “Wonderful,” we say, “wonderful,” and actually believe it is.

I rather suspect that the year 1922 will be a landmark for the literary historian of our day. _Ulysses_ is a sign-post. It will he hardly possible for the two styles of writing, the analytical shorthand and the narrative any longer to imagine that they are hunting together. James Joyce has worked out on the blackboard the piece of algebra over which his pupils have been so long puzzling. _Ulysses_ is the answer.

“Life with a big ‘L.’” Every generation has its own pet hobby-horse to ride to death, and that’s been ours: still is, I think. We are all in search, each of us in our own way, of this strange quality of living that our own existence lacks.