the third of the company meanwhile was feeling lonely and deserted in london. london in august is really depressing in spite of its being the conventional habit to say so. around every worker's brain there is a consciousness of the wires of captivity, and although the weather may be, and indeed generally is, cold, wet and dark, nevertheless it is hard to doubt but that it is bright and shining by the sea and on the downs.
peter could have gone into the country—nothing really held him to london—but he had in literal truth no one with whom to go. in the past he had not grumbled at having no friends; that was after all his own choice—no one was to blame save himself—but during these last months something had happened to him. he was at length waking from a sleep that seemed to him as he looked back to have lasted ever since that terrible night that he had spent on the hill outside tobias, the night of the day that norah monogue had died.
at last he was waking. what he had said to millie was true—his interest in herself and henry was the force that had stirred him—and stirred him now to what dangerous ends?
one night early in august flung him suddenly at the truth.
two of the three graces—grace talbot and jane ross—were at home to their friends in their upper part in soho square. peter went because he could not endure another lonely evening in his rooms—another hour by himself and he would be forced to face the self-confession that now at every cost he must avoid. so he went out and found himself in the little low-ceilinged rooms, thick with smoke and loud with conversation.
grace talbot was looking very faint and languid, buried in a large armchair in the centre of the room with a number of men round her; jane ross, plainer and more pasty than ever,[pg 164] was trying to be a genial hostess, and discovering, not for the first time, that a caustic tongue was more easily active than a kind heart. she wanted to be nice to every one, but, really, people were so absurd and so stupid and so slow. it wasn't her fault that she was so much cleverer than every one else. she didn't want to be. but there you were; one can't help one's fate.
peter was greeted by one or two and settled down into a chair in a corner near a nice, fat, red-faced man called amos campbell. campbell was a novelist who had once been of the galleon school and full of galleonish subtleties, and now was popular and trollopian. he was, perhaps, a trifle over-pleased with himself and the world, a little too prosperous and jolly and optimistic, and being in addition the son of a bishop, his voice at times rose to a pulpit ring, but he meant well, was vigorous and bland and kindly. the graces thoroughly despised him and peter was astonished to see him there. perhaps nister or gale or one of the other men had brought him. he would have received no mention in this history had it not been for a conversation that had important results both for peter and henry.
literary parties were curious affairs in 1920; they shared the strange general character of that year in their confusion and formlessness. it was a fact that at that time in london there was not a single critical figure who commanded general respect. no school of criticism carried any authority outside its immediate following—not one man nor woman alive in great britain at that moment, not one literary journal, weekly, monthly, or daily, carried enough weight behind its literary judgments to shift for a moment the success or failure of a book or a personality. monteith, whose untidy black hair and pale face peter saw in the distance, had been expected to do great things, but as soon as he had commanded a literary weekly he had shown that he had no more breadth, nor wisdom, nor knowledge than the other men around him, and he had fallen quickly into the hands of a small clique who wrote for his papers in a happy spirit of mutual admiration. all this was nobody's fault—it was the note of a period that was far stronger in its character than any single human being in it.
[pg 165]
everything was in the whirlpool of change, and that little room to-night, with its smoke, furious conversation, aimless wandering of dim figures moving in and out of the haze, formed a very good symbol of the larger world outside.
peter exchanged a few sentences with campbell then fell into silence. suddenly the restraint that he had been forcing upon himself for the last two months was relaxed. he would think of her. why should he not? for five minutes. for five minutes. in that dim, smoke-obscured room who would know, who could tell, who could see her save himself?
she came towards him, smiling, laughing, suddenly springing up before him, her arms outstretched, bright in her orange jumper as she had been on that day in henry's room; then her face changed, softened, gravity came into it; she was leaning towards him, listening to his story, her eyes were kindly, she stretched out her hand and touched his knee, he held out his arms. . . . oh god! but he must not. she was not for him, she could not be. even were he not already tied what could he offer her with his solemnity and dreaminess? . . . he sprang up.
"going already?" said campbell. "had enough of it?"
"no. i want to speak to monteith. hullo, there's seymour. keep him off, campbell. his self-satisfaction is more than i could endure just now."
he sat down again and watched the figures, so curiously dim and unreal that it might be a world of ghosts.
"ghosts? perhaps we are. anyway we soon will be."
jane ross came stumping towards him. "oh, mr. westcott! come and make yourself useful. there's anna makepeace over there, who wrote plum bun. you ought to know her."
