Part 6

Thus, to his amazement, at the end of luncheon, when he was feeling as though he could not bear the sound of Robsart's rich, self-satisfied voice a moment longer, the man made his proposal. He was going to Scotland for two months. Would Westcott like to take the flat, free of rent, of course? It was at his disposal. He need not have meals there unless he wished.

Something in Westcott's spirit had attracted Robsart. Westcott had not given him the praise he had needed; but now he seemed to have forgotten that. The man who sat opposite to him with the thin face, the black, closely cropped hair, thin above his forehead, grey above the temples, with the broad shoulders, the hard, thick-set figure, the grave eyes, the nervous, restless fingers, the man who, in spite of his forty years, seemed still in some strange way a boy--that man had been through fire and tribulation such as Robsart would never know. Robsart was not a bad man, nor an unkindly; success had been the worst thing that could have happened to his soul. He put his hand on Westcott's shoulder: "You stay here and have a rest for a bit. Do just as you like. Chuck my things about. Smash the Rodin if it amuses you." Peter accepted.

When he moved, with his few possessions, into the grand place, he found it less alarming than he had expected. Hortons itself was anything but alarming. In the first place, there was the nicest girl in the world, Fanny, who was portress downstairs. She made one happy at once. Then the valet, Albert, or Albert Edward, as he seemed to prefer to be called, was the kind of man understood in a moment by Peter. They were friends in three minutes. Albert Edward had his eye on Fanny, and was going to propose one of these days. Wouldn't they make a jolly pair?

Once or twice the great Mr. Nix himself, the manager of the flats, came in to see how Peter was faring. He seemed to have an exalted idea of Peter because he was "Robsart's friend." Robsart was a very great man in Mr. Nix's eyes.

"But I'm not his friend," Peter said. "You must have been," Mr. Nix said, "for him to let you have his flat like that. I've never known him to do that before."

In three days Peter was happy; in another three days he began to be strangled. There were too many things in the flat--beautiful things, costly things. Little golden trifles, precious china, pictures worth a fortune, first editions scattered about as though they were nothing. "Too full, too full, too full."

Peter couldn't sleep. He pushed on all the lights, and pushed them all off again. He got up, and in his old, shabby, patched pyjamas walked the length of the flat up and down, up and down. The Brahmin gods in the gold temple stared at him impassively. The Rodin old woman leered.

"Another two days and I'm done with this place," he thought. Then Murdoch Temple came to see him. Westcott had known Temple before the war; he had not seen him for five years. Temple had not altered: there was the same slight, delicate body, pale, discontented face, jet-black hair, long, nervous and conceited hands, shabby clothes too tight for the body and most characteristic of all, a melancholy and supercilious curl to his upper lip. Temple was supercilious by nature and melancholy by profession. From the very beginning it had seemed that he was destined to be a genius, and although after fifteen years of anticipation the fulfilment of that destiny was still postponed, no one could doubt, least of all Temple himself, that the day of recognition was approaching. At Oxford it had seemed that there was nothing that he could not do; in actual fact he had since then read much French and some Russian (in translation, of course), edited two little papers, strangled by an unsympathetic public almost at birth, produced a novel, a poem, and a book of criticism. An unhappy chill had hung over all these things. The war, in whose progress poor health had forbidden him to take a very active part, had made of him a pessimist and pacifist; but even here a certain temperamental weakness had forbidden him to be too ardent. He was peevish rather than indignant, petulant rather than angry, unkind rather than cruel, malicious rather than unjust, and, undoubtedly, a little sycophantic.

He had a brain, but he had always used it for the fostering of discontent. He did care, with more warmth than one would have supposed possible, for literature, but everything in it must be new, and strange, and unsuccessful. Success was, to him, the most terrible of all things, unless he himself were to attain it.

That, as things now went, seemed unlikely. During the last two years he and his friends had been anticipating all that they were going to do "after the war...." There was to be a new literature, a new poetry, a new novel, a new criticism; and all these were to be built up by Temple and company. "Thank God, the war's saved us from the old mess we were in. No more Robsarts and Manisbys for us! Now we shall see!"

Peter had heard vague rumours of the things these young men were going to do. He had not been greatly interested. He was outside their generation, and his own ambitions were long deadened by his own self-contempt. Nevertheless, on this particular morning, he was glad to see Temple. There was no question but that he made as effective a contrast with Robsart as one could find.

Temple was extremely cordial. At the same time, he was frankly surprised to find Peter there.

"How did you track me?" asked Peter.

"Robsart told Maradick in Edinburgh, Meredith was writing to me. How are you after all this time?"

"All right," said Peter, smiling. The conversation then was literary, and Temple explained "how things were." Things were very bad. He used the glories of Robsart's rooms as an illustration of his purpose. He waved his hands about. "Look at these things," he seemed to say. "At these temples of gold, this china of great price, these pictures, and then look at me. Here is the contrast between true and false art."

