Chapter VII: Part TWO: Certain Interiors (2)

It was mostly his tired voice and his colorless narration that had impressed me with him. I didn’t think much about--I did not even realize--the rather stupendous Odyssey of a life he must have had until I stood on that balcony of the Paris theater, in the night, with the French officers. You see, it was anyhow such a tremendous Odyssey for every one there that a little more or less at the moment did not jump to the eye as mattering. But, underneath, in the subconscious mind, it mattered.

I daresay--nay, I am sure--that it was that quality that mattered to me more than anything else of the whole cause for thought that the war gave one. For me--apart from Lord Kitchener and Sir Edward Grey--there were few great figures of those years. Sir Edward Grey went out of course once war was declared: then Kitchener went. There remained this Tommy of the Lincolns and I think Lt. Morgan of my own battalion was then still alive. Henri Gaudier was certainly dead--and he, in my mind, was united to the Lincolnshire Private and Morgan. They had, all three, a certain serenity.

I wish I could remember Morgan’s initials. He had a brother, “I. H.”--a nice boy. I hope he is still alive.

But the Morgan who is dead sounded, as it were, exactly the same note as the Lincolnshire man--the note of tired but continuous laboring after a very hard life. You know the sort of effect a violin has when its strings are muted. It was like that.

I think Morgan must have had his last leave at the same time as myself when I went out the second time; but I don’t think we went out together. At any rate, we took together a very long railway journey--but I don’t remember why or where--probably because I spent it listening to the story of his life. I remember his tired movements as he took his knapsack down from the rack whilst the train was running into some terminus. And I remember it seemed to me to be a shame--on the part of destiny--that he should be going out at all. I met him next night in Coventry Street--and he did not seem to be getting much out of Coventry Street after dark. We stood talking for a minute, and then he disappeared among the prostitutes and the flash Jews. I expect we each said: “Good luck, old man,” for I believe he liked me, and I must have liked him very much.

He was killed, as I have said, by a _minenwerfer_ as he was going up a communication-trench on his first night. He was buried so that, in the morning when they found him, only his feet and legs were showing. He was probably not buried alive, because the officer who found him said that he was smiling. I like to think of that.

Because these were the men who needed--who _must_ have had if indeed there be a just God or even merely a deity who gives compensations--a period of sanctuary after their very hard labors. It doesn’t matter about you and me....

But poor old Morgan ... I don’t know what age he was. I daresay he was no more than thirty-two, little and brown and persistent--his face was thin, aquiline, and as if hardened and sand-blasted by the perpetual confrontation of winds full of hail. For he too had gone out to Canada--but as a boy, apparently without much capital, to work for wheat-farmers.

I suppose most people know something about working for Canadian farmers--the long solitudes, the distance of the towns, the protracted buggy rides over immense plains. Well, I seem to have an extraordinary sense of it--just from the way Morgan talked on that long train journey. I don’t know that I remember incidents. Perhaps I could. I remember that, knowing little about horses at the beginning, he was asked by the boss if he would take a helluva vicious team to the nearest township to fetch something, a plow, I think. And he had done it.

But the main of the story was just the long strain--long hours merging into long years, with the muscles always a little overstrained. Not much, but a little. Because, though gallant, persistent, and showing it as the Welsh do, he was small for wrestling with tree trunks and immense plains. I remember his saying that when he had dug holes for the posts of wire fencing, he poured water in so that the posts should freeze solid in their places.

Well, he too must have been “_hardi, courageux, et avisé_”--leading a long, uncolored life of sober chastity, without many visits to the townships even, let alone the towns. For, as he sat in the carriage, he said that he owned property--timber lots and other lots, bought out of the savings of a laborer.

And he spoke of going back there, _après la guerre finie_--with the serene resignation of a man with no other imaginable destiny before him. It was to be more toil and more toil and more toil. He did not, apparently, ask for--certainly he did not imagine--any other future. So that resignation is not the right word. Serenity is....

X

_From a Balcony_

One of the French officers, on the balcony of the theater, during the _entr’acte_ of _Lakme_, was describing, with that depressed neatness of quiet diction that is at the disposal of every educated Frenchman, the sleep of a French territorial on an uncompleted traverse. The others had, as it were--and as if by preconcertion--capped stories in lauding and pitying the _territoriaux_. These troops, it may be as well to point out, were something like the Labor Battalions that subsequently we raised. I fancy we had nothing of the sort at that date and indeed, between Hélie and Corbie I had lately seen the Guards’ Brigade doing fatigue that, in French-France would have been performed by old fathers and grandfathers. That, of course, is nothing to the discredit of that great brigade. As soon as battalions, brigades, or divisions came out of the trenches for a “rest”, they were given the cheerful jobs of repairing rear-line trenches, digging drains, cleaning out latrines, and the like. When we came out from the Somme for a “month’s rest”, first A Company, then B, C, and D were given an all-night fatigue--of mending the Albert-Amiens road! And in August! Then we were moved up into the salient.

