each week the pitt league posted up on the walls of the theatre a notice of the times and places of the various classes that were to be held. there were some six rooms at the disposal of this enterprising society. there was the attic at the top of block i, a noisy room because the dramatic society would probably be found rehearsing next door; then there was the theatre, an impossible room; in the first place because it was too big, and in the second because the scenic artists behind the curtain carried on a continual dialogue to the tune of: “where is that blue paint?” “have you put up the wings?” “where the hell’s the hammer?” which dialogue the scene-shifters accompanied with suitable crashes and landslides. it was a poor room for study—the
image unavailable: the billiard room at mainz. [to face page 172.
the billiard room at mainz.
[to face page 172.
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theatre; and then there was the field officers’ dining-room—that was not too bad. but one window-pane was missing, and there was no heating apparatus, and the orderlies were always wanting to lay the plates; altogether there was not a superfluity of spare space; there was really only one decent room—the alcove—and that was for one hour of the day allotted to the botanists and anatomists. for the rest of the time an agenda at the bottom of the pitt league poster announced that “the alcove was reserved for authors, architects and other students.”
the alcove was a small room opening out of the billiard-room, and its possession by the “authors, architects and other students” was a privilege jealously guarded. not that we ever resorted to force, the mere strength of personality was sufficient. a few acid epigrams drove the intruders away with the impression that after all there were lunatics in the camp. only one man stayed for more than an hour, and that was captain frobisher,{174} a large, fat man who was doubtless an excellent soldier, but who was not an addition to a literary society that prided itself upon its exclusiveness. after all, when one is searching for a lost rhyme, or trying to make an honest scene sufficiently obscure to protect canon lyttelton’s delicate susceptibilities, it is disconcerting to have to listen to a conversation of this sort:—
“ ... and what do you think of the new offensive, skipper?”
“oh, we’ll wipe the swine off the face of the earth. i hope our men don’t take too many prisoners. there’s only one sort of hun that’s any use, and that’s a dead one. excreta, that’s all they are, excreta.... what i say is, smash ’em, and then when they’re down tread on ’em. that’s all they’re fit for. a good hun is a dead hun.”
of course such rhetoric is excellent in its place, and in the mouth of a politician would appear as the supreme unction shed over the warring banners of humanity. but there are times....{175}
frobisher must go. we all decided that. the only difficulty was that ... well, even in confinement one must show respect to a senior officer. it would have to be done with considerable tact; we could hardly approach him ourselves. we supposed that if he really wanted, he could defend himself on the ground that he was a student, a student of the philosophical interpretation of a dozen cocktails. but yet he had to go. and finally stone undertook the job.
it took two bottles of rhine wine to screw him up to the proper pitch, but we got him there at last; and nobly did he fulfil our trust. it was an unforgettable afternoon. captain frobisher was sitting at the middle table discussing over a bottle of wine his schemes for the entire destruction of the german race. the old saws were rolling smoothly from his tongue.
“we must let them have it; what i say is, starve them out, bomb their towns, confiscate their colonies; then make them{176} pay right up to the hilt, a crushing indemnity. they’d have done the same to us. an eye for an eye. that’s the principle we must work on, a tooth for a tooth.” even a patriotic bishop could not have been more humanely vindictive.
and then we led in stone.
he sat on the edge of the table nearest to the captain; his huge head of hair was flung back in a wild profusion, his shirt was open at the throat, he looked for all the world like a second byron. and for the space of an hour he lectured on the higher life. as a testimony to the potency of the rhine vintage, it was without parallel. it was a noble exposition.
he began with schopenhauer; the jargon of metaphysics reeled into anacolutha: the absolute, the negation of the will; the thing in itself; phenomena, and the real. the mind was dazed with the conflicting theories of causation, and after each sounding peroration he recited in a crooning monotone the less cheerful musings of the shropshire lad;{177} while we, entering into his mood, gazed up at him with enraptured eyes, murmuring: “delightful! oh, delightful!”