"We want to get rid," he explained to Peter, "of all these false valuations. This wretched war has shown us at least one thing--the difference between the true and the false. The world is in pieces. It is for us to build it up again."

"And how are you going to do it?" asked Peter.

Well, it seemed that Temple's prospects were especially bright just then. It happened that Mr. Dibden, the original inventor of "Dibden's Blue Pills," was anxious to "dabble in art." He was ready to put quite a little of his "blue pill" money behind a new critical paper, and the editor of this paper was to be Temple.

"Of course," said Temple. "I'm not going to agree to it unless he guarantees us at least five years' run. A paper of the sort that I have in mind always takes some time to make its impression. In five years the world at least will be able to see what we are made of. I've no fears."

Peter, who was more ingenuous than he knew, was caught by the rather wistful eagerness in Temple's voice.

"This fellow really does care," he thought.

"We want you to come in with us," said Temple. "Of course, we shall have nothing to do with fellows like D---- and W---- and M----; men who've simply made successes by rotten work. No! But I flatter myself that there will be no one of our generation of any merit who won't join us. You must be one."

"I'm too old," said Peter, "for your young lot."

"Too old!" cried Temple. "Rot! Of course, it's a long time since _The Vineo_, but all the better. You'll be the fresher for the pause. Not like M---- and W----, who turn out novels twice a year as though they were sausages. Besides, you've been in the war. You've seen at first hand what it is. None of these ghastly high spirits about you! You'll have the right pessimistic outlook."

"I don't know that I shall," said Peter, laughing.

"Oh, yes, you will," said Temple confidently. "I'm delighted you'll join us. And I'll be able to pay well, too. Old Dibden's ready to stump up any amount."

"That's a good thing," said Peter.

He remembered that Temple had not, with the best wish in the world, been always able in the past to fulfil all his promises. In short, Peter was touched and even excited. It was so long since anyone had come to him or wanted him. Then Temple had caught him at the right moment. He was out of a job; Robsart's flat was suffocating him; he himself was feeling something of this new air that was blowing through the world. He wondered whether after all it might not be that Temple and his friends would be given the power. They had youth, energy, a freedom from tradition....

He promised Temple that he would come to tea next day, and see some of his friends.

"The paper's to be called the _Blue Moon_," said Temple. "To-morrow, then, at five."

Peter found himself at five next day in a small room off Chancery Lane. Temple met him at the door, greeted him with that rather eager and timid air that was especially his, introduced him to a young man on a green sofa, and left him.

Peter was rather amused at his own excitement. He looked about him with eagerness. Here, at any rate, was a fine contrast to Robsart. No gold gods and precious Rodins in this place. The room was bare to shabbiness. The only picture on the ugly wall-paper was a copy of some post-impressionist picture stuck on to the paper with a pin.

It was a warm spring day, and the room was very close. Some half a dozen men and two girls were present; very much bad tobacco was being smoked. Somewhere near the untidy fire-place was a table with tea on it. "Perhaps," thought Peter, "these _are_ the men who will make the new world.... At any rate, no false prosperity here. These men mean what they say." Looking about him, the first thing that he discovered was a strange family likeness that there seemed to be amongst the men. They all wore old, shabby, ill-fitting clothes. No hair was brushed, no collars were clean, all boots were dusty. "That's all right," thought Peter. "There's no time to waste thinking about clothes these days."

All the same he _did_ like cleanliness, and what distressed him was that all the young men looked unwell. One of them, indeed, was fat. But it was an unhealthy stoutness, pale, blotchy, pimpled. Complexions were sallow, bodies undeveloped and uncared-for. It was not that they looked ill-fed--simply that they seemed to have been living in close atmospheres and taking no exercise.... Listening then to the talk he discovered that the tone of the voices was strangely the same. It was as though one man were speaking, as though the different bodies were vehicles for the same voice. The high, querulous, faint, scornful voice ran on. It seemed as though, did it cease, the room would cease with it--the room, the sofa, the wall-paper, the tea-table cease with it, and vanish. One of the pale young men was on the sofa stroking a tiny, ragged moustache with his rather dirty fingers. He raised sad, heavy eyes to Peter's face, then, with a kind of spiritual shudder as though he did not like what he had seen there, dropped them.

"It's rather close in here, isn't it?" said Peter at last.

"Maybe," said the young man....

One of the young women, directed apparently by Temple, came over to Peter. She sat down on the sofa and began eagerly to talk to him. She said how glad she was that he was going to join them. Although she spoke eagerly, her voice was tired, with a kind of angry, defiant ring in it. She spoke so rapidly that Peter had difficulty in following her. He asked who the men in the room were.

"That's Somers," she said, pointing to the stout man, "Hacket Somers. Of course, you know his work? I've got his new poem here. Like to see it? We shall have it in the first number of the _Blue Moon_."