At any rate, slowly, coldly, and without the shadow of a shade of cordiality, in the blackness of the Paris night, the French officers piled it up. We were not popular in France at that date, and I don’t know that, except as individuals, we deserved popularity. That does not matter. The fact remained that they were “out” to make one feel that from under every little cowering roof in France, from Orange as from the frontier by Mentone to the other frontier by Longwy, old, stiff men, with horny hands and faded eyes had marched over the endless roads with the poplars to their too-heavy labors amidst the bursting shells.... From under _every_ cowering roof of every township, town, hamlet, and parish; from every _arrondissement_; from every _subprefecture_; from every _departement_. Coldly, like inquisitors, in the darkness, they let me have that information. It was not really necessary. I knew it already. But I was too tired, harassed, dispirited to tell them so. I, too, was old for that job. _Atque ego_....

For I couldn’t get away from the conviction that they were talking at me with a purpose--that they were, in indirect terms, telling me that it was a scandal that the Brigade of Guards should be employed in clearing out latrines, work which, in French-France, was performed by the fathers and the grandfathers--the guards being tired out and worn down by such employment when they were such splendid fighting material and should have been really rested. I daresay our own war office would have answered that that was part of our discipline and that “fatigues” when men were “resting” were good for their livers and kept them “fit”. There is such a school of thought. Anyhow, I am not writing a military treatise and do not ask that any attention should be paid to my views. I am only chronicling the psychology of an Infantry officer as he was affected by certain circumstances.

And I _couldn’t_ get away from the conviction that the French officers were talking “officially”. In those days there had just been published in Paris a book of “official” propaganda by myself. It would not have been a different book if it had been unofficial or if there had been no war. It simply advanced the theory that in the world of letters and ideas, for personal industry and pride in work as work, it is only France that matters among the nations. I had said that when I was twenty; I resaid it then being over double that age; I resay it today; and I will resay it as my eyes close in death. No one in my country has ever paid any attention to one’s saying it, and no one ever will. Why should they? Letters and ideas have so little place in our body politic and the doctrine of pride in work as work; of engrossment and of serenity; of aloofness from the world and of introspection with no other purpose--is here anathema both with the Right which hates the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake and with the Left, which hates that of Labor for the sake of Labor. Yet I see no other lesson in life. That is why I have collected these notes upon sheepfolds--this long lay sermon.

So this particular piece of official propaganda was, just then, being accorded an extraordinary amount of notoriety in France. The skill of our own propaganda people and the patriotism of distinguished Frenchmen accounted for that. It was reviewed at enormous length and with enormous headlines by Academicians, by assailants of the French Academy, and by the Mayors of Rouen, Lyons, and Toulouse. It was “communicated” to the Institute of France; publicly laid upon the shelves of the city library of Yvetot. And it was no doubt on that account that the French officers presented official views to me so carefully and so excruciatingly. They imagined that I had weight in the Councils of the Empire, as would have been the case in their own country.

While they talked the black houses round the market had infinite depths of violet against the white stars. But all the same I was looking at the view from the top of the great brick Roman Theater at Orange--over the flats with the ragged, stunted vines, the stubble, and the thatched roofs. Yes, I knew that beside Orange the little houses cowered beside the furrows and that on the other frontier great, gaunt piles were subsiding under scrolls and tongues of flame, going down to a last rest as the very tired men of a platoon will fall out beside the road. And the great buildings never get up again.

For I never feel that houses have souls. So that, when, out there, you saw a house go down as fire, it seemed to do it luxuriously almost. It was finished with men and their ways. It had no doubt borne for long with their cruelties, stupidities, imbecilities; with its windows for mournful eyes it had seen the generations flit past and fade. It had known cold that made its timbers crack and the great heat of the sun warping them. But beneath the flames, slowly, it would sink to the earth from which it had come. Yes, luxuriously, as men stretch themselves down for a long rest....

The French officer was still talking about the old territorial who had fallen asleep. It seems that the old man had gone on working, after his mates had been taken off for a spell, on the inner face of the traverse--which is a sort of pillar of earth with a gangway round it, left in a trench to minimize the lateral spread of shell fire. He had gone on working--out of pure zeal, the officer said. The officer addressed me with hard bitterness. I suppose he thought I was some sort of noncombatant. The staff-captain told me afterward that this officer, being aide-de-camp to one of the most famous French generals of division of the day had, the night before, attended his chief to a dinner--given, I think, by the British A.P.M.--in the course of which the heroic doings of a great many British Regiments were extolled. And then, in a pause, an English lady had said to the French general: “And the French haven’t done so badly.”... I was being made to suffer for this.

And I did suffer a good deal--more I think than I ever suffered. The officer went on and on about his old territorial. He was there, asleep, in the light of a single candle stuck in the clay. He was as it were spread-eagled against the earth. His legs apart he had raised his hammer to strike his chisel; both his arms were over his head, stretched out. And he was just asleep. It was touching; it was terrible in its simplicity, the officer said. He said the territorial came from Passy--as it might be Putney.

It was just at this point that I remembered Morgan and the old man of the bath-mill. I daresay you will think it merely a literary trick, when I say that I saw them.

But I _saw_ them: against an immense black mass fringed by flaming houses. I saw those two, tired faces; the two serene, honest, and simple souls, who had the Kingdom of God within them. And it seemed to me that they had died in vain.