captain frobisher fidgeted nervously on his form, he moved first to one extremity, then to another. periodically he attempted a conversation with his companion; but every time he began, stone broke into a state of fervour more than usually impassioned, and frobisher’s attention was irresistibly drawn towards this strange creature who had emerged suddenly out of a world he did not know. stone realised his traditional conception of the romantic poet, the long-haired, sprawling, effervescent creature that he had never seen, but that he had been told the war had killed. and here into the very centre of mainz, into this home of militarism, was introduced the loathsome atmosphere of paris and the café royal, this unpleasant reincarnation of the hectic nineties.
for an hour he stood it, and then stone arrived at the point to which all his previous{178} eloquence had led. “i don’t know,” he said, “i have thought it out for a long time, but i am still uncertain as to which of all the collective emotions has done most harm, has wrought most damage to the suffering individual. once i thought it was religion, religion with its bigotry and ritual, its confessional and chains; but during the last four years i have been sorely tempted—sorely tempted, my dear waugh—to believe that of all the evils that can befall a community, there is none worse than the scourge of patriotism.”
it was the limit, beyond which even the endurance of a soldier could not pass. captain frobisher threw at stone one glance charged with distrust, and strode from the room. he never entered it again; and the “authors, architects and other students” were able to return to earth, and become once more respectable citizens.
of the architects and other students we saw very little. occasionally a linguist would drift in with a conversation grammar{179} and a notebook, and sometimes a financier would draw up tables of expenditure and loss, but on the whole the alcove was the property of “wordsmiths.”
there were about five of us in all, and as soon as appel was over we used to proceed towards the billiard-room laden with pens and paper. at this early hour there were usually not more than three of us, as tarrant and stone preferred to take breakfast at a later hour; but milton hayes was invariably to be found there, embellishing lyrics, or putting the final touches to his musical comedy, and in the intervals of production expounding his latest ?sthetic theories.
a vivid contrast was presented by tarrant and stone. with popular taste they were both equally unconcerned. relative merit interested them not at all; their standards were deep-laid and inelastic.
tarrant usually appeared in the alcove at about one o’clock, and observed a ritual that would with any one else have savoured of affectation, but was with him perfectly{180} natural. nature had endowed him with generous proportions, more built for comfort than for speed; and he accentuated the natural roll of his gait by his strange footwear. a pair of field boots had been abbreviated into shoes by the camp cobbler in such a way as to admit of the insertion of two fingers between the leather and the instep. to keep them on his feet as he walked, tarrant had to resort to a straddle that was one of the features of camp life. and as he entered he bulked largely in the door of the alcove, marvellously shod, carrying under one arm a dictionary, a notebook and a thesaurus, and over the other a cardigan waistcoat and a green velvet scarf.
he flung his books noisily on the table and then proceeded to array himself for the ardours of composition. he first of all divested himself of his collar and tie, and wrapped round his throat the green velvet scarf, that would have lain more appropriately as a stole on the shoulders of an ecclesiastic than it did as a muffler on those of a{181} gefangener, engaged on a psychological study of seduction. tarrant then removed his tunic, disclosing a woollen waistcoat, over which he proceeded to draw the second woollen coat that he had brought with him. he explained that they brought him physical ease.
“you see, old man,” he said, “it’s not much use my mind being free, if my limbs are encased in even the loosest of military tunics.”
he then proceeded to work.
every writer, of course, has his own particular foible, and tarrant’s was an appalling accuracy in gauging the exact number of words that he had written. most writers are quite content to add up the number of lines in a page, then find the average number of words in a line and multiply. but tarrant would have none of these slipshod methods.
“on that principle,” he said, “i suppose you’d call a line a line whether it goes right across the page or not?”
“yes,” i confessed.{182}
he gave a grunt of contempt.