"i'm very happy where i am." she stumped away, and, sitting back in his chair, he was suddenly aware of grace talbot, who, although monteith had come up and was talking very seriously, was staring in front of her, lost, many miles away, dreaming.
she was suddenly human to him, she who had been for the most part the drop of ink at the end of a cynical pen, the contemptuous flash of an arrogant eye, the languorous irony of a dismissing hand.
she was as unhappy as himself; perceiving it suddenly and[pg 166] her essential loneliness he felt a warmth of feeling for her that intensely surprised him. "what children we all are!" he said to himself: "the graces, monteith, the great mr. winch, the parisian mrs. wanda, and all the rest of us! how little we know! what insecure, fumbling artists the best of us—and the only two great writers of our time are the humblest men amongst us. after all our arrogance is necessary for us because we have failed, written so badly, travelled such a tiny way."
an urgent longing for humility, generosity, humour, kindliness of heart swept over him. he felt that at that moment he could love any one, however slow and conventional their brain were their heart honest, generous and large. he and monteith and grace talbot were leading little hemmed-in lives, moving in little hemmed-in groups, talking in little hemmed-in phrases.
like henry a few months earlier a revelation seemed to come to him that life was the gate to art, not art to life. he surely had been taught that lesson again and again and yet he had not learnt it.
he was pulled out into the centre of the room by a sudden silence and a realization that every one was listening to a heated argument between monteith and campbell. grace talbot was looking up from her chair at the two men with her accustomed glance of lazy superiority.
westcott was surprised at campbell, who was a comfortable man, eager to be liked by every one, afraid therefore to risk controversy lest some one should be displeased, practised in saying the thing that his neighbour wished to hear.
but something on this occasion had become too strong for him and dragged him for once into a public declaration of faith, regardless whether he offended or no.
"you're all wrong, monteith," he burst out. "you're all wrong. and i'll tell you why. i'm ten years older than you are and ten years ago i might have thought as you do. now i know better. you're wrong because you're arrogant, and you're arrogant because you're limited, and you're limited because you've surrounded yourself with smaller men who all think as you do. you've come to look on the world simply as one big field especially manured by god for the sowing of your own little particular seed. if other poor humans choose[pg 167] to beg for some of your seed you'll let them have it and give them permission to sow, but there's only one kind of seed, and you know what kind that is.
"well, you're wrong. you've got a decent little plant that was stronger six years ago than it is now—but still not a bad little plant. you're fluent and clever and modern; you're better than some of them, grace talbot here, for instance, because you do believe in the past and believe that it has some kind of connection with the present, but you've deliberately narrowed your talent and your influence by your arrogance. arrogance, arrogance, arrogance—that's the matter with all of you—and the matter with literature and art to-day, and politics too. you all think you've got the only recipe and that you've nothing to learn. you've everything to learn. any ploughman in devonshire to-day could teach you, only the trouble is that he's arrogant too now and thinks he knows everything because his labour leaders tell him so."
campbell paused and monteith struck in. monteith when he was studying at cambridge the arts of being a public man had learnt that rule no. 1 was—never lose your temper in public unless the crowd is with you.
he remained therefore perfectly calm, simply scratching his hair and rubbing his bristly chin.
"very good, campbell. but aren't you being a little bit arrogant yourself? and quite right, too. you ought to be arrogant and i ought to be. we both imagine that we know something about literature. well, why shouldn't we say what we know? what's the good of the blind leading the blind? why should i pretend that i know as little as mr. snookes and mr. jenks? i know more than they. why should i pretend that every halfpenny novelist who happens to be the fashion of the moment is worth attention? why shouldn't i select the good work and praise it and leave the rest alone?"
"yes," said campbell; "what's good work by your over-sophisticated, over-read, over-intellectual standard? well and good if you'll say i've trained myself in such and such a way and my opinions are there. my training, my surroundings, my own talent, my friends have all persuaded me in this direction. there are other men, other works that may be good or[pg 168] bad. i don't know. about contemporary art one can only be personal, never final. i have neither the universal temperament nor the universal training to be judge. i can be advocate, special pleader. i can show you something good that you haven't noticed before."
"i am not god almighty, nor do i come straight from olympus. i have still a lot to learn."
"if you'll forgive me saying so, mr. campbell," said jane ross, "you're talking the most arrant nonsense. you're doing your best to break down what a few of us are trying to restore—some kind of a literary standard. at last there's an attempt being made to praise good work and leave the fools alone."
"and i'm one of the fools," broke in campbell. "oh, i know. but don't think there's personal feeling in this. there might have been ten years ago. i worried then a terrible deal about whether i were an artist or no; i cared what you people said, read your reviews and was damnably puzzled by the different decisions you gave. and then suddenly i said to myself: 'why shouldn't i have some fun? life's short. i'm not a great artist, and never shall be. i'll write to please myself.' and i did. and i've been happy ever since. you're just as divided about me as you used to be. and just as divided about one another. the only difference is that you still worry about one another and fight and scratch, and i bow to your superior judgment—and enjoy myself. i haven't much of an intellect, i'm not a good critic, but i'm nearer real life than you are, any of you. what you people are doing is not separating the sheep from the goats as you think you are—none of you are decided as to who the sheep really are—but you are simply separating life from art. we're not an artistic nation—nothing will ever make us one. we've provided some of the greatest artists the world has ever seen because of our vitality and our independence of cliques. how much about art did richardson and fielding, scott and jane austen, thackeray and dickens, trollope and hardy consciously know? when has hardy ever written one single statement about art outside his own prefaces, and in them he talks simply of his own books. but these men knew about life. fielding could tell you what the inside of a debtor's prison is like, and scott could plant trees, and thack[pg 169]eray was no mean judge of a shady crowd at a foreign watering-place, and hardy knew all about milking a cow. what do you people know about anything save literary values and over them you squabble all the while. there aren't any literary values until time has spoken. but there is such a thing as responding to the beauty in something that you've seen or read and telling others that you've enjoyed it—and there are more things in this world to enjoy—even in the mess that it's in at this moment—than any of you people realize."