It was for me the most terrible moment of the war.

I daresay that for many people it was the most horrible period of the war. For, by then it had become apparent that the Somme advance was a fiasco--a useless butchery. We knew we should never advance. I daresay the French knew it better than we. Certainly the voices of these officers drove it home: they spoke as if they were talking to a condemned criminal. And I think it was not right of them.

We, at any rate, were the old voluntary army. We had come, aged or young, from the ends of the earth. I don’t know whether it is worse to be old or young in a great war--it was bad enough to be old! And I don’t know whether it was better or worse to have come from the ends of the earth--or from Passy. Or to have passed all one’s life beneath a roof that shuddered with fear.... If you had done that, you were more used to the idea, and to the discipline of the idea, of war. You discussed the moves, here and there, more _en connoisseur_.

But I doubt if one of those men on the balcony felt the war as I did. We, after all, brought so many more emotions to it. You had only to contrast Paris, gray, sober, much as usual, with the roads under leisurely repair, and the old horses and the old _cochers_ and _voitures_ dawdling in the shadow of the plane-trees--with London, plastered with endless appeals in blue and scarlet and yellow--London, hurrying, exclaiming, clamoring.... The old territorial had lived all his life under the shadow--and it came. The old private of the Lincolnshires had never thought of such an end. But it came! And Europe flamed....

And the worst of it all was that one was beginning to doubt. Until then one had been carried by the fine wave of enthusiasm. It seemed to embrace the whole country. And we in all the holes, valleys, over all the downlands of the Somme, where the sun shone with its chalky rays as it does by L----, had had a great singleness of purpose and had been confident that we had the support of a great singleness of purpose extending across a world. But doubt had begun to creep in....

I wished, then, that I had not read “What Maisie Knew” in the bath at Albert. I wished that the daily papers would not reach us. The atmosphere shown so overwhelmingly in the book was beginning to be too close to the atmosphere reflected in the papers. And we were, truly, very lonely out there; truly we were some millions of men, suspended on a raft, in limitless space.

And we were beginning to feel a curious dislike of the civilians whom up till then we had so trusted--a curious dislike that was never to die. I don’t know what was going on at home: political intrigues no doubt; strikes possibly. But there seemed to prevail a tenuous, misty struggle of schemes--just the atmosphere of “Maisie.” I don’t think that many of those who were one’s comrades _in illo die_ did not at times feel a certain hopelessness. It was as if at times we said: What are those people after? Aren’t they--aren’t they surely?--“out” to make huge profits from our poor Tommies; to cut down the rations of our poor Tommies; and to gain notoriety by forcing on a timorous central government their own schemes for the training of poor Tommies--schemes that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our poor fine Tommies? And, when their own attractions were enhanced by the bringing off of this or that scheme, intrigue, or cabal, they would vote to themselves ribbons, orders, power, divorces, and the right to gallons of petrol. And so they would sit in the chairs of the lost and the forgotten amidst a world where the ideals which sent all those millions to destruction were lost too ... and forgotten. You will say that this is bitter. It is. It was bitter to have seen the 38th Division murdered in Mametz Wood--and to guess what underlay that!...

And then the French officer said what I knew he would say: what I had known that, with all his cold lack of rhetoric, he was working up to. He said that the old, sleeping territorial looked like Our Lord on Calvary. I could have screamed. Upon my soul I could have screamed. And, if I hadn’t thought it just possible that his dislike attached to me personally, I daresay I should have talked to him as I talked to the other French officer as the reader may see in _Une Partie de Cricket_. But the faint hope that it was just myself that he despised and not poor Morgan and the others--all the poor others along that long front of ours--that faint hope that he was attacking only me and not the Army of the Somme just made me hold my peace until we went back into the theater. And in the theater I suddenly remembered--as clearly as I had remembered the others--Henri Gaudier. He, too, seemed to stand before me and to smile at me a little, as if he found me comic....

I do not know why it is that now, when I think of Gaudier, the cadence that I hear in my mind should be one of sadness. For there was never any one further from sadness than Henri Gaudier, whether in his being or in his fate. He had youth; he had grace of person and of physique; he had a sense of the comic. He had friendships, associates in his work, loves, the hardships that help youth. He had genius, and he died a hero.

He comes back to me best as he was at a function of which I remember most, except for Gaudier, disagreeable sensations--embarrassments. It was an “affair”--one of two--financed by a disagreeably obese Neutral whom I much disliked. That would be in late July, 1914. The Neutral was much concerned to get out of a country and a city which appeared to be in danger. Some one else--several some ones--were intensely anxious, each of them, to get money out of the very fat, very monied, disagreeably intelligent being. And I was ordered, by _Les Jeunes_, to be there. It was a parade, in fact. I suppose that even then I was regarded as a, I hope benevolent, grandfather, by a number of members of an advanced school.[7] Anyhow, that comes back to me as a disagreeable occasion of evil passions, evil people, of bad, flashy cooking in an underground haunt of pre-war smartness.

I daresay it was not really as bad as all that--but when I am forced to receive the hospitality of persons whom I dislike, the food seems to go bad, and there is a bad taste in the mouth, symbol of a disturbed liver. So the band played in that cave and the head ached and there were nasty foreign waiters and bad, very expensive, champagne.

