Death of a Hero (20 page)

Poor Mrs. Shobbe did not look out; she had never been allowed to do anything so unmaidenly. She became the means whereby Mr. Shobbe avoided the dismal but common fate of working for a living. He snubbed her, he patronized her, he neglected her, he was unfaithful to her, but hung on to her like a sloth to a tree-branch – she had three thousand a year, most of which he spent. As for Shobbe, he was a plump and talented snob of German origin. His aquiline nose was the one piece of evidence, apart from his bad manners, which supported his claim to aristocratic birth. Before the Great War he was always talking about his year's service in an aristocratic German regiment, or beginning a sentence, “When I was last with the Kaiser,” or talking voluble German whenever there was an audience, or saying “Of course, you English… ” After the war he discovered that he was and always had been a patriotic English gentleman. Be it said to his credit, he “rolled up” himself and did not only “give” a few cousins. But then, there was Mrs. Shobbe to get away from on a legitimate excuse – how many patriotic English gentlemen in the war armies were rather avoiding their wives than seeking their country's enemies? Shobbe was an excellent
example of the artist's amazing selfishness and vanity. After the comfort of his own person he really cared for nothing but his prose style and literary reputation. He was also an amazing and very amusing liar – a sort of literary Falstaff. As for his affairs with women – my God! Yet, after all, were they really so lurid? Probably they were grossly exaggerated because Shobbe had talent, and everybody was jealous of it…

George suddenly became aware that Mrs. Shobbe was beckoning to him from the couch. Some of the noisier guests had departed – probably to drink more freely – and a wide-opened window had carried away much of the tobacco smoke. George emerged from his reverie and went quickly over to her.

“You know Mrs. Lamberton, don't you, Mr. Winterbourne? And this is Miss Paston, Elizabeth Paston.”

How-do-you-do's.

“And, oh, Mr. Winterbourne, will you get us some iced lemonade, please? We're all dying of thirst in this smoky room.”

George brought the drinks, and sat down in a chair facing the women. They chatted aimlessly. Soon Mrs. Shobbe went away. She saw a lonely old maid in the opposite corner of the room, and felt it “right” to talk to her. Mrs. Lamberton sighed.

“Why does one come to these intellectual agapes? An expense of spirit in a waste of time.”

“Now, Frances!” said Elizabeth, with her hard, nervous little laugh, “you know you'd hate it if you weren't asked.”

“Besides, it's one place where you're sure not to meet your husband,” said George.

“Oh, but then I
never
see him. Only last week I had to ask the servants where Mr. Lamberton was. I didn't know whether he was still alive or only preoccupied with a new conquest.”

“And was he?”

“What?”

“Alive. I didn't know he ever had been.”

They laughed, though the paltry jest was near the truth.

“And yet,” George pursued, with the ruthless clumsiness of youth, “you must have liked him once. Why? Why do women like men? And on what singular principle do they choose their husbands? Instinct? Self-interest?”

Neither answered. Women do not like these questions, especially from young men whose duty it is to be dazzled by charms they cannot analyse. Of course, the questions were impertinent; but if a young man is not impertinent, what on earth is the use of him?

The women lit cigarettes. George looked at Elizabeth Paston. A slender figure in red silk; black, glossy hair drawn back from a high, intellectual forehead; large, very intelligent dark eyes; a rather pale, rather Egyptian-looking face with prominent cheek-bones, slightly sunken cheeks, and full red lips; a nervous manner. She was one of those “near” virgins so common in the countries of sexual prohibition. Her hands were slender, the line from her ear to her chin exquisitely beautiful, her breasts too flat. She smoked cigarettes too rapidly, and had a way of sitting with a look of abstraction in a pose which showed off the lovely line of her throat and jaw. Her teeth were a little irregular. The delicate ear was like a frail pink shell under the dark sea-fronds of her hair. Her calves and ankles, such important indications of female character and temperament, were hidden under the long skirts of those days; but the bared arms and wrists were slender and a little sensual as they lay along her clothed thighs. George was greatly attracted. Apparently she also liked him, and Mrs. Lamberton noticed it with that swift, rather devilish intuition of women. She rose to leave.