campbell stopped. seymour, who was standing just behind him, saw fit to remark: "how right you are, campbell; life's glorious it seems to me. what was it stevenson said: 'life is so full of a number of things.'"
poor campbell! nothing more terrible than seymour's appreciation was to be found in the london of that period.
"oh, damn!" campbell muttered. "i didn't see you were there, seymour. just my luck."
but peter had been watching grace talbot's eyes. she had not listened to a word of the little discussion. the cessation of voices pulled her back. "you're a good fellow, campbell," she said. "you've got a good digestion, a gift for narrative, very little intellect, and at fifty you'll be very fat and have purple veins in your nose. we all like you, but you really must forgive us for not taking you seriously."
campbell laughed. "perhaps you're right," he said. "but which is better? to be a second-rate artist and free or to be a second-rate artist and bound? your little stories are very nice, grace, but they aren't as good as either tchehov or maupassant. monteith's poetry is clever, but it isn't as good as t. e. brown on one side or clough on the other, and neither t. e. brown or clough were first-rate poets. so can't we, all of us, second-raters as we are, afford to be generous to one another and take everything a little less solemnly? life's passing, you know. happiness and generosity are worth having."
"we will now sing hymn 313: 'onward christian soldiers.'" said jane ross, laughing. "next sunday being the third after trinity the sermon at evensong will be preached by the rev. amos campbell, rector of little marrow pumpernickel. he[pg 170] will take as his text 'blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.' the collection will be for church expenses."
every one laughed but grace talbot moved restlessly in her chair.
"all the same," she said, "amos is right in a way. why the devil don't we write better? i wish—i wish——" but nobody knew what she wished because the great mr. winch arrived at that moment and demanded attention.
peter walked home to his marylebone rooms in a fine confusion of thought and feeling. campbell was a bit of a fool, too fat, too prosperous, too anxious to be popular, but he was a happy man and a man who was living his life at its very fullest. he was not a great artist, of course—great artists are never happy—but he had a narrative gift that it amused him to play every morning of his life from ten to twelve, and he made money from that gift and could buy books and pictures and occasionally do a friend a good turn. monteith and grace talbot and the others were more serious artists and were more seriously considered, but their gifts came to mighty little in the end—thin, little streams. as to peter his gift came simply to nothing at all. and yet he did not wish to be campbell. too much prosperity was bad and campbell in the "slippered and pantaloon" age, when it came to him, would be unpleasant to behold. his enchantment was very different from millie's and henry's, bless them. at the thought of them there came such a longing for them, for their physical presence, their cheery voices, their laughter and noise, that he could scarcely endure his loneliness. theirs was the age. theirs the kingdom, the power and the glory.
and why should he not long for millie? for the second time that evening he abandoned himself to the thought of her. as he walked down oxford street, pearl-grey under sheeted stars, he conjured her to his side, put his arm about her, bent down and raised her face to his, kissed her. . . . why should he not? he was married. but that was such years ago. was he to be cursed for ever because of that early mistake?
maybe clare was dead. he would go off to france to-morrow and make another search. now when real love had come to[pg 171] him at last he would not be cheated any more. life was passing. in a few years it would be too late. his agonized longing for millie seized him so that he stood for a moment outside the shuttered windows of selfridge's, frozen into immobility by the power of his desire.
at least he could be her friend—her friend who would run to the world's end for her if she wished it; to be her friend and to write as campbell had said simply for his own fun—after all, he was getting something out of life in that; to go on and see this new world developing in her eyes, to help her to get the best out of it, to live for the young generation through her. . . . so strong was his desire that he really believed for a moment that she was by his side. . . .
"millie," he whispered. when in his rooms he switched on the light he found on his table two letters; he saw at once that one was in millie's handwriting. eagerly he tore it open. he read it:
metropolitan hotel, cladgate.
my dear peter—i feel that you must be the next human being after henry to hear a piece of news that has made me very happy. i am engaged—to a man called baxter. i met him first at miss platt's and fell in love with him at first sight. i do hope you'll like him. i'm sure you will. i've told him about you and he says he's afraid of you because you sound so clever. he's clever too in his own way, but it isn't books. i'm so happy and it does seem so selfish when the world is in such a mess and so many people are hard up. but this only happens once!
i do want you to meet bunny (that's baxter) as soon as ever you can.—your affectionate friend,
millicent trenchard.
when peter had finished the letter he switched off the light and sat on, staring at the blue-faced window-pane.