There were also speeches--and one could not help knowing that the speeches were directed at the Neutral’s breeches pockets. The Neutral leaned heavily sideways at table, devouring the bad food at once with gluttony and nonchalance. It talked about its motor car, which apparently was at Liverpool or Southampton--somewhere where there were liners, quays, cordage, cranes; all ready to abandon a city which would be doomed should Armageddon become Armageddon. The speeches went on....

Then Gaudier rose. It was suddenly like a silence that intervened during a distressing and ceaseless noise. I don’t know that I had ever noticed him before except as one amongst a crowd of dirtyish, bearded, slouch-hatted individuals, like conspirators; but, there, he seemed as if he stood amidst sunlight; as if indeed he floated in a ray of sunlight, like the dove in Early Italian pictures. In a life during which I have known thousands of people; thousands and thousands of people; during which I have grown sick and tired of “people” so that I prefer the society of cabbages, goats, and the flowers of the marrow plant; I have never otherwise known what it was to witness an appearance which symbolized so completely--aloofness. It was like the appearance of Apollo at a creditors’ meeting. It was supernatural.

It was just that. One didn’t rub one’s eyes: one was too astounded. Only, something within one wondered what the devil he was doing there. If he hadn’t seemed so extraordinarily efficient, one would have thought he had strayed, from another age, from another world, from some Hesperides. One keeps wanting to say that he was Greek, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t of a type that strayed: and indeed I seem to feel his poor bones moving in the August dust of Neuville St. Vaast when I--though even only nearly!--apply to him a name that he would have hated. At any rate, it was amazing to see him there; since he seemed so entirely inspired by inward visions that one wondered what he could be after--certainly not the bad dinner, the attentions of the foreign waiters, a try at the Neutral’s money-bag strings. No, he spoke as if his eyes were fixed on a point within himself; and yet, with such humor and such good-humor--as if he found the whole thing so comic!

One is glad of the comic in his career; it would otherwise have been too much an incident of the Elgin marble type. But even the heroism of his first, abortive “joining up” was heroico-comic. As I heard him tell the story, or at least as I remember it, it was like this:

He had gone to France in the early days of the war--and one accepted his having gone as one accepted the closing of a door--of a tomb, if you like. Then, suddenly, he was once more there. It produced a queer effect; it was a little bewildering in a bewildering world. But it became comic. He had gone to Boulogne and presented himself to the Recruiting Officer--an N. C. O., or captain, of the old school, white moustachios, _cheveux en brosse_. Gaudier stated that he had left France without having performed his military duties, but, since _la patrie_ was in danger, he had returned like any other good little _piou-piou_. But the sergeant, martinet-wise, as became a veteran of 1870, struck the table with his fist and exclaimed:

“_Non, mon ami_, it is not _la patrie_, but you who are in danger. You are a deserter; you will be shot.” So Gaudier was conducted to a motor, in which, under the military escort of two files of men, a sergeant, a corporal, and a lieutenant, he was whirled off to Calais. In Calais Town he was placed in an empty room. Outside the door were stationed two men with large guns, and Gaudier was told that, if he opened the door, the guns would go off. That was his phrase. He did not open the door. He spent several hours reflecting that though they manage these things better in France, they don’t manage them so damn well. At the end of that time he pushed aside the window blind and looked out. The room was on the ground floor; there were no bars. Gaudier opened the window; stepped into the street, just like that--and walked back to Boulogne.

He returned to London.

He was drawn back again to France by the opening of the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral. This time he had a safe conduct from the Embassy. I do not know the date of his second joining up or the number of his regiment. At any rate, he took part in an attack on a Prussian outpost on Michaelmas Eve, so he had not much delayed, and his regiment was rendered illustrious, though it cannot have given him a deuce of a lot of training. He did not need it. He was as hard as nails and as intelligent as the devil. He was used to forging and grinding his own chisels. He was inured to the hardships of poverty in great cities; he was accustomed to hammer and chisel at his marble for hours and hours of day after day. He was a “fit” townsman--and it was “fit” townsmen who conducted the fighting of 1914 when the war was won: it was _les parigots_.

* * * * *

Of his biography I have always had only the haziest of notions. I know that he was the son of a Meridional craftsman, a carpenter and joiner, who was a good workman and no man could have a better. His father was called Joseph Gaudier--so why he called himself B’jesker, I do not know. I prefer really to be hazy; because Gaudier will always remain for me something supernatural. He was for me a “message” at a difficult time of life. His death and the death at the same time of another boy--but quite a commonplace, nice boy--made a rather doubtful way quite plain to me.

All my life I have been very much influenced by a Chinese proverb--to the effect that it would be hypocrisy to seek for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low teahouse. It is a bad proverb, because it is so wise and so enervating. It has “ruined my career”.