“and then you say the loom of youth is 110,000 words long; why, half the lines you call ten words long only consist of two words—‘bloody hell.’ that’s not the way to do things.”
and so tarrant laboriously added up every word. it became quite a mania with him. so much so, in fact, that he used to embark on long discussions as to the derivation of amalgamated words, and whether “lunch-time” should count as two or one. for his rough draft he kept beside him a small slip of paper, on which at the end of each sentence he used to make mathematical calculations, that reminded me of school cricket, the scoring box, and the attempt to keep level with the tens.
correction involved much labour. at the end of the sentence he might have noted down 277 words. then he would revise; half a clause consisting of eight words would be omitted, and on the slip of paper down went 269. then a celibate noun called for{183} an adjectival mate, and 270 was hoisted amid applause. it was an amusing game, but it took up a great deal of time. very rarely did tarrant produce more than 400 words as the result of three hours’ work, and his absolute maximum for a day was 1100.
“all great men work slowly,” he said. “flaubert took seven years over madame bovary, and i shall take only a year over this,” and with a sudden sweep he flashed the discussion back on to his pet subject of words.
“you see, i’ve done 48,374 words, and there are three more chapters of approximately 3000 words each. now will that be enough?”
i told him that mr. grant richards had stipulated in one of his weekly advertisements, that if he liked a book, it could range between the limits of 45,000 and 200,000 words, and tarrant once more returned peacefully to his addition.
stone, tarrant’s constant companion through the tedium of eighteen months’{184} imprisonment, was chiefly conspicuous for his conversation. nobody ever actually saw him writing, or had indeed read anything he had written, but he always carried about with him a notebook, that gave the impression that he had either just risen from his labours, or was merely waiting the inspiration of the moment. as a scholar and a critic he was easily the most brilliant of our little circle, and it was delightful to hear him dethrone the idols of the twentieth century. he had very little use for any critic since pater, or any novelist since sterne. of the modern novelists he maintained that the only two worth considering were h. h. richardson and arnold bennett, though to gilbert cannan he extended a hand of deprecatory welcome. wells was the chief target of his wit.
“i don’t know what to make of him,” he used to say. “sometimes i think we may almost excuse him on the ground that if he had not written the new machiavelli, perkins and mankind would not exist. but, really,{185} as i read his recent stuff, marriage, the soul of a bishop, joan and peter, why, max has ceased to be the parodist of wells, wells has become the parodist of max.”
as an actual “wordsmith” stone enjoyed a reputation something similar to that of theodore watts. one felt that he had only to publish what he had written, and he would receive world-wide recognition. in the notebook that never left him, he was supposed to carry the key that should unlock his heart. there lay two completed poems, and a tenth of a novel. but they were quite illegible. none of us ever saw them. occasionally when the influence of rhine wine had somewhat weakened the phenomenal barrier that separated stone’s mentality from the real world of his metaphysics, he would promise to inscribe them for us in the morning in the full indelibility of purple pencil. once he even went so far as to recite one of them; but the words came to us droningly sweet through a mist of inaudibility, and there remains only the{186} recollection of certain sounding words, a low murmur as of a distant waterfall. in the morning all the promises were forgotten, and sometimes i have been tempted to wonder whether those poems had any real existence in the sphere of phenomena. stone was so at the mercy of his metaphysics, he indulged in expeditions into a world whither i had neither the wish nor the ability to follow him, and perhaps he merely imagined those two poems as some manifestation of that inexplicable “thing-in-itself” over which he was so concerned. perhaps they had no counterpart in that draggled notebook; and though it is quite possible that some day we shall see those poems immortally enshrined in vellum, personally i rather doubt it.
those hours in the alcove contain all i personally would wish to remember of my captivity. it was a delightful room, with its white tables and windows opening on the fowl-run; it was a perfect place in which to write. the click of billiard balls, and the{187} murmurous rise and fall of inaudible conversations provided the ideal setting for thought. personally i can never write in a room that is quite silent; its isolation frightens me, and through an open window i listen in vain for the indistinct noises of humanity.
