Death of a Hero (18 page)

“You'd better come along to fat Shobbe's.”

George, who was young enough to enjoy going to miscellaneous parties, gratefully acquiesced; and was still further gratified by being allowed to witness the strange and complex ablutions performed by
Mr. Upjohn from a wash-basin startlingly concealed in a veneered mahogany tailboy.

Mr. Upjohn was evidently a very clean man, at least in those portions of his body exposed to the public gaze. He washed and rinsed his face thoroughly, brushed his teeth until George apprehended lest the bristles be worn to the bone, gargled and spat freely. He soaped and pumiced his hands, which were large, yellow, and slightly spatulate; and excavated his nails with singular industry and pertinacity. He then sat down before a folding table-mirror in three parts, which reflected both profiles as well as full-face, and combed and brushed and re-brushed and re-combed his coarse hay-like hair until it crackled with induced electricity. When Mr. Upjohn judged that hygiene and beauty-culture had received their full due, he arrayed himself in a clean collar, a tie of remarkable lustre and size, and a narrow-waisted rather long coat which, taken in conjunction with the worn but elegant peg-top trousers he had on, gave him a pleasantly rakehelly and Regency look. This singular scene, which occupied the better part of an hour, was conducted by Mr. Upjohn with great gravity, varied by the emission of a singular and discordant chant or hum, and wild petulant oaths whenever any object of the toilet or of his apparel did not instantly present itself to his hand. Oddly enough, Mr. Upjohn was not a sodomist. He was a professedly ardent admirer of what our ignorant forefathers called the soft sex. Mr. Upjohn often asserted that after the immense toils of Suprematist painting nothing could rest him but the presence of several beautiful women. While gallantly and probably necessarily discreet as to his conquests, he was always prepared to talk about love, and to give subtle erotic advice, which led any man who had actually lain with a woman to suspect that Mr. Upjohn was at best a fumbler and probably still a virgin.

Mr. Upjohn then endued a very Regency thin grey overcoat, stuck a long ebony cane with no handle under his left armpit, tossed a soft grey hat rakishly on to his hair, and made for the door. George followed, half-impressed, half-amused by this childish swagger and self-conscious bounce.

In the street the Sabbath ennui of London emerged from its lair like a large, dull grey octopus, and shot stealthy feelers of depression at them. Mr. Upjohn, safe as Achilles in the Stygian dip of his conceit, strode along energetically with an inward feeling that he had gone one
better on James McNeill Whistler. The boredom of Mr. Upjohn came from within, not from without. He was so absorbed in Mr. Upjohn that he rarely noticed what was going on about him.

George fought at the monster and plunged desperately into talk.

“What about this coal strike? Will it ruin the country as the papers say? Isn't it a foolish thing on both sides?”

This strike was George's first introduction to the reality of the “social problem” and the bitter class-hatred which smoulders in England and at times bursts into fierce crises of hatred, restrained only by that mingling of fear and “decency” which composes the servile character of the British working-man.

“Well, what I mean to say is,” said Mr. Upjohn, who very rarely managed to say what he meant but always meant to say something original and startling, “it ain't our affair. But what I mean is, if the miners get more money it'll be all the better for us. They're more likely to buy our pictures than sons of bitches like Bond and Pittsquith.”

George was a bit staggered at this. In the first place, he had been looking at the problem from a national, not a personal, point of view. And, in the second place, he knew just a little about working-men and their conditions. He could not see how five shillings a week more would convert the miners to collecting the Suprematist school of painting, or make them abandon their cultivated amusements of coursing, pigeon-flying, gambling, wife-beating, and drinking. But Mr. Upjohn delivered his
obiter dicta
with so much aplomb that a boy of twenty might be excused for failing to see their complete absurdity.