When, for instance, I founded a certain Review, losing, for me, immense sums of money on it, or when the contributors unanimously proclaimed that I had not paid them for their contributions--which was not true because they certainly had among them a quantity of my money in their pockets--or when a suffrage bill failed to pass in the Commons; or when some one’s really good book has not been well reviewed; or when I have been robbed, slandered, or abortively blackmailed--in all the vicissitudes of life, misquoted on it, I have always first shrugged my shoulders and murmured that it would be hypocrisy to seek for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-shop. It meant that it would be hypocrisy to expect a taste for the finer letters in a large public’s discernment in critics; honesty in æsthetes or literati; public spirit in lawgivers; accuracy in pundits; gratitude in those one has saved from beggary, and so on.

So, when I first noticed Henri Gaudier--which was in an underground restaurant, the worst type of thieves’ kitchen--these words rose to my lips. I did not, you understand, believe that he would exist and be so wise, so old, so gentle, so humorous, such a genius. I did not really believe that he had shaved, washed, assumed garments that fitted his great personal beauty.

For he had great personal beauty. If you looked at him casually, you imagined that you were looking at one of those dock-rats of the Marseilles quays, who will carry your baggage for you, pimp for you; garotte you and throw your body overboard--but who will do it all with an air, an ease, an exquisiteness of manners! They have, you see, the traditions and inherited knowledge of such ancient nations in Marseilles--of Etruscans, Phoenicians, Colonial Greeks, Late Romans, Troubadours, Late French--and that of those who first sang the Marseillaise! And many of them, whilst they are young, have the amazing beauty that Gaudier had. Later, absinthe spoils it--but for the time, they are like Arlésiennes.

All those wisdoms, then, looked out of the eyes of Gaudier--and God only knows to what he threw back--to Etruscans or Phoenicians, no doubt, certainly not to the Greeks who colonized Marseilles, or the Late Romans who succeeded to them. He seemed, then, to have those wisdoms behind his eyes somewhere. And he had, certainly, an astounding erudition.

I don’t know where he picked it up--but his conversation was overwhelming--and his little history of sculpture by itself will give you more flashes of inspiration than you will ever, otherwise, gather from the whole of your life. His sculpture itself affected me just as he did.

In odd places--the sitting rooms of untidy and eccentric poets with no particular merits, in appalling exhibitions, in nasty night clubs, in dirty restaurants one would be stopped for a moment in the course of a sentence by the glimpse of a brutal chunk of rock that seemed to have lately fallen unwanted from a slate quarry, or, in the alternative, by a little piece of marble that seemed to have the tightened softness of the haunches of a fawn--of some young creature of the underwoods, an ancient, shyly-peopled, thicket.

The brutalities would be the work of Mr. Epstein--the other, Gaudier. For Gaudier’s work had just his own, personal, impossible quality. And one did not pay much attention to it simply because one did not believe in it. It was too good to be true. Remembering the extraordinary rush that the season of 1914 was, it appears a miserable tragedy, but it is not astonishing, that one’s subliminal mind should whisper to me, every time we caught that glimpse of a line: “It is hypocrisy to search for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-house.” It was of course the devil who whispered that. So I never got the sensation I might have got from that line. Because one did not believe in that line. One thought: “It is just the angle at which one’s chair in the restaurant presents to one an accidental surface of one of these young men’s backs.”

And then a day came when there was no doubt about it. Gaudier was a Lance Corporal in the 4th Section, 7th Company, 129th Regt. of Infantry of the Line.[8] Gaudier was given his three stripes for “gallantry in face of the enemy”. One read in a letter:

“I am at rest for three weeks in a village, that is, I am undergoing a course of study to be promoted officer when necessary during an offensive.”

Or in another letter:

“I imagine a dull dawn, two lines of trenches, and in between explosion on explosion with clouds of black and yellow smoke, a ceaseless noise from the rifles, a few legs and heads flying, and me standing up among all this like to Mephisto--commanding: ‘_Feu par salves à 250 mètres--joue--feu!_’

“Today is magnificent, a fresh wind, clear sun, and larks singing cheerfully....”

That was it!

But just because it was so commonplace; so sordid, so within the scope of all our experiences, powers of observation, and recording, it all seemed impossible to believe that in _that_ particular low tea-house there were really Youth, Beauty, Erudition, Fortune, Genius--to believe in the existence of a Gaudier! The devil still whispered to me: “That would be hypocrisy!” For if you would not believe that genius could show itself during the season of 1914, how _could_ you believe that, of itself, inscrutable, noiseless, it would go out of our discreditable world where the literati and the æsthetes were sweating, harder than they ever, ever did after _le mot juste_ or the Line of Beauty, to find excuses that should keep them from the trenches--that, so quietly, the greatest genius of them all would go into that world of misery.

And then I read:

“_Mort pour la patrie._

“After ten months of fighting and two promotions for gallantry, on the field, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, in a charge at Neuville St. Vaast. June 5, 1915.”

Alas, when it was too late, I had learned that, to this low tea-shop that the world is, from time to time the Sacred Emperor may pay visits. So I began to want to kill certain people. I still do--for the sake of Gaudier and those few who are like him.