and then towards evening, when the labours of the day were ended, we would sit together round a bottle of a villainous brand of laubenheimer and discuss the merits of tchecov and de maupassant. long contests were waged there on the vexed problems of ?sthetics; the limits of dramatic art, vers libre, the function of criticism. all these in their turn passed through the sieve of dialectic. at times even captivity seemed a pleasant business, so full of leisure was it, after the bustle of the months that had preceded it. and no doubt years hence, when the rough outlines have become gently blurred against a harmonious background, we shall cast a glamour over those lazy days, and see in them a realisation of bohemian{188} dreams, of a paris café and verlaine leaning over a white table-cloth declaiming his lovely valedictory lines. and perhaps time, that great alchemist, may even go so far as to transmute that foul white wine into the purest absinthe. we shall think of dowson and the cheshire cheese, of the rhymers’ club and the delightful artifice of the nineties, and we shall claim companionship with those brave innovators to whom a finished work of art was a sufficient recompense for their weariness. but within it was not really like that; and as pater has said, no doubt that ideal period of artistic endeavour has never had any existence outside the imagination of the dreamer, sick with a sort of far-away nostalgia, a vague longing for wider prospects and less narrowing horizons. every generation has flung its eyes backwards over the past, and thought “if it had only been then that we had lived—then, when the values of life were still clear and simple,” and round certain names and ages there has been woven in con{189}sequence the thin gossamer of romance, and the artist has found comfort in his conception of a world that has been passed by. from these backward glances and averted faces has emerged much that will never pass—thais and salambo, henry esmond and marius the epicurean.
during the last three years i have often wished that i had been born thirty years earlier, at a time when the influence of french literature was making itself so keenly felt, and when verlaine was the light about the young men’s feet. it is a glamorous world that we catch glimpses of through the opening doors of mr. george moore’s confessions. but i suppose that really it would not have been so very wonderful after all, and that those delicate creatures whose feet moved through symons’s verse to a continual rustle of silk and cambric, were probably the most tawdry of grisettes, and those paris cafés and the many-coloured glasses of liqueur, they were very much like the alcove, i expect; and the alcove is a{190} place where no one would wish to sojourn indefinitely.
but we shall always look back at it with some affection. we spent there many happy hours, and there the weariness of captivity was relieved by the human comradeship that alone makes life endurable. we shall not easily forget how, when the billiard-room was closed for the night, we used to step out into the square, just as the sunset was flooding it with an amber haze, and walk beneath the chestnuts, prolonging the conversations of the afternoon, until the cracked bell and waking lights drove us back to the barracks. i shall never forget those evenings. probably never before was the citadel—that home of militarism—the scene of so much artistic discussion; and it may be that in after days our ghosts will linger round those memorial places, and that on some quiet evening two tenuous and ungainly forms will be seen swinging down the avenue beneath the chestnuts—
“dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacée,”
{191}
and the sentries of some j?ger regiment will catch the sound of thin voices floating across the night. they will be still arguing over the same old questions, those two foolish ghosts, those questions whose solution the rest of the world has long since decided to ignore.
“but look here now, honestly, surely brooke is not too bad; listen to this ...” and the faint words of “mamua” would be borne over last year’s leaves.
but the elder ghost would shake his head; and a thin reedy voice would pipe—
“no, it won’t do, old man, won’t do, only a whispering gallery.” and they would pass on, still arguing, still differing, and still, apparently, very good friends.
and the two german sentries would look at one another sympathetically.
“kriegs-gefangeners, fritz,” one would say, “captured in the great war. there were a lot of ’em here, and those two, you’ll always see them walkin’ up and down there talking the most awful rot, all about poetry{192} and things. poor fellows! probably a little wrong in the head, they were, a bit maddish you know; they look a bit that way.”
and it is not for me to deny it.