She handed Peter a page of typed manuscript. He read it eagerly. Here, then, was the new literature. It was apparently a poem. It was headed "Wild West--Remittance Man."

The first three verses were as follows:

"_Schlemihl no mother weep for doomed for a certain time--

Rye whisky--a fungus Works into each face--line-- The Bond-street exterior-- tears at his vitals-- gravely the whisker droops his eyes are cold.

Immaculate meteor Inside a thick ichos outside a thick ether quenched the bright music...._"

Peter read these three verses; then a second time, then a third. The young woman was talking fiercely as he read. She turned to him:

"Aren't they splendid?" she said. "Hacket at his best. I was a little doubtful of him, but now there's no question...."

"Frankly," said Peter, "I don't understand them. It's about a drunkard, isn't it? I see that, but...."

"Don't understand it!" cried the young woman. "What don't you understand?"

"Well, for instance," said Peter, "'Immaculate meteor.' Is that the world, or Bond Street, or the whisky?" He felt her contempt.

She laughed.

"Well, of course, Hacket's poems aren't for everybody," she said.

She got up then, and left him. He knew the report that she would make of him to Temple. He sat there bewildered. He began to feel lonely and a little angry. After all it was not his fault that he had not understood the poem. Or was it the heat of the room? He wished that someone would offer him some tea, but everyone was talking, talking, talking. He sat back and listened. The talk eddied about him, dazing him, retreating, rolling back again. He listened. Every kind of topic was there--men, women, the war, Germany, poetry, homo-sexuality, divorce, adultery, Walt Whitman, Sapho, names, strange names, American names, French names, Russian names, condemning Him, condemning Her, condemning It, the war, Man ... Woman....

Once and again he caught popular names. How _they_ were condemned! The scorn, the languid, insolent scorn. Then pacifism.... He gathered that two of the men in the room had been forced to dig potatoes for the Government because they didn't believe in war. Patriotism! The room quivered with scorn. Patriots! It was as though you had said murderers or adulterers! His anger grew. Robsart was better than this, far, far better. At least Robsart tried to make something out of life. He was not ashamed to be happy. He did not condemn. He was doubtful about himself, too. He would not have asked Peter to lunch had he not been doubtful.... And the arrogance here. The room was thick with it. The self-applause mounted higher and higher. The fat man read one of his poems. Only a few words reached Peter. "Buttock ... blood ... cobra ... loins ... mud ... shrill ... bovine...."

Suddenly he felt as though in another moment he would rush into their midst, striking them apart, crying out against them, as condemnatory, as arrogant as they. He got from his sofa and crept from the room. No one noticed him. In the street the beautiful, cool, evening air could not comfort him. He was wretched, lonely, angry, above all, most bitterly disappointed. It seemed to him as he walked along slowly up Fleet Street that life was really hopeless and useless. On the one side, Robsart; on the other, these arrogant fools, and in the middle, himself, no better than they--worse, indeed--for they at least stood for something, and he for nothing, absolutely nothing. That absurd poem had, at any rate, effort behind it, striving, ambition, hope. He had cared all his life for intellectual things, had longed to achieve some form of beauty, however tiny, however insignificant.... He had achieved nothing. Well, that knowledge would not have beaten him down had he felt the true spirit of greatness in these others. He realised now how deeply he had hoped from that meeting. He had believed in the new world of which they were all talking; he had believed that its creation would be brought about by the forces of art, of brotherhood, of kindliness, and charity, and nobility. And then to go and listen to a meeting like Temple's? But what right had he to judge them, or Robsart, or anyone?

Only too ready to believe himself a failure, it seemed now that the world too was a failure; that the worst things that the pessimists had said during the war were now justified. Above all he detested his own arrogance in judging these other men.

He had come by now to Piccadilly Circus. He was held by the crowd for a moment on the kerb outside Swan & Edgar's. The Circus was wrapped in a pale, honey-coloured evening glow. The stir of the movement of the traffic was dimmed as though it came through a half-open door. Peter felt calm touch his bitter unhappiness as he stood there. He stayed as though someone had a hand on his shoulder and was holding him there. He was conscious for the second time that day of anticipation. Now, having been cheated once, he tried to drive it away, but it would not leave him, and he waited almost as though he were expecting some procession to pass. The shops were closing, and many people were going home. As he stood there Big Ben struck six o'clock, and was echoed from St. James's and St. Martin's. People were coming in prepared for an evening's amusement. The last shoppers were waiting for the omnibuses to take them up Regent Street.

