Death of a Hero (19 page)

George stood, a little dazed, beside a small group of youngish men and women. A dark, rather sinister-looking young man kept saying:

“Le crapule! Ah! le crapule!”

George wondered vaguely who was a crapule and why, and halflistened to the conversation.

“He was paying me three hundred a year and…”

“My last novel did so well that he gave me a five years' contract and an advance of…”

“Yes, and I was getting twenty per cent…”

“Yes, but do let me tell you this. Shobbe says that the lawyers told him four thousand pounds of the money came from the diocesan funds of…”

“Yes, I know. Shobbe told us.”

“Le crapule!”

“What'll the archbishop say?”

“Oh, they'll smother that up.”

“Yes, but look here – do shut up for a minute, Bessie – what I want to know is, how do we stand? What about our copyrights? Shobbe told me the legal position is…”

“Hang the legal position. What do we get out of it?”

“Crapule!”

“Nothing, probably.
You
won't get much, anyhow. He hadn't even published your book, and I was to get three hundred a year and…

“It isn't so much the money I mind as having my book off the market when it was going so well – did you see the long article on me in last week's…”

“Crapule!”

George glanced almost affectionately at the sinister-looking young man. It struck him that the repeated “crapule” was addressed as much to his present audience as to the unknown perpetrator of these calamities. At that moment Mr. Upjohn came along, and George took him aside. “I say, Frank, what's all this talk about?”

“Dear Bertie has eloped with Olga and the cash.”

“Dear Bertie? Oh, you mean… But the firm will go on, won't it?”

“Go on the streets. You see, there isn't a cent left. What I mean is, I shall have to find some one else to do my Suprematist book. What I mean to say is, Bertie had a glimmering of intelligence…”

“Who's Olga?”

But at that moment a lady with two unmarried daughters and private information about the senile aunt's fortune plunged sweetly at Mr. Upjohn.

“Oh, Mr. Upjohn, how
nice
to see you again! How
are you?”

“Mildly surviving.”

“You
never
came to my last at-home. Now you
must
come and have dinner next week. Sir George was
so
much impressed last week by what you said about the new school of painting you have founded – what
is
the name? I'm so
stupid
about remembering names.”

Mr. Upjohn introduced them:

“Lady Carter – George Winterbourne. He's a painter of sorts.”

Lady Carter took in George at a glance – shabby clothes, old tie carelessly knotted, hair too long, abstracted gaze, poor, too young anyway – and was politely insolent. After a few words, she and Mr. Upjohn walked away. She pretended to be amused by Mr. Upjohn's conversation.

George went over to the table and took a sandwich and a glass of champagne. The ceaseless babble of petty talk about petty interests irritated and bored him. He felt isolated and hate-obstinate. So this was Upjohn's “only intelligent group in London”! If this is “intelligence,” then let me be a fool for God's sake. Better the great octopus ennui outside than these jelly-fish tentacles stinging with conceit, self-interest, and malice.

He went over to talk to Comrade-Editor Bobbe. Mr. Bobbe was a sandy-haired, narrow-chested little man with spiteful blue eyes and a malevolent class-hatred. He exercised his malevolence with comparative impunity by trading upon his working-class origin and his indigestion, of which he had been dying for twenty years. Nobody of decent breeding could hit Mr. Bobbe as he deserved, because his looks were a perpetual reminder of his disease, and his behaviour and habits gave continual evidence of his origin. He was the Thersites of the day,
or rather that would have been the only excuse for him. Intellectually he was Rousseau's sedulous and somewhat lousy ape. His conversation rasped. His vanity and class-consciousness made him yearn for affairs with upper-class women, although he was obviously a homosexual type. Admirable energy, a swift and sometimes remarkable intuition into character, a good memory and excellent faculty of imitation, a sharp tongue and brutal frankness, gave him power. He was a little snipe, but a dangerous one. Although biassed and sometimes absurd, his weekly political articles were by far the best of the day. He might have been a real influence in the rapidly growing Socialist Party if he could have controlled his excessive malevolence, curbed his hankering for aristocratic alcoves, and dismissed his fatuous theories of the Unconscious, which were a singular mixture of misapprehended theosophy and ill-digested Freud. George admired his feverish energy and talents, pitied him for his ill-health and agonised sense of class inferiority, disliked his malevolence, and ignored his theories.