They were walking up Church Street, Kensington, that dismal communication trench which links the support line of Kensington High Street with the front line of Notting Hill Gate. How curious are cities, with their intricate trench systems and perpetual warfare, concealed but as deadly as the open warfare of armies! We live in trenches, with flat revetments of house fronts as parapets and parados. The warfare goes on behind the house-fronts – wives with husbands, children with parents, employers with employed, tradesmen with tradesmen, banker with lawyer, and the triumphal doctor rooting out life's casualties. Desperate warfare – for what? Money as the symbol of power; power as the symbol or affirmation of existence. Throbbing warfare of men's cities! As fierce and implacable and concealed as the desperate warfare of plants and the hidden carnage of animals. We walk up
Church Street. Up the communication trench. We cannot see “over the top,” have no vista of the immense no-man's-land of London's roofs. We cannot pierce through the house-fronts. What is going on behind those dingy, unpierceable house-fronts? What tortures, what contests, what incests, what cruelties, what sacrifice, what horror, what sordid emptiness? We cannot pierce through the pavement and Belgian blocks, see the subterranean veins of electric cables, the arteries of gas and water-mains, the viscera of underground railways. We cannot feel the water filtering through London clay; do not perceive the relics of ruined Londons waiting for archaeologists from the antipodes; do not see, far, far down, the fossiled bones of extinct animals and their coprolites. Here in Notting Hill the sabre-toothed tiger roared and savagely devoured its victims; the huge-horned deer darted in terror; wolves howled; the brown bear preyed; overhead by day screamed the eagles and by night flitted huge bats. Mysterious forest murmurs, abrupt yells and threatening growls, and the amorous hatred of female beasts, were vocal when the channel was the Rhine's estuary.

“Time passes,” said George; “what do we know of Time? Prehistoric beasts, like the ichthyosaurus and Queen Victoria, have laired and copulated and brought forth…'

A motor-bus roared by, like a fabulous noisy red ox with fiery eyes and a luminous interior, quenching his words.

“Eh?” said Mr. Upjohn. “Balls!”

“Now, look at these simian bipeds,” George pursued, pointing to an inoffensive pair of lovers and a suspicious cop, “more foul, more deadly, more incestuously blood-lustful…”

“You see, what I mean is, nothing matters to these people but our conversation… Now, what I mean is, you get fat Shobbe to let you write an article on me and Suprematism.”

“We should go to the Zoo more often, and watch the monkeys. The chimpanzee leaps with the dexterity of a politician. The Irish-looking ourang smokes his pipe as placidly as a Camden Town murderer. The purple-bottomed mandrils on heat will initiate you into love. And the perpetual chatter of the small monkeys – how like ourselves! What ecstatic clicking about nothing! Go to the ape, thou poet.”

Mr. Upjohn laughed abruptly and spat with a raucous cough:

“An old idea, but what's it got to do with
le mouvement?
Still, what I mean is, I might do something with it.

Poor old George! He was a bloody fool. He never learned how fatally unwise it is to express any sort of an idea to a brother – still less to a sister – artist.

Mr. Upjohn discoursed on Suprematism and himself.

At Notting Hill Gate, George halted. The Sabbath ennui shot its tentacles at him, and enlaced his spirit, dragging him down into the whirlpool of wanhope. Why go on? Why affront the veiled hostility of people? Why suffer those eyes to search and those nimble unerring tongues to wound? Oh, wrap oneself in solitude, like an armoured shroud, and bend over the dead words of a dead language! A simian biped! O gods, gods! And Plato talks of Beauty.

“Come along,” shouted Mr. Upjohn, a few paces ahead, “this way. Holland Park. Old Shobbe'll be waiting for me in that mob. What I mean is, he knows I'm the only other intelligent person in London.”

George still hesitated. He sank deeper in the maelstrom of unintelligible and causeless despair. Why go on? The adolescent love of death and suicide – corollary to youth's vitality and vivid energy – swept over him in choking waves. To cease upon the midnight with no pain…

“I think I shan't come,” he shouted after the retreating Mr. Upjohn.

Mr. Upjohn hurried back and seized George's arm:

“What's the matter with you? The best way to get an article out of Shobbe is to go and see him on his Sunday evenings. Come on. We shall be late.”

No Euripidean chorus uttered gnomic reflections on the inevitable and irresistible power of Ananke, the Destiny which is above the gods. No bright god warned him, no oracular voice spoke to him. Conflict of freewill and destiny! But is there a conflict? Whether we move or are still, whether we go to the right or the left, hesitate or rush blindly forward, the thread is inexorably spun. Ananke, Ananke.

George yielded reluctantly to the tug at his arm.

“All right, I'll come.”