For the effect of reading that announcement was to make me remember with extraordinary vividness a whole crowd of the outlines of pieces of marble, of drawings, of tense and delicate lines at which, in the low tea-house of the year before’s season, I had only nonchalantly glanced. The Sacred Emperor, then, had been there. He seemed, at last, to be an extraordinarily real figure--as real as one of the other sculptor’s brutal chunks of granite. Only, because of the crowd one hadn’t seen him--the crowd of blackmailers,[9] sneak-thieves, suborners, pimps, reviewers, and the commonplace and the indifferent--the Huns of London. Well, it became--and it still more remains! one’s duty to try to kill them. There are probably several Sacred Emperors still at large--though the best of them will have been killed, as Gaudier was.

* * * * *

It was whilst I was inside the theater that I registered, as the saying is, a mental vow that I would pay no attention any more to public affairs. To do so would drive one mad. I decided that I must put my head down under the cloth for the rest of the war. And I think I did so. Except for the occasional duty of writing propaganda--which from that time onwards I did in French--I paid no more attention to the politics of my country or the world. I just did the collar-work of the Infantry Officer until the 11/11/’17. After that, my views being too favorable to France, the Ministry of Information and the censor suppressed or lost in the post my rather excited writings on the Terms of Peace.... That would be about three years ago today. It seems a long while....

The inside of the theater was brilliant, formal, a little shabby if you looked closely. Of the performance of _Lakme_--an opera that I love very much, since the music is soft, moving, and generous--I remember very little. So it must have been a good rendering with no performer in particular “sticking out”. The British naval officers were rather funny. And I think it is no left-handed compliment to the composer, Délibes--though it may be to the librettist--to say that my thoughts were elsewhere. The music was just sensuous pleasure; the aspect of the house, spreading round in great lines of polychromatic humanity, more regular than is the case with most theaters in London--more suave and more classical--soothed one after what was certainly an emotional crisis; an escaped danger. For it would have mortified me for the rest of my life if I had burst out under the goadings of the French officers. But, by the Grace of God and the skin of my teeth, I had retained, quite certainly, my aspect of insular phlegm.

Still it had been exhausting--and I was enervated. And then, quite suddenly, it came to me to wonder what was going on outside the theater--what was going on under the black roof of the night, with the infinitely numerous population of leaves, blades, branches, reeds beside streams, great trees in the woodlands--and with the silent, watchful population of the thickets where the shadows are so extremely deep. I found myself wondering what time of year it was. And I said: the first weeks of September. For that morning I had recollected that, two years before on that day, the Germans had turned back from in front of Paris. Forty-six years before they had won the battle of Sedan.

It was, then, during the first weeks of September. But what happened--in September? One forgot. One had repaired trenches; one had commanded fatigues digging drains round Bn.H.Q., to the left of Mount Kemmel. One had dug so efficiently that, during the first thunderstorm the repaired trenches below were neck-deep in water. All that had passed in “the Country”.

But what happened in September? There were no doubt apples on the trees, and, certainly, it was the time of year when many cobwebs, frail nets across the tall grasses on commons or single, brilliant filaments, streamed out and glistened on still, bright days.

There would be plums, too; but what about damsons? Wasn’t it early for them? And how about garden peas? Were they over? And field peas? And would there be an autumn feel in the air?

It was twenty-one days to Michaelmas--and Michaelmas certainly brought the autumn feeling, with touches of vine in the shadow of yellowing plants and the leaves of sunflowers drooping straight down, like unfurled colors on windless days. But in copses, shaves, and spinneys were the leaves on forest trees yet turning? Were roads yet hard and frosty in the morning? And were horses yet sluggish and apt to stumble on roads as they do at the turn of the year and the fall of the leaf?... Time to give ’em a ball.

The baffled mind seemed to stumble at all these questions. One was in the theater and having been forbidden by the will to think that what surrounded the great walls with their human lining was a vast black map fringed by conflagrations, the poor mind hung faltering.

It fell suddenly back on contemplating the green nook that--on the down behind Albert--it had reserved for itself. Yes, the mind actually did that. And, across the gilding of the proscenium, across Lakme’s singing the great song of yearning, there hung a slight shimmer of green that intensified itself and took shape like a recumbent oval.... And there began to become visible the yellowing, grayish rows of broad beans; a rather ragged hedge and a little stream beyond, level with the grass and fringed with the glistening stems of clumps of rushes that had been cut for thatching stacks. Because it was indeed September.

[Footnotes]

[7] For the benefit of the uninstructed reader, I may say that new Schools of Art, like new commercial enterprises, need both backers with purses and backers of a certain solid personal appearance or weight in the world. And it is sometimes disagreeable, though it is always a duty, to be such an individual.

[8] The knowledgeable reader will observe that here Gringoire has consulted the monograph on Gaudier by Mr. Pound--the best piece of craftsmanship that Mr. Pound has put together; or at least the best this writer has read of that author’s.

[9] Gringoire is too fond of this word--which he uses in a special sense to indicate persons--mostly reviewers--who do not appreciate the work of himself and his school. In his conversation he introduced at this point a long denunciation of the ---- Literary Supplement, principally because, whilst purporting to be a literary paper, it devotes, according to him, 112/113ths of its space to books about facts, at the expense of works of the imagination. So he calls that respectable journal a blackmailing organ. Since, however, this is a topic that can hardly interest the non-literary, and since the literary are hardly likely to read these pages, the compiler has taken the liberty of not reporting these sallies. It may be true that Pontius Pilate is more criminal than the crucified thieves--but it is _never_ politic to say so.