“Oh, Frances, don't go yet!” exclaimed Elizabeth. “I only came to see you, and you were so surrounded by men I have scarcely seen you.”

“Yes, don't go.”

“I must. You don't know the duties awaiting a careful wife and good mother.”

She slipped away, leaving them alone.

“Isn't she a dear?” said Elizabeth.

“Something very lovely and precious. Even when she talks nonsense in that slightly affected way she seems to be saying something valuable.”

“Do you think she is beautiful?”

“Beautiful? Yes, in a way, but she isn't one of those horrid regular beauties. You notice her at once in a room, but you'd never see her on the walls of the Academy. It isn't her beauty so much as her personality, and that you feel more by intuition than by observation. And yet the effect is beauty.”

“Are you very much in love with her?”

“Why, aren't you? Isn't every one?”

“In love with her?”

George was silent. He was not sure whether the question was
naïf
or very much the reverse. Elizabeth changed the conversation.

“What do you ‘do'?”

“Oh, I'm a painter, and I write hack articles for Shobbe and such people to earn a living.”

“But don't you sell your pictures?”

“I try to; but you see, people in England aren't much interested in modem art, not as they are on the Continent or even in America. They want the same old thing done over again and again with more sugar. One thing about the British bourgeois – he doesn't know anything about pictures, but very stoutly stands for what he likes, and what he likes is anything except art. The newest historians say that the Anglo-Saxons come from the same race as the Vandals, and I can well believe it.”

“Surely there are some up-to-date collectors in England.”

“Why, yes, of course, probably as many as anywhere else, but too many of them collect pictures as an investment and so only take what the dealers advise them to buy; others are afraid to touch English art, which has gone soggy with Pre-Raphaelitism and touched imbecility with the anecdotal picture. There are people with taste and enthusiasms, but they're nearly all poor. It's much the same in Paris. The new painters there are having a terrific struggle, but they'll win. The young are with them. And then in Paris it's rather chic to know the latest movements and to defend the rebel artists against the ordinary mass ignorance and hostility. Here they're still terrified by the fate of Oscar, and it's chic to be a sporting imbecile. The English think it's virile to have no sensibilities.”

“Are you English or American?”

“English, of course. Should I care about them if I were not? In a way, of course, it doesn't really matter. The nationalist epoch of painting is over – it's now an international language centred in Paris and understood from Petersburg to New York. What the English think doesn't matter.”

George was excited and talking volubly. Elizabeth encouraged him. Females know instinctively or by bitter experience that males like to tell them things. It is so very curious that we talk of vanity as if it were almost exclusively feminine, whereas both sexes are equally vain. Perhaps males are vainer. Women are sometimes plainly revolted by
really inane compliments, while there is no flattery too gross for a male. There simply isn't. And not one of us is free from it. However much you may be on your guard, however much you may think you dislike it, you will find yourself instinctively angling for female flattery – and getting it. Oh yes, you'll get it, just as long as that subtle female instinct warns them there is potency in your loins….