2

A
S they were shown into Mr. Shobbe's large studio they encountered an indescribable babble of human voices, which gave strange point to George's zoological remarks, since it sounded as if all the macaws at the Zoo had got into the monkey-house to argue with its inhabitants about theology. Mr. Shobbe's studio (or “stew-joe,” as his humbler Cockney contributors called it) was already dim with cigarette smoke. The excited and elevated babble of voices was due to the fact that this was one of Mr. Shobbe's rare caviar and champagne evenings, and not one of the ordinary beer and ham-sandwich
débâcles.
George and Mr. Upjohn were still in the doorway, hidden by the opening door, when a couple of champagne corks popped. George noticed a look of horror and perplexity, mingled with the satisfaction always produced by the prospect of free alcohol, in Mr. Upjohn's countenance. George wondered vaguely why, and followed the ebullient swagger of Mr. Upjohn into the large room. It was not until long afterwards that he realized the cause of this rapid and subtle flash of horror in Mr. Upjohn. The champagne and caviar evenings were reserved for the “better” contributors to, and the wealthier guarantors of, Mr. Shobbe's periodical. Upjohn was County and Cambridge, with a small income and prospects of a large inheritance from a senile aunt – he was therefore one of the “better” contributors. George, on the other hand, was merely middle-class, talented, and penniless. Mr. Upjohn had thus committed a social error of hair-raising enormity by bringing George to the champagne reception under the false impression that it was merely a beer “do” for the common mob.

With genial bonhomie Mr. Shobbe greeted in Mr. Upjohn the potential inheritance from the senile aunt. Upon George he turned a coldly languid blue eye, and for a moment lent him a hand even limper, flabbier, and clammier than usual. George noticed the difference, but ingenuously assumed that it was because he was younger than Mr. Upjohn and incapable of producing “Christ in a Bloomsbury Brothel” or the doctrines of Suprematism. But Mr. Upjohn, with more acute social ambitions, was aware of his
gaffe.
He mumbled his apology, which was almost lost in the surrounding babble:

“Brought 'm 'long discuss 'n article on Me 'n S'prematism.”

Mr. Shobbe only half-heard, and nodded vaguely. The slight awkwardness of the situation was ended by the appearance of Mrs. Shobbe, who greeted them both; and they passed into the room. George attributed the feeling of strain to his own shyness and aloofness. He was still
naïf
enough to suppose that people are welcomed for their own sake.

In justice to the distinguished gathering in Mr. Shobbe's studio (two “social” journalists were present) it must be said that the babble and the excitement were not wholly due to the champagne. Pre-war London was comparatively sober. Numbers of women did not even drink at all, and cocktails and communal copulation had not then been developed to their present state of intensity. Whether the art of scandal-mongering has suffered by this new social activity is hard to say, but as ever it remains the chief diversion of the British intelligentsia. Serious conversation is of course impossible, on account of the paper-pirates who are always hovering about to snatch up an idea. One definite improvement is that the
bon mot
, the
recherché
pun, the international witticism, are definitely discouraged. Indeed, one of the brightest of the post-war reputations was created by a young man who had the self-restraint to sit through forty-five literary parties without saying a word. This frightened everybody so much that when this modern lay Trappist departed you heard on all sides:

“Brilliant young man.”

“Extraordinary clever.”

“I hear he's writing a book on metaphysics in the Stone Age.”

“No, really?”

“They say he's the greatest living authority on pre-Columbian literature!”

“How quite too marvellous.”

But in those distant pre-war days people strove to chatter themselves into notice through a chaos of witticisms. On this particular evening, however, witticisms were in the background, for an event had occurred to stagger this small cosmos of affectation into sincerity. With the exception of George (who was too young and unknown to matter) and a few women, almost everybody present had been connected with a publishing firm which had suddenly gone bankrupt. On Mr. Shobbe's recommendation some of his wealthier guarantors had
put money into the firm; the painters were “doing” illustrated editions or writing books on the Renaissance artists still popular in those unenlightened days; and the writers had received contracts for an almost unlimited number of works. Money had been lavishly spent and some rather amusing things had been begun. Then suddenly the publisher vanished with the lady typist-secretary and the remainder of the cash. Hence the excited babble.