XI

_“Rosalie Prudent”_

One evening the compiler addressed Gringoire, who was making notes in a seed catalogue, somewhat as follows:

“Do you remember, oh Gringoire, what it is to awake of a September morning at dawn? Being _horticulteur_, your first thought will be for the weather: being _poète_, your first thought will be for your new volume. And the two first thoughts will overlay the one the other, according as chance wills. But the still mist is so reassuring as to the weather that you can put that aside and think only of your volume. The goodly fruits of the earth in the late summer season, the plums, the apples, the quinces; the maize, the marrows, the melons, have yet another day, for sure, of bright, warm sun, of gorgeous, mellow downward shavers of sun. They, surely, shall stand motionless in the warmth.

“But the poems ... oh my poor Gringoire of the dawn: the great, half-finished epic! Ah that! that seemed so glowing too when last night in the golden light of the two candles, in your poor little, rickety salon that yet has a style of its own ... you read them to Madame Sélysette ... the poor verses that you read so famously to little Madame!... In the dawn, ah, the wolf of the night that says: ‘Hou ... hou’ from the mountains has not gone home! Almost you hear his sniffing round the little green door that, because yours is a land of idylls and the innocent, you have left open. One day the wolf with the great, cocked hairy ears, with the long white teeth like razors for their sharpness shall come in. You will hear upon the uncarpeted stairway the pad of the feet; the little thin door will push open, and raised at the foot of your small white bed, you will see the great beast; the huge head; the bloodshot eyes.... And Madame, in the other little white bed across the small white room will moan a little in her sleep....

“All the poor verses: the little lines! How shall they be the barbed wire fence that shall keep the wolf from the door of the cottage? Why, he could push the poor, tindery old walls down with his snout! The poor verses! They halt ... or no, they do not halt. We are too good a craftsman for that! But assuredly they do not run. And the publisher! What shall he say? And Madame with such a need of a new gown: it should have been of velvet, puffed in the arms, and slashed to show an undercoat of crushed rose silk. And to tell the truth--your _pantalons?_ How they shine in the seat, like a mirror! And the public! Ah, the grim public that has no taste but for dominoes in the cafés of an evening! How shall they care for the savor of lavender and rosemary in your smaller verses? What, to them, are Melpomene and Mélisande and Maleine and Musidore of your epic! And the cursed ‘machinery’ of the enormous poem! What has become of your great device that was to take the story forward from line 1100 to line 1424? Forgotten! O Apollo! O Euterpe! Forgotten--gone--your brain is failing. Your diet of oatmeal and junket is not enough to water your gray matter with rich red blood. It is all over ... and the great wolf says ‘Hou!... hou!’ upon the mountains, though the mists are rising. And Madame, you can see, is smiling in her sleep! Ah! When you are suspended by your cravat from the old thorn tree, she will marry the rich son of the apothecary....

“And then ... suddenly you remember! Maleine became a rose tree, and the slipper of glass was hidden in a bath.... Yes: it was like that. The device has come back to you. Hurray! Hurray! And the verses shall glow and sparkle. And damn the public and damn and damn the publisher, and Madame is a sweet, plump angel.

“And you spring from your bed, oh Gringoire, but with the footfall of a panther for fear the creaking of the very old oak floor boards should awaken your own Sélysette. And quick and quick to your dressing room, which is on state occasions the spare bedroom. Then you wash in the brick-floored kitchen. And how crisp and reviving is the cold water on the skin--just as it used to be when you came out of the tent or the dugout or the hut, down before Péronne in the old days. And there is no war.

“No war to awaken the birds that are still sleeping in the massed shadows of trees all unmoving in the deep mists. A noble, long, quiet, warm day of September is before you. A day of _moissons_ and _vendanges_, ripening securely, still; with line added to line in the morning; and nothing to do in that rich little garden of yours; and line added to line of the epic all the afternoon. And a stroll in the level, sinking rays of the sun with Madame Sélysette, like a mysterious _jeune fille_ once more, to sing to you, in the carefreedom of her heart, the song of the raggle-taggle gipsies, oh....

‘Oh what care I for my goose-feather-bed
The sheets turned down so bravely oh!
Tonight I’ll sleep on a cold open heath
Along with the raggle-taggle gipsies, oh!’

as she was used to sing it in the days when she left the roof of her father, the so very rich goldsmith of Toulouse, to take up with you, oh my so very poor poet. _Vogue la galère!_ I hear you say. For are there not fine cabbages in the garden; and the haricots and the tomatoes all a-ripening! And does not Madame make an incomparable _potage bonne femme_ with these things and a few little bones! A fig for the wolf! And if she cannot have her gown of velvet--when do her dark eyes sparkle more vivaciously than when in her black hair she wears a coronal of the scarlet berries of bryony? And if the _pantalons_ shine in the seat, let them shine till they wear through! And then there will be a piece of sacking to insert, whose remainder shall stuff up the holes of the so very old roof. And Melpomene and Mélisande and Musidore shall dance to the tune of green sleeves round the rose tree that was Maleine! Aye, they shall dance in the sun till the crystal slipper falls out of the bath of dew. And already Phœbus Apollo has chased into the farthest recesses of the Alpilles the craven old wolf....