“Mother of the race of Aeneas, voluptuous delight of gods and men, sacred Aphrodite” – how does it go? But the poet is right. She, the sacred one, the imperious reproductive instinct, with all Her wiles and charms, is indeed the ruler over all living things, in the waters, in the air, on land. Over us Her sway is complete, for it is not seasonal but permanent. (Who was the lady who said that if the animals don't make love all the time the reason is that they are
bêtes?)
Priests, with all weapons from circumcision to prudery, have warred with Her; legislators have laid down rules for Her; well-meaning persons have tried to domesticate Her. Useless! “At thy coming, goddess,” the celibate hides his shaved crown and sneaks to a brothel, the clerk in holy orders enters into holy matrimony, the lawyer visits the little shopgirl he “helps,” domestic peace is shaken alive with adulteries. For man is an ambulatory digestive tube which wants to keep alive, and Death waits for him. Descartes was a fool in these matters, like so many philosophers. “I think, therefore I am.” Idiot! I am because others loved; I love that others may be. Hunger and Death are the realities, and between those great chasms flits a little Life. The enemy of Death is not Thought, not Apollo with gold shafts of light, useless against the Foe of gods and men, as you see him in the prologue to
Alkestis.
It is She, the Cyprian, who triumphs, woman-like, with her wiles. Generations She yields Him, the Devourer, as His prey, and unwearyingly raises up new races of men and women. it is She who swells the loins of men with an intolerable burden of seed; She who makes ready the thirsty womb; She who creates implacable desire and infinite yearning and compels the life-giving act; She who guides the slim eager plough-share into the soft open welcoming furrow; She who plumps the flat white belly and then, treacherous and cruel to Her instrument once Her purpose is achieved, with intolerable anguish tears forth from shaking mother-flesh the feeble fruit of Man. All the thoughts and emotions and desires of adult men and women circle about Her, and Her enemies are but Death's friends. You may elude Her with asceticism, you may thwart Her
purpose (who shall write a new myth of the rubber-tree, Death's subtle gift?), but if you love Life you must love her, and if you puritanically say She is not, you are both a fool and Death's servant. If you hate Life, if you think the suffering outweighs the pleasure, if you think it the supreme crime to transmit life, then you must indeed dread Her as the author of the supreme evil – Life.

Elizabeth and George talked and found each other delightful. They thought it was their interest in art and ideas. Delightful error! All the arts of mankind are the Cyprian's handmaids, and even the chaste and tweeded spectre Sport has unwittingly been made Her pander – for with no grudging hand does the Goddess scatter Her gifts, smiling upon the amorous play of children and not disdaining even those who desire their own sex. She is beneficent and knows there are only too many ready to propagate, and is not anxious to create too many victims for Hunger, and therefore patronizes even the heretics of Sparta and Lesbos…

We should turn churches into temples to Venus, and set up a statue to Havelock Ellis, the moral Hercules who has partially succeeded in cleansing the Augean stable of the white man's mind…

Under the benign influence of the Cyprian they talked, they went on talking. They had drifted on to the topics of Christ and Christianity, that interminable pons
asinorum
of youthful discussions.

“But I think Christ is wonderful,” Elizabeth was saying with an air of having discovered something, “because he completely ignored social values and considered people only for what they really were in themselves. It is so strange to think of his being made the pretext for the world's most elaborate system of priestcraft when the whole of his life and teaching is a protest against it. And then I like his going about with fishermen and prostitutes.”

“The bohemian Christ? But have you noticed what a Proteus he is? Everybody interprets the historical Jesus to please himself. He is a whole mythology in himself. If you really try to discover the historical Jesus, you find you keep stripping away veil after veil, and then just as you think you are coming to the real figure you find there's nothing there. But, I grant you, Christ is a very sympathetic figure. What I cannot endure is Christianity and the harm it has done Europe. I detest its
system of values, its persecution, its hatred of life (it worships a tortured and expired god), its cult of self-sacrifice and sexual aberrations like sadism, masochism, and chastity…” Elizabeth laughed, a little shocked.

“Oh, oh! Now you are exaggerating!”

“Not at all. I think I could prove what I say, at the expense of some time and boring you. Consider the lives of Saints like Catherine of Siena, Sebastian and all the infinite martyrs; look at their representation in art; and then ask yourself what instincts are really satisfied by the cult of these personalities and images.”

“That sounds like good Protestant prejudice.”

“There are lots of things I detest in Protestantism – its smugness and aridity, for instance – but I like its honesty. And we owe it a great deal. It was because of the political inconveniences resulting from a multitude of sects that Holland and England reintroduced religious tolerance, which had disappeared with the triumph of the Christians. Of course, the tolerance is not complete, because the Christians are still persecutors at heart and have a thousand ways of vexing and maligning those who disagree with them or are merely indifferent. Hence the extraordinary defensive puritanism of English rationalists. But something has been achieved. After all, during many centuries I should have been arrested, tortured, and probably murdered for what I have just said to you, and you would have thought me a carbonized monster. Now any alleged truth or moral proposition or belief which has to be enforced by torture or defended by sophistry stands self-condemned.”