“What
are you
doing here, Winterbourne? I shouldn't have thought Shobbe would invite
you.
You haven't any money, have you?”

“Upjohn brought me along.”

“Upjohn-and-at-'em? What's he want of you?”

“An article on his new school of painting, I think.”

Mr. Bobbe tittered, screwing up his eyes and nose in disgust, and flapping his right hand with a gesture of take-it-away-it-stinks.

“Suprematist painting! Suprematist dung-bags! Suprematist conceit and empty-headed charlatanism! Did you see him toady to that Carter woman,
Lady
Carter? Puh!”

There was such vindictiveness in that “puh” that George was disconcerted. True, he himself suspected Mr. Upjohn was a bit of a charlatan, and knew he was odiously conceited; at the same time there was something very kind-hearted and generous in poor Upjohn-and-at-'em, who had received that nickname for his furious onslaughts on any one who was established and successful, in alleged defence of any one who was struggling and neglected. Unfortunately, these vituperative efforts of poor Mr. Upjohn did no good to his friends and served only to bring himself advertisement – the advertisement of ridiculousness. But George felt he ought to say something in defence.

“Well, of course, he's eccentric and sometimes offensive, but he's got a streak of curious genius and real generosity.”

Mr. Bobbe snarled rather than tittered.

“He's an insignificant, toadying little cheese-worm. That's what he is, a toadying little
cheese-worm.
And you won't be much better, my lad, if you let yourself drift with these people. You'll go to pieces, you'll just go
com-plete-ly
to pieces. But humanity's rotten. It's all rotten. It stinks. It's worm-eaten. Look at those mingy fellows prancing round those women on the tips of their toes. Cold-hearted, cold-bollocked, mingy sneaks! Look at the women, pining for a bit o' real warm-hearted man's love, and what do they get? Mingy cold-hearted screwing! I know ‘em, I know ‘em. Curse the mingy lot of ‘em. But it won't last long, it can't. The workers won't stand it. There'll be a revolution and a bloody one, and soon too. Mingy sons of spats and eyeglasses!”

George was amazed and embarrassed by this outburst. He did indeed feel repelled by most of the gathering, particularly by persons like Mr. Robert Jeames, the Poets' Friend, who made anthologies of all the worst authors, wore a monocle and spats, and lisped through a wet tooth. But after all Mr. Jeames was harmless and quite amiable. One might not agree with his taste; one might not feel attracted by him, or indeed by most of the people present. But there was certainly a wide difference between such a feeling and “mingy sneaks” and “cheese-worms.” Moreover, George was a little offended by Mr. Bobbe's proletarian vocabulary, while he failed to see exactly why the sexual frigidity of a few men in dinner-jackets should cause the workers to rise in bloody revolution.

“I shouldn't think the workers care a hoot. If it's as you say, the women are more likely to join the suffragettes.”

“Faugh!” said Mr. Bobbe. “puh! Suffragettes? Take them away. They smell. They're unclean. They're obscene. Women and votes! It's the last stage of decomposition of the mingy world. When the women start to get power, it's the end. It means the men are done for, mingy cold-hearted sneaks. Once let the women in, and nothing can save the world. Socialism, perhaps, and a geniune out-reaching of the inward unconscious Male-life to the dark Womb-life in Woman. But no, they're not worthy of it. Let ‘em go. You'll see, my lad, you'll see. Within five years there'll be a…”

“Oh, Mr. Bobbe,” said Mrs. Shobbe's voice, and a timid little greyish lady, all in grey and silver, appeared, gentle and fluttering beside them, like a large gentle grey moth. “Oh, Mr. Bobbe, do forgive me for
interrupting your
interesting
conversation. Lady Carter is
so
anxious to meet you and admires you
so
much. I'm sure you'll like her and her two daughters – such
beautiful
girls.”

George watched Mr. Bobbe as he bowed servilely to Lady Carter and entered into an animated conversation with that living rung in the social ladder. He watched the scene for several minutes, and was just thinking of leaving when Mr. Waldo Tubbe came near him.

“Well, Winterbourne,” he remarked in his neat, mincing English, “you appeared sunk in thought. What was the precise object of your contemplation?”

“Bobbe was inveighing against Upjohn for toadying to Lady Carter, and then as soon as Mrs. Shobbe came and asked him to be introduced, he rushed off and you can see him there sitting at Lady Carter's feet with clasped hands.”

Mr. Tubbe looked unnecessarily grave.

“O-oh,” he said, with a very genteel roll to the “o”, and an air of suggesting unutterable things. This was a very great asset to Mr. Tubbe in social intercourse. He found that an interrogative silence on his part forced other people to talk, and made them slightly ill at ease, so that they betrayed what they did not always wish to express. He would then gravely remark “Oe-oh” or “In-deed?” or “Really?” with a deportmental air which was highly impressive and somehow slightly reproving. It was reported that Mr. Tubbe spent hours practising in private the exact intonation of his “Oe-ohs”, “Reallys”, and “Indeeds”. He had certainly brought them to a high pitch of gentility and suppressed significance. Mr. Tubbe drank a good deal – gin mostly; but it must be said for him that the drunker he got, the more genteel and darkly significant he became.

There was a pause after Mr. Tubbe's “Oe-oh”. His interrogative silence did its work. George plunged into talk, saying the first thing which came into his head.

“I came along with Upjohn, after seeing his new pictures.”

“In-deed?”

“He would like me to write an article on them, but it's very difficult. Honestly, I don't understand them and think they're rather nonsense; don't you?”

“Oe-oh.”

“Have you seen them?”

“Noe-o.”

Say something, blast you!

Another long pause.

“Well, my dear Winterbourne, I am very happy to have had some conversation with you. Come in and see me soon, quite soon. Will you excuse me? I must ask Lord Congreve a question. Goodbye.
Goodbye
!”

George observed the greeting between Mr. Waldo Tubbe and Lord Congreve.

“Hullo, Waldo!”

“My
dear
Bernard!

Mr. Tubbe shook hands with an air of restrained but very considerable emotion. He treated Lord Congreve with a kind of dignified familiarity, rather like Phélypeaux playing billiards with Louis Quatorze. Mr. Shobbe, who was the third party to this interesting reunion, behaved more easily, with a
puissance-à-puissance
geniality. George could not hear what they were saying, and did not want to. He was watching Mrs. Shobbe, who was talking gently with two younger women on a couch in one corner of the studio. Poor Mrs. Shobbe, of whom one always thought as a soft, kind grey moth, for ever fluttering with kindly intent and for ever fluttering wrong. She had that sweet exasperating gentleness and refined incompetence which marked so many women of the wealthier class whose youth was blighted by Ruskin and Morris. Her portrait had been painted by Burne-Jones – there it was on the wall, over-sweet, over-wistful, stylized to look like one of his Arthurian damosels. And there she was grey and moth-like, the sweetness gone insipid, the wistfulness become empty and regretful. Had she ever looked like that portrait? No one would have known it was she, unless they had been told.

Poor Mrs. Shobbe! In turns one pitied, almost loved, despised, and was exasperated by her. Such crushed insipidity. And yet such a gallant effort to do “what is right”. But she somehow disgusted one with refinement and trying to do what is right, and made one yearn sympathetically towards a hard-swearing, hard-working, hard-drinking motor mechanic. Her life must have been very unhappy. Her well-off Victorian parents (wholesale wine trade, retired) had given her a good education of travel and accomplishments, and had systematically and gently crushed her. It was chiefly the mother, of course, that abominable mother-daughter “love” which is compact of bullying, jealousy,
parasitism, and baffled sexuality. With what ghastly pertinacity does a disappointed wife “take it out” on her daughter! Not consciously, of course; but it is the unconscious cruelty and oppression of human beings which seem the most dreadful. To escape, she had married Shobbe.

Nothing can be more fatal for a girl than to marry an artist of any kind. Have affairs with them, my dears, if you like. They can teach you a great deal about life, human nature, and sex, because they are directly interested in these matters, whereas other men are cluttered with prejudices, ideals, and literary reminiscences. But do not marry them, unless you have a writing of divorcement in the pocket of your night-gown. If you are poor, life will be horrid even though there are no children; and if you have children, it will be hell. If you have money, you may be quite sure that it is not you but your money which has been espoused. Every poor artist and intellectual is looking for a woman to keep him. So you look out too. Of course, not only are there no delicious marriages, there are not even any good ones – Rochefoucauld was such an optimist. And in any case marriage is a primitive institution bound to succumb before the joint attack of contraceptives and the economic independence of women. Remember, artists are not seeking tranquillity and legitimate posterity, but experience and an income. So look out!