“And, fastening your collar, you rush into the room where Madame is asleep, and you shout out:

“‘I have it! We will put Sweet Williams, and behind them Canterbury Bells, and behind them Hollyhocks, in the bed along the path. And tulips before the door!’

“It is true that the Hollyhocks will then be to the south of the Canterbury Bells, and they again to the south of the Sweet Williams--the tall plants standing in the light of the short ones, which is against the maxims of safe gardeners. But we must chance something, as we chance life when we are so very poor and so very simple and have to adventure down the years with no stores of gold, under a very old roof with half the tiles off. And besides: maybe next summer will be a very dry summer, and then the shade of the Hollyhock on the Canterbury Bells, and of the Canterbury Bells on the Sweet Williams will be a positive benefit....

“And, truly, in all the gardening year--which is all pleasure except for such lets and hindrances as God decrees to you in order that you may remember that you are human--there is no pleasure to equal the pleasures of a mid-September day. For there is promise in the chrysanthemums; the asters, petunias, and geraniums are still bright; marrows, pumpkins, gourds, maize, plums, apples, pears, damsons are drinking in the sun and turning all the colors from rich green to orange and tomato-scarlet. There are still flowers on the roses and on the sweet-pea hedge. And, if those foliages are thinning, through their silver and yellow haze you can see the bright mosaic of next summer’s beds! Ah, brave mid-September!”

* * * * *

To this Gringoire answered--a little grimly:

In a mid-September twilight, the rain poured down on Pont-de-Nieppe. Depressed Highlanders lounged along the street in front of the row of villas that ran from the church to the rear of the town--taking our own lines as the front. One’s horse and one’s orderly’s horse slipped disagreeably on the wet granite setts of the pavé, and one seemed to have gone backwards and forwards, in a deluge over greasy roads for hours and hours--for a whole lifetime. One seemed never to have done anything else. It was a billeting job that we had been sent upon. And, when we had billeted everything we could think of, there still remained some disreputable other ranks connected with the divisional canteen, for whom we had not found holes, corners, and a shop. And the division we were relieving had apparently vanished and so had the Town Marshal, whilst the _Maire_ was so obliging that he placed the whole, empty town at our disposal. It would have helped us more if he had been less obliging and had dictatorially provided us with one shop into which to stick the canteen and its confounded sutlers. And it poured, and we continued to wander about the empty streets. And it poured--and, in the most unexpected places, the disreputable Acting Lance Corporal in charge of Divisional Canteen would bob up, touch his cap like a London cab-runner and exclaim, always in three breaths: “Xcusemesir; may-I-speak-to-you-sir; have-you-found-a-billet-for-the-Divisional-Canteen-sir?” He was a most annoying person, a London music hall “turn” in peace time. He occupied his leisure moments behind the Canteen Counter in writing “sketches” for London Halls, like the Hoxton Empire, at fifty pounds a time. Sometimes he would appear alone or would emerge alone from the chalk-rubbish and festoons of wallpaper of an empty shop. Sometimes he would have behind him a disreputable French country cart loaded with sardine tins, sticks of shaving soap, cigarette packets, cratesful of wet dates, writing tablets--God knows what. And the horse--or it may have been a mule--seemed to be a hundred years old. And rain dripped from its ears. And rain poured on the disagreeable objects in the tilt cart and on the three impossible Tommies who went with it. And they would have backgrounds of black, wet houses, without roofs, but with lace window curtains dripping in all the empty window spaces; and wet, smashed chairs and commodes and wardrobes hung drunkenly over holes in the floors of houses that had no front walls. And it poured. And twilight deepened.

Then a battalion came in along the Bailleul road; a poor, smashed battalion, with men limping and men under whose tin hats there gleamed white bandages, very conspicuous in the rain and the mud and the dark, wet khaki. And a battalion looks grim indeed when it has been hammered by artillery, on a Macadam road without chance of retaliation--owing to a blunder of a staff officer. They had, I think, 160 men killed in one company--pretty well the whole strength as battalions were in those days. I don’t like to think of it, much.

And yet, such is poor human nature, that both I and my companion said, “Thank God!”--as we had never said, “Thank God” in our lives before. At least I know that I said “Thank God” as I had never in my life said it before--and as I never shall again. For it wasn’t our battalion that had been smashed by direct shell-fire on the Macadam road--Loire--Dranoutre--Neuve Eglise--Plugstreet--Nieppe. Imagine such a route--in full view of the Hun trenches! Why, riding that way the day before, to prospect next day’s billets, I and another officer had had three shells directed to us alone by the German artillery--between Dranoutre and Neuve Eglise! So imagine what it would be for a battalion. And we had seen orders which said that _our_ people were to leave Loire at such and such an hour and to march by Companies--presumably in column of route!--in the Dranoutre-Neuve Eglise-Plugstreet road! And the Divisional Transport Officer had told us early in the afternoon that, as we had _known_ would be the case, our battalion had been hammered to pieces. A whole Company had been wiped out on that road--marching in column of route.[10] “A” Company, he had said, our own company!