Opposite Peter there were the Criterion posters _Our Mr. Hepplewhite_, and opposite Mr. Hepplewhite Mlle. Delysia was swinging her name in mid-air to entice the world into the Pavilion. Every kind of shop crowded there round the Circus--barbers', and watch-makers', and bag-makers', and hosiers', and jewellers', and tobacconists', and restaurants, and tea-shops--there they all were; and the omnibuses, like lumbering mastodons or ichthyosauri, came tottering and tumbling into the centre, finding their heavy, thick-headed way out again as though they were blinded by this dazzling, lighted world.

He was struck, as he watched, by the caution, the hesitation, the apparent helplessness of all the world. Londoners had always been represented as so self-confident, self-assured, but if you watched to-night, it seemed that everyone hesitated. Young men with their girls, women with babies, men, boys; again and again Peter saw in faces that same half-timid, half-friendly glance; felt on every side of him a kindliness that was born of a little terror, a little dread. There was some parallel to the scene in his mind. He could not catch it, his mind strove back. Suddenly, with the big form of a policeman who stepped in front of him to control the traffic, he knew of what it was that he was thinking. Years ago, when he had first come up to London, he had lived in a boarding-house, and there had been there a large family of children with whom he had been very friendly. The parents of the children had been poor, but their single living-room had been a nursery of a happy, discordant kind. Every sort of toy had found its way in there, and Peter could see the half-dozen children, now trembling, fighting, laughing, crying, the mother watching them and guarding them.

The Circus was a nursery. The blue evening sky was closed down, a radiant roof. Everywhere were the toys. Now it seemed that balls were danced in the air; now that someone sang or rang bells; now that some new game was suddenly proposed and greeted with a shout of joy. The children filled the Circus; the policemen were toy policemen, the omnibuses toy omnibuses, the theatres toy theatres.

On every side of him Peter felt the kindliness, the helplessness, the pathos of his vision. They were children; he was a child; the world was only a nursery, after all. The sense of his earlier indignation had left him. It seemed now that anger and condemnation, whether of Robsart, or Temple and his friends, or of himself, were absurd. They were all children together, children in their ignorance, their helplessness, children in their love for one another, their generosity, and their hope.

For the first time in his life that sense of disappointment that had been for so long a stumbling-block to all his effort left him. He felt as though, like Pilgrim, he had suddenly dropped his pack. Children in the nursery--the lot of them. No place in this world for high indignation, for bitterness, for denunciation.

The injustice, the ill-humour, the passions of life were like the quarrels in children's play; the wisest man alive knew just as much as his nursery-walls could show him.

He laughed and turned homewards.

The new world? Perhaps. The progress of the world? Perhaps. Meanwhile, there were nursery-tea, a game of pirates, and a fairy-tale by the fire ... and after it all, that sound, dreamless sleep that only children know. Would one wake in the morning and find that one was leaving the nursery for school? Who could tell? No one returned with any story....

Meanwhile, there was enough to do to help in keeping the nursery in order, in seeing that the weaker babies were not trodden upon, in making sure that no one cried himself to sleep.

Anger and condemnation would never be possible again; no, nor would he expect the Millennium.

VI

LUCY MOON

Lucy Moon was the daughter of the Reverend Stephen Moon, Rector of Little Hawkesworth in North Yorkshire. She was twenty-one years of age, and pretty. She was so pretty indeed that she reminded one young man in Hawkesworth of "a cornfield under a red moon," and the Reverend Simon Laud, to whom she was engaged, thought of her privately as his "golden goddess," from which it will be seen that she had yellow hair and a peach-like complexion.

She had lived always a very quiet and retired life, the nearest to adventure being two or three expeditions to Scarborough. She did not know, however, that her life was retired. She was never dull. She had two younger brothers, and was devoted to her father and mother. She never questioned their authority. She read the books that they advised, and wished to read no others. The life that ebbed and flowed around the rectory seemed to her a very exciting one, and it was not until the Reverend Simon Laud, rector of a neighbouring parish, proposed to her, and she found that she accepted him, although she did not love him, that she began to wonder, a little uncertainly, with a little bewilderment, about herself. She had accepted him because everyone had agreed that it was so obviously the right thing for her to do. She had known him ever since she could remember. He was older than she, and kindly, although he had asthma and his knees cracked. He had been rector of his parish for twenty years, and everyone said that he was a very good man indeed. He had a sense of humour too, and his Penny Readings were the best in all North Yorkshire. It was not until Simon had kissed her that Lucy wondered whether she were doing right. She did not like him to kiss her. His nose seemed so large when near to her, and his lips tried to catch hers and hold them with a kind of sucking motion that was quite distressing to her. She looked ridiculously young when Mr. Laud proposed to her, with her fair gold hair piled up in coils on the top of her head, her cheeks crimsoned with her natural agitation, and her young, childish body, like a boy's, slender and strong under her pink cotton gown.

"My little girl!" Mr. Laud said, and kissed her again. She went up to her room and cried for quite a long time. Then, when she saw how happy her mother was, she was happy too. Perhaps he would not want to kiss her after